Part 6

“You is Mis’ ‘Lisbeth,” she said kindly, holding the door wide. “De Gin’l, he ear’n lookin’ fer you ’twell to–morrer—but come right in heah.”

There were signs of preparation within, but the room designed for Elizabeth—the best bedroom in the house—was not ready. Serena—for so she informed Elizabeth was her name—was full of humble, soft apologies.

“De Gin’l will be mighty worried dat he war’n home when you come; he was countin’ on meckin’ you mighty comfortable.”

To which Elizabeth, her spirit dying within her at the aspect of things, answered: “Is not the front bedroom in the third story furnished? Perhaps I could go there.”

Serena eagerly led the way. It was the room which had been Elizabeth’s ten years ago. She had chosen it because General Brandon was always entertaining some of his relations, and had the old–time idea that hospitality to a guest meant the upsetting of all family arrangements; so Elizabeth had chosen this upper room for her own, secure in not being turned out of it to accommodate some ex–Confederate general, judge, or other person distinguished in “our great Civil War,” as General Brandon always spoke of it. The windows had a good outlook upon the blue Potomac and on the misty line of the Virginia hills far beyond. Otherwise it had not a single recommendation.

Serena, her heart in her beady black eyes, was all sympathy and attention. She brought tea, called Elizabeth “honey,” and talked in her slow and soothing voice of “de Gin’l.” Evidently General Brandon was a hero to his maid–of–all–work.

At last Serena went out, and Elizabeth was alone. She sat down before the little dressing–table and removed her widow’s bonnet and veil. And remembering that when she had last seen herself in that mirror she had been a bride and in the glory of her youth, she could not but study the changes in herself. She had then been beautiful, in a vivid, irregular manner, and ought to have been so still, as she was but little past her thirtieth birthday. But she saw plainly that she was haggard, that she was sallow, that she was painfully thin. She looked at her own reflection with self–pity, thinking, “I should be handsome still if I had but some flesh and color, and if life were not so hard and disappointing.” She sat a long while, leaning her head on her hand, and seeing in the mirror, not her own reflection, but the hapless story of her own life passing before her. Then, recalling herself, like a person waking from a dream, she went to the window and looked out upon the quiet street.

It was already dusk, and the mist of the late autumn afternoon made mysterious shadows, through which the houses loomed large and near. Directly before her towered the great stone house, and just above the porte–cochère was a large, square window, with delicate lace draperies. It was quite dark enough for the wood fire, sparkling in the white–tiled fireplace, to show the interior of the room, which was evidently a boudoir of the most beautiful and luxurious character. Elizabeth was keen of sight, and she could not refrain from looking into so charming a room placed under her eyes. The walls were panelled with flowered silk; the furniture was of gold and spindle–legged; there was a delicious little sofa drawn up to the fire; everything spoke of wealth informed by taste.

In a minute more the mistress of this delightful room entered—a graceful, girlish figure, enveloped in a long, full cloak of a shimmering, silvery satin and wearing a flower–decked white hat. She threw aside her cloak and sat down for a moment on the sofa before the fire. Her air was not that of happy abandon, but rather of thoughtfulness, even of sadness. She was not beautiful, but Elizabeth, with a woman’s ready appraisement of another woman’s charms, saw at a glance that this girl’s appearance was interesting. Her features were delicate, but her face was too pale for beauty; her thin–lipped mouth was large, though redeemed by perfect teeth; but her air, her figure, her walk, were full of grace and elegance. She remained only a few minutes in the room, then passed into the inner room and closed the door after her. And in a moment a maid came in and drew the silk curtains, leaving only a rosy glow from the window instead of a captivating picture.

Elizabeth, distracted for only a little while from her own thoughts, went back to the sad employment of casting up her sorrows and disappointments. She remembered her childhood on the old Virginia plantation with her father’s mother. The war was not many years past then, and over all her life hung that great black shadow of chaos following defeat, the wreck of fortune, the upheaval of society, the helplessness, the despair of millions of people, with their whole social fabric a wreck, all values destroyed, everything disrupted and out of joint. She had realized later on how General Brandon had stinted himself for the little dark–eyed daughter on the Virginia plantation, and his magnanimous investment of his savings in Egyptian bonds, which made Elizabeth smile faintly in the midst of her wretchedness. In those years of separation and of learning from the great, wide–open book of life, Elizabeth had come to understand her father better than during that part of her life passed with him.

The General was a West Point graduate, and had been the best–loved man in his class, in spite of having been also the handsomest and one of the dullest. So when his old classmates in the army had heard of his straits, they all agreed that “something must be done for Dick Brandon.” Although a West Point man, he was not a scientific man; he was too handsome to know much. His old friends did the best they could for him by getting him a clerkship in Washington; and General Brandon, who had commanded a brigade of three thousand fighting men, during four years of unremitting warfare, found himself subject to a chief of division young enough to be his son and as ignorant as men are made.

The old soldier had borne his lot with a fine patience and a sweet calmness that placed him well up in the ranks of unrecorded heroes. He had a superb courage, a charming temper; he remained incurably handsome, and likewise he was and always remained incurably simple in every way. Anybody could hoodwink him, and most people did. When he had come to Washington, bringing with him his daughter Elizabeth, then eighteen, and some remnant of property coming to him, he bought the shabby house. Or, rather, he thought he bought it, for it had a heavy mortgage on it, which General Brandon never had the least expectation of lifting—mortgages being as natural to Virginians as sparks flying upward.

Washington in those days was a simple, merry place, with a delightful and unique society based upon official rank, and a few old resident families, who were in society when Abigail Adams had the clothes dried in the East Room of the White House. Elizabeth remembered that she had been a great belle with gay young army and navy men and sprigs of diplomats and was not unhappy, although she had felt at every turn the prick of poverty. She had been ashamed to complain, however, in the presence of General Brandon’s cheerful submission. He had his compensations, though,—chiefly his evening visits to and from other grizzled officers of both sides, when they sat and talked gravely and tensely of issues as dead as Julius Cæsar, and solemnly discussed what might have been, to an accompaniment of whiskey and cigars. General Brandon’s whiskey and cigars were poor—he smoked a pipe himself, declaring he preferred it. But no army man of any rank ever animadverted on the General’s whiskey or cigars; and, although both were evilly cheap, they drank and smoked cheerfully, with a relish for the man if not for his entertainment.

General Brandon had no knowledge of the words “getting on in society,” or anything like them. He belonged to that sturdy oligarchy in Virginia which, whatever might be its shortcomings, knew nothing of snobs or snobbery, because everybody was just as good as everybody else. But his social career had been such that the newly rich might have asked him his patent for knowing everybody worth knowing. He was asked everywhere in those days, which he took as a matter of course, just as, during his occasional brief sojourns in England during his Egyptian days, he was asked everywhere and took it as a matter of course. Your true Virginian has many faults and some vices, but he is socially the wisest person in the world because he is the simplest. Nobody can patronize him, nobody can snub him. He takes the notice of royalty with the same unconscious ease that he does the rapturous salutation of a negro barber who belonged to him “befo’ de war, sir,”—always polite, considerate, mindful of the small, sweet courtesies of life.

There is but one section of society with which he cannot get on. This is the newly rich smart set, fresh from the forge, the shop, the mine, the liquor saloon—that rapid fungus which has grown up in America during the last forty years, of which it has been said that no parallel exists to its license and irresponsibility, unless one goes back to the later Roman and Byzantine emperors. This class is free with a freedom that is staggering to contemplate; free from any traditions of the past, any responsibility in the present, any accountability to the future; free to marry, to be divorced, to live where it likes, to change its residence every week in the year; free from the care of the few children they have, free from taxes as far as rank perjury goes, and free to command all the science of the world to keep death at bay as long as possible. The advent of this class anywhere changes the aspect of things, and therefore when it moved in columns upon Washington, the people of General Brandon’s class and Elizabeth’s time became “Cave–dwellers,” and the General was asked “nowhere,”—that is, he was still asked, but it was “nowhere.” The General, however, did not know this at the time, or ever afterwards.

Elizabeth sat at the window and, looking out upon the murky evening, continued that sad review of her life.

There is a French school of moralists which says that a man may love two women at once. Elizabeth Darrell had certainly loved two men at once. Pelham was always and forever the man she would have married, but Darrell’s honest love was not thrown away on her. She mourned him as she had mourned for her child, neither one infringing in the least on Pelham’s place in her heart. She had been a wife and a mother, she had suffered a real and lasting passion for a man not her husband, but she had not transgressed a hair’s–breadth; she had experienced both poverty and wealth, she had known and felt more in her thirty years than most women do in a lifetime; and yet it seemed to her as if she had only turned over, without the opportunity to read and study, those glowing pages in the book of a woman’s life—the love of a man, the love of a child, the beauty of the world. Now all was over—even Pelham’s love and tender consideration, which had been hers for so long that she scarcely recognized the face of life without them. Nothing was left for her except her father, the best of men and fathers; but this was not enough for a nature like Elizabeth Darrell’s.

While these thoughts were passing through Elizabeth’s mind, darkness had fallen. Lights were twinkling everywhere. The great house opposite radiated brightness from many windows, and it occurred to Elizabeth, as to every sorrowful and disappointed person, that every one in that luxurious and brilliant home must be happy. Probably the girl of the boudoir, whose attitude had expressed such dejection, was grieving over some trifle like a disappointment in a dance or the failure of some plan of pleasure. Then she heard the street door open and a step which she recognized as her father’s, and she had the first sensation of gladness she had felt for so long that she had almost forgotten what gladness was.

General Brandon, standing under the flaring gas–jet in the narrow hall, saw the black figure flying down the stairs towards him. He stopped, trembling with emotion; he who had without a tremor faced death a hundred times was shaken at the sight of his child in her mourning garments. The next minute her head was on his shoulder and he was patting it, saying, “My child,—my ever dear child,—welcome at all times, more welcome in your sorrow.”

Elizabeth looked up, smiling and weeping. It was the first time since her husband’s death that she had not seemed in everybody’s way. General Brandon gazed at her, at the changes that ten years had made, at the marks of the recent shipwreck of her hopes and joys, at the pallor and thinness that brooding over her misfortunes had brought upon her; and then he said, with a tremulous smile and with tears in his honest eyes, “It is doubly sweet to have you back unchanged.”

He led her into the dingy, well–remembered drawing–room, and they sat hand in hand on the sofa, talking, Elizabeth dwelling upon her husband’s goodness to her, and mentioning none of her woes and perplexities in that first hour of meeting. Then Serena announced dinner, and General Brandon, with the air of escorting a queen regent, placed his daughter at the head of the table. “And never, since the day of your marriage, my love, have I ever sat down to this table without remembering you and wishing that you were seated at this place,” he said.

To Elizabeth it seemed that the place she had in that dull dining room was the only spot she had had any right to, except under sufferance, since that June morning, now nearly a year and a half past, when her husband had died. Not only was General Brandon glad to see her, but Serena seemed equally so. Serena was a distinct acquisition to Elizabeth. When the dinner was fairly begun the General produced a bottle of that doubtful champagne which had been served at Elizabeth’s wedding. “Saved to celebrate your return, my dearest,” he said. Elizabeth could scarcely drink it for the tears that threatened to overflow.

The dining room was just as it had been ten years ago, only duller and dingier; but it was scrupulously neat. General Brandon’s joy at seeing her was not troubled by any apprehensions as to the shortcomings of his household. All during dinner his spirits did not flag, and insensibly Elizabeth’s turbulent heart grew more composed. Her father asked her minute particulars concerning her married life, and when Elizabeth told of Darrell’s unvarying goodness to her, a singular look of relief came into her father’s face. He had always had a dim apprehension that Elizabeth was not rightly mated with Darrell—which was true. He delicately refrained from asking any questions about her means, but Elizabeth told him frankly that the sole provision available for her, after Pelham inherited the property, was about one hundred pounds a year, contingent on her remaining a widow.

“Why, that is opulence!” said General Brandon, with the ideas of opulence of an ex–Confederate officer in a government clerkship. “That will suffice amply for your needs; and whatever I can supply, my dear, is yours, and my house and all in it are at your complete disposal.”

Elizabeth rose and went over to him and kissed him. After all, there was some goodness left in the world. She did not once mention Pelham’s name; but presently her father asked: “And in your trouble, where was Major Pelham, of whom you so often wrote me in years past, as being most kind and brotherly to you? As he was the next heir, he owed you much consideration.”

Elizabeth, by an effort, spoke calmly. “He had just started for West Africa when Jack died. I have heard nothing from him, but I know through his solicitor—a very rude person—that Major Pelham has not been to England.”

“And Major Pelham has not even written you a letter of condolence?”

“No.”

“Most strange. And his solicitor is in communication with him?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth was surprised at the steadiness of her voice in answering these questions, but General Brandon noticed for the first time a tremor in her tones.

“I cannot understand such conduct, and particularly as I retain a most agreeable recollection of Major Pelham,—Captain Pelham he was at the time of your marriage.”

Then, to Elizabeth’s relief, her father left off speaking of Pelham and gave her a minute account of all her Virginia relations and their doings during the last ten years. Elizabeth listened, her head on her hand, the light from the flaring chandelier falling upon her rich hair, one of her beauties left unimpaired. She appeared to be strictly attentive, but in truth she scarcely heard one word of what her father, in his soft, well–bred voice, was saying. Her mind was going over, as it had done many hundreds of times, the strange problem about Pelham. Was it possible that a mere matter of money and an estate had so changed him that he could forget her, after nine years of devotion—silent, it is true, but none the less eloquent? Or was it, after all, mere lip service he had paid her? This she could not quite believe, and so was ever tormented between longing and regret on one hand, and a silent but furious resentment on the other. Pelham at least was a gentleman, and yet he had not observed any sentiment of courtesy or attention to her when he was under every obligation to do so. He must know what sort of man Mr. McBean was, and yet he had left her completely in the solicitor’s power. And the remembrance of McBean brought back the recollection of the money she owed on the necklace of which McBean had tried to rob her. She went over the whole weary story again, that strange, contradictory story of Pelham’s agent, technically and actually—and she was glad to take refuge from her perplexing and contradictory thoughts by paying more heed to what her father was saying. He had got through with a part of his relations, and with a view to interesting Elizabeth in her future home was telling her something of those friends and acquaintances left in Washington.

“You remember Sara Luttrell, my dear?” asked General Brandon, with a smile. “Well, she is the same Sara Luttrell I danced with forty–five years ago at West Point. Nobody knew her age then and nobody knows it now—and time seems to have passed her by. She still lives in her fine old house, gives two dinners a week herself and goes out to dine the remaining five evenings, and nobody dares cross her except her nephew—her husband’s nephew, I should say—Richard Baskerville.”

“I remember Mr. Baskerville perfectly. He was always very kind to me, and so was Mrs. Luttrell.”

“Richard Baskerville, my dear, is a very remarkable man. He has developed a comfortable fortune of his own, and will inherit every stiver of Sara Luttrell’s money. But he works hard at his profession of the law and has made a name for himself. His fortune and position make it possible for him to devote himself to civics, and he is frequently engaged in the investigations of violations of the civil service law and in matters coming before Congress in which there is reason to suspect fraud. Just now he is in the thick of a fight with my neighbor in the fine house across the way, Senator Clavering, who is under fire at the present time before a senatorial committee concerning some alleged gigantic frauds with railway land grants in the Far West. I knew Clavering well before the war, when I was a captain of infantry and he was a sutler,—post–traders they now call themselves, and I understand that at army posts their daughters aspire to be visited by the young officers.”

So the big, beautiful house belonged to this man Clavering. Elizabeth felt an immediate and strange interest on hearing about the people who lived in that charming abode. She wondered why she should wish to hear more of these people whose names she had heard only at that moment, but nevertheless she did. Nothing pleased General Brandon so much as to talk of things which happened before the war, except to talk about those which happened during the war.

“Clavering, however, was not the man to remain a sutler very long. He made money at the business—they all do; Napoleon Bonaparte was the only man who knew how to treat a man supplying soldiers. In the days when I knew Clavering, a sutler was a sutler; nevertheless, Clavering was such a remarkable man that no one who knew him could forget him. I used often to talk with him, and he professed to be under some obligations to me for certain small acts of kindness. After giving up the post–tradership for something better, I heard of him at intervals. I even saw him once here in Washington just before your marriage—sometimes he was up and sometimes he was down. Then he went into mining, prospecting, and land buying on a great scale and developed what I had always observed in him, a remarkable capacity for men and affairs. Five years ago he came to the Senate, built this splendid house you saw on the corner, and set up for a statesman and a gentleman. Ha, ha! I must say, however, that he had some qualifications for both. His family are conspicuous socially. He has three daughters and a deadly pious son, a confirmed ritualist like most of those common people. He goes to St. Bartholomew’s Chapel, where I attend service still, as I did when I had the joy of having you with me, my child.”

The General was a strict churchman, and it was no small recommendation that Clavering had a son who was also a strict churchman.

“And one of Clavering’s daughters—Miss Anne Clavering—is very much admired and respected. Another of his daughters has had the misfortune to be divorced. His wife is little seen in society. She was a plain but most excellent woman when I knew her thirty years ago. This investigation of which Richard Baskerville is one of the leading spirits must be extremely painful to the ladies of Clavering’s family.”

General Brandon prattled on until ten o’clock came, when he always went to his modest club for an hour. He escorted Elizabeth to her door and said good night, giving her a blessing like the patriarchs’ of old.