Chapter 13

Betty shot a peremptory glance at Sally Carter, who nodded and started to follow with a small dark attache who had pursued herself and her million for five determined years. He was titled if not noble, a clever operator of a small brain, and a high-priest of teas. He knew the personnel of Washington Society so thoroughly that he never had been known to waste a solitary moment on a portion-less girl, and he had successfully cultivated every art that could commend him to the imperious favourites of fortune. Betty Madison had disposed of him in short order, but Miss Carter, although she refused him periodically, allowed him to hang on, for he amused her and read her favourite authors. They had not walked far when he seized the picturesque opportunity to press his suit, and Miss Carter, while scolding him soundly, forgot the rapid walkers in front.

Betty, as she tramped along beside the large swinging presence the forest seemed to embrace as its own, wondered why she did not love him, wondered if she should, had she never met the other man. Doubtless, for he possessed all the attributes of the conquering hero, and she would have excavated the ideals of her romantic girlhood, brushed and re-cut their garments, and then deliberately set fire to her imagination. If the responsive spark had held sullenly aloof, awaiting its time, she, knowing nothing of its existence, would soon have ceased to remember the half-conscious labours of the initial stage of her affections, and doubtless would have married this fine specimen of American manhood, and been happy enough. But the responsive spark had struck, and illumined the deepest recesses of her heart in time to burn contempt into any effort of her brain, now or hereafter. The question did assail her--as Burleigh talked of his summer outings among the stupendous mountains of his chosen State--could she turn to him in time were she suddenly and permanently separated from the other? She shook her head in resentment at the treasonable thought; but her brain had received every advantage of the higher civilization for twenty-seven years, and worked by itself. She was young and she had much to give; in consequence, much to receive. She could find the highest with one man only, for with him alone would her imagination do its final work. But Nature is inexorable. She commands union; and as the years went by and one memory grew dimmer--who knew? But the thought gave her a moment of sadness so profound that she ceased to hear the voice of the man beside her. She had had moments of deep insight before, and again she stared down into the depths where so many women's agonized memories lie buried. She suddenly felt a warm clasp round her hand, and for a second responded to it gratefully, for hers had turned cold. Then she realized that she was in the present, and withdrew her hand hurriedly.

"Forgive me," he said. "I simply couldn't help it. I could in Washington, and I felt that I must wait. But up here--I want to marry you. You know that, do you not?"

Betty glanced over her shoulder. There was to be no interruption. She was mistress of herself at once.

"I cannot marry you," she said. "I almost wish I could, but I cannot."

He swung into the middle of the path and stood still, looking down upon her squarely. There was nothing of the suppliant in his attitude. He looked unconquerable.

"I did not expect to win you in a moment," he said. "I should not have expected it if I had waited another year. I knew from the beginning that it would be hard work, for if a woman does not love at once it takes a long time to teach her what love is. I have tried to make you like me, and I think I have succeeded. That is all I can hope for now. You have been surfeited and satiated with admiration, and you regard all men as having been born to burn incense before you. I love you for that too. I should hate a woman who even had it in her to love a man out of gratitude. You have your world at your feet, and I want mine at my feet. You have won yours without effort, for you were born with the crown and sceptre of fascination, I have to fight for mine. But the same instinct is in us both, the same possibilities on different lines. I am not making you the broken passionate appeal of the usual lover, because so long as I know you do not love me I could not place myself at the mercy of emotion--I have no thought of making a fool of myself. But when I do win you--then--ah! that will be another matter."

She shook her head, but smiling, for she never had liked and admired him more. She knew of what passion he was capable, and how absurd he would have looked if lashed by it while her cool eyes looked on. His self-control made him magnificent.

"I never shall marry," she said, and then laughed, in spite of herself, at the world-old formula. Burleigh laughed also.

"There isn't time enough left before chaos comes again to argue with a woman a question which means absolutely nothing. I am going to marry you. I have accomplished everything big I have ever strived for. I never have wanted to marry any other woman, and I want to marry you more than I wanted to become a Senator of the United States. Nothing could discourage me unless I thought you loved another man, but so far as I can see there is no other suitor in the field. You appear to have refused every proposing man in Washington. Is there any one on the other side?" he asked anxiously.

"No one. I have no suitor beside yourself; but--"

"I don't understand that word, any more than I understand the word 'fail,'" he said in his rapid truculent tones. Then he added more gently: "I am afraid you think I should be a tyrant, but no one would tyrannize over you, for you are any man's equal, and he never would forget it. I could not love a fool. I want a mate. And I should love you so much that I never should cease atoning for my fractious and other unpleasant qualities--"

"You have none! I cannot do less than tell you I think you are one of the finest men this country has produced, and that I am as proud of you as she will be--"

"Let me interrupt you before you say 'but.' That I have won so high an opinion from you gives me the deepest possible gratification. But I want much more than that. Let us go on with our walk. I'll say no more at present."

XI

He did not allude to the subject again by so much as a tender glance, and Betty, who knew the power of man to exasperate, appreciated his consideration. She wondered how deep his actual knowledge of women went, how much of his success with them he owed to the strong manly instincts springing from a subsoil of sound common-sense which had carried him safely past so many of the pitfalls of life.

Nor did his high spirits wane. He stayed out of doors, in the forest or on the lake, until midnight, and was up again at five in the morning. Betty was fond of fresh air and exercise, but she had so much of both during the two days of his visit that she went to bed on the night of his departure with a sense of being drugged with ozone and battered with energy. The next day she did not rise until ten, and was still enjoying the dim seclusion of her room when Sally tapped and entered. Miss Carter looked nervous, and her usually sallow cheeks were flushed.

"I've come to say something I'm almost ashamed to say, but I can't help it," she began abruptly. "I'm going away. I can't, I _can't _sit down at the table any longer with _her,_ and treat her as an equal. I writhe every time she calls me 'Sally.' I know it's a silly senseless prejudice--no, it isn't. Black blood is loathsome, horrible!--and the less there is of it the worse it is. I don't mind the out-and-out negroes. I love the dear old darkies in the country; and even the prosperous coloured people are tolerable so long as they don't presume; but there is something so hideously unnatural, so repulsive, so accursed, in an apparently white person with that hidden evidence in him of slavery and lechery. Paugh! it is sickening. They are walking shameless proclamations of lust and crime. I'm sorry for them. If by any surgical process the taint could be extracted, I'd turn philanthropic and devote half my fortune to it; but it can't be, and I'm either not strong-minded enough, or have inherited too many generations of fastidiousness and refinement to bring myself to receive these outcasts as equals. I feel particularly sorry for Harriet. She shows her cursed inheritance in more ways than one, but without it, think what she would be,--a high-bred, intellectual, charming woman. She just escapes being that now, but she does escape it. The taint is all through her. And she knows it. In spite of all you've done for her, of all you've made possible for her, she'll be unhappy as long as she lives." "She certainly will be if everybody discovers her secret and is as unjust as you are." Betty, like the rest of the world, had no toleration for the weaknesses herself had conquered. "We cannot undo great wrongs, but it is our duty to make life a little less tragic for the victims, if we can."

"I can't. I've tried, I've struggled with myself as I've never struggled before, ever since I learned the truth. It sickens me. It makes me feel the weak, contemptible, common clay of which we all are made, and our only chance of happiness is to forget that. But I've said all I've got to say about myself. I'm going, and that is the end of it. I'll wear a mask till the last minute, for I wouldn't hurt the poor thing's feelings for the world. And I'd die sixteen deaths before I'd betray her. But, Betty, get rid of her. She wants to go to Europe. Let her go. Keep her there. For as sure as fate her secret will leak out in time. She _breathes_ it. If I felt it, others will, and certainty soon follows suspicion. Jack would have felt it long since if he were not blinded and intoxicated by her beauty; but you can't count on men. He'll soon forget her if you send her away in time, and for your own sake as well as his get rid of her. You don't want people avoiding your house!"

"She is going. She has no desire to stay, poor thing! Of course, I know how you feel. I felt that way myself at first, but I conquered it. Others won't, I suppose, and it is best that she should go where such prejudices don't exist. I spoke to her again a day or two ago about it--for your idea that Jack loves her has made me nervous, although I can see no evidence of it--and I suggested that she should go at once; but she seems to have made up her mind to September, and I cannot insist without wounding her feelings. I wish Jack would go away, but he always is so much better up here than anywhere else that I can't suggest that, either."

"Well, I'm going now to tell papa he must prepare his mind for Bar Harbor. Say that you forgive me, Betty, for I love you."

"Oh, yes, I forgive you," said Betty, with a half laugh, "for a wise man I know once said that our strongest prejudice is a part of us."

XII

After Major Carter and Sally left, Betty had less freedom, for her mother was lonely; moreover, she dared not leave Emory and Harriet too much together. The danger still might be averted if she did her duty and stood guard. She never had seen Jack look so well as he looked this summer. The very gold of his hair seemed brighter, and his blue eyes were often radiant. His beauty was conventional, but Betty could imagine its potent effect on a girl of Harriet Walker's temperament and limited experience. But he had appeared to prefer Sally's society to Harriet's, and his spirits dropped after her departure.

It was only when Harriet offered to read to Mrs. Madison and settled down to three hours' steady work a day, that Betty allowed herself liberty after the early morning. From five till eight in the evening and for an hour or two before breakfast she roamed the forest or pulled indolently about the lake. The hours suited her, for the hotel people were little given to early rising; and although they boated industriously by day, they preferred the lower and more fashionable lake, and dined at half-past six.

Life with her no longer was a smooth sailing on a summer lake. There was a roar below, as if the lake rested lightly on a subterranean ocean; and the very pines seemed to have developed a warning note.

Harriet looked like a walking Fate, nothing less. Since Sally's abrupt departure she had not smiled, and Betty knew that instinct divined and explained the sudden aversion of a girl who did so much to add to the cheerfulness of her friends. Emory also looked more like his melancholy self, and wandered about with a volume of Pindar and an expression of discontent. Did he love Harriet? and were her spirits affecting his? Since Harriet's promise Betty felt that she had no right to speak. He had weathered one love affair, he could weather another. When Harriet was safe in Europe, she would turn matchmaker and marry him to Sally Carter. Betty thought lightly of the disappointments of men, having been the cause of many. So long as Jack did not dishonour himself and his house by marriage with a proscribed race, nothing less really mattered. But she played his favourite music and strove to amuse him.

She rallied him one day about the change in his spirits since the departure of Sally Carter, and he admitted that he missed her, that he always felt his best when with her.

"Not that I love her more than I do you," he added, fearing that he had been impolite. "But she strikes just that chord. She always makes me laugh. She is a sort of sun and warms one up--"

"The truth of the matter is that she strikes more chords than you will admit. She's just the one woman you ought to marry. If you'd make up your mind to love her, you'd soon find it surprisingly easy, and wonder why it never had occurred to you before." Betty thought she might as well begin at once.

He shook his head, and his handsome face flushed. It was not a frank face; he had lived too solitary and introspective a life for frankness; but he met Betty's eyes unflinchingly.

"She is not in the least the woman for me. She lacks beauty, and I could not stand a woman who was gay--and--and staccato all the time. It is delightful to meet, but would be insufferable to live with."

"What is your ideal type?"

He rose and raised her hand to his lips with all his old elaborate gallantry. "Oh, Betty Madison! Betty Madison!" he exclaimed. "That you should live to ask me such a question as that?"

"I'd like to box his ears if he did not mean that," thought Betty. "I particularly should dislike his attempting to blind me in that way."

And herself? She asked this question more than once as she rowed toward the northern end of the lake in the dawn, or in the heavier shadows at the close of the day. Could it last? And how long? And did he believe that it could last? Or was he, with the practical instinct of a man of the world, merely determined to quaff that fragrant mildly intoxicating wine of mental love-making, until the gods began to grin?

She had many moods, but when a woman is sure that her love is returned and is not denied the man's occasional presence, she cannot be unhappy for long, perhaps never wholly so. For while there is love there is hope, and while there is hope tears do not scald. Betty dared not let her thought turn for a moment to Mrs. North. Her will was strong enough to keep her mind on the high plane necessary to her self-respect. She would not even ask herself if he knew how low the sands had dropped in that unhappy life. The horizon of the future was thick with flying mist. Only his figure stood there, immovable, always.

"And it is remarkable how things do go on and on and on," she thought once. "They become a habit, then a commonplace. It is because they are so mixed up with the other details of life. Nothing stands out long by itself. The equilibrium is soon restored, and unless one deliberately starts it into prominence again, it stays in its proper place and swings with the rest."

She knew her greatest danger. She had it in her to be one of the most intoxicating women alive. Was this man she loved so passionately to go on to the end of his life only guessing what the Fates forbade him? The years of the impersonal attitude to men which she had thought it right to assume had made her anticipate the more keenly the freedom which one man would bring her. She frankly admitted the strength of her nature, she almost had admitted it to him; should she always be able to control the strong womanly vanity which would give him something more than a passing glimpse of the woman, making him forget the girl? If she did anything so reprehensible, it would be the last glimpse he would take of her, she reflected with a sigh, She wondered that passion and the spiritual part of love should be so hopelessly entangled. She was ready to live a life of celibacy for his sake; she delighted in his mind, and knew that had it been commonplace she could not have loved him did he have every other gift in the workshop of the gods; she worshipped his strength of character, his independence, his lofty yet practical devotion to an ideal; she loved him for his attitude to his wife, the manly and uncomplaining manner with which he accepted his broken and shadowed home life, when his temperament demanded the very full of domestic happiness, and the heavy labours of his days made its lack more bitter; and she sympathized keenly in his love for and pride in his sons. There was nothing fine about him that she did not appreciate and love him the more exaltedly for; and yet she knew that had he been without strong passions she would have loved him for none of these things. For of such is love between man and woman when they are of the highest types that Nature has produced. Betty hated the thought of sin as she hated vulgarity, and did not contemplate it for a moment, but if she had roused but the calm affection of this man she would have been as miserable as for the hour, at least, she was happy.

XIII

Betty was determined that Saturday and Sunday should be her own, free of care. She sent Emory to New York to talk over an investment with her man of business, and she provided her mother with eight new novels. As Harriet loved the novel only less than she loved the studies which furnished her ambitious mind, Betty knew that she would read aloud all day without complaint. Miss Trumbull, of whom she had seen little of late, and who had looked sullen and haughty since Harriet with untactful abruptness had placed her at arm's length, she requested to superintend in person the cleaning of the lower rooms.

Her mind being at rest, she arose at four on the morning of Saturday. She rowed across the lake this time and picked up Senator North about a half-mile from the hotel. His hands were full of fishing-tackle.

"Will you take me fishing?" he said. "Can you give me the whole morning? I hear there is better fishing in the lake above, and a farmhouse where we can get breakfast. Do you know the way?"

She nodded, and he took the oars from her and rowed up the lake.

"My wife always sleeps until noon," he said. "We can have seven hours if you will give them to me."

"Of course I'll give them to you. I may as well admit that I intended to have them. I made an elaborate disposition of my household to that end."

They were smiling at each other, and both looked happy and free of desire for anything but seven long hours of pleasant companionship. The morning, bright and full of sound, mated itself with the superficial moods of man, and was not cast for love-making.

"Well, what have you been doing?" he asked. "I have had you in a permanent and most refreshing vision, floating up and down this lake, or flitting through the forest, in that white frock. I know that Burleigh was here--"

"I did not wear white for him."

"Ah! He has looked very vague, not to say mooning, since his return. I am thankful he is not seeing you exactly as I do. How is the lady of the shadows?"

"Sally's Southern gorge rose so high, after she discovered the taint, that she left precipitately. She couldn't sit at the table with even a hidden drop of negro blood."

"You Southerners will solve the negro problem by inspiring the entire race with an irresistible desire to cut its throat. If a tidal wave would wash Ireland out of existence and the blacks in this country would dispose of themselves, how happy we all should be! What else have you been doing?"

"I have read the Congressional Record every day, and the _Federalist_ and State papers of Hamilton; to say nothing of the monographs in the American Statesmen Series. Mr. Burleigh insisted that I must acquire the national sense, and I have acquired it to such an extent that half the time I don't know whether I am living in history or out of it. Even the Record makes me feel impersonal, and as 'national' as Mr. Burleigh could wish."

"Burleigh intends that his State shall be proud of you."

Betty flushed. "Don't prophesy, even in fun. I believe I am superstitious. His idea is that politics are to become a sort of second nature with me before I start my _salon_--Why do you smile cynically? Don't you think I can have a _salon?_" "You might build up one in the course of ten years if you devoted your whole mind to it and made no mistakes; nothing is impossible. But for a long while you merely will find yourself entertaining a lot of men who want to talk on any subject but politics after they have turned their backs on Capitol Hill. They will be extremely grateful if you will provide them with some lively music, a reasonable amount of punch, and an unlimited number of pretty and entertaining women. But don't expect them to invite you down the winding ways of their brains to the cupboards where they have hung up their great thoughts for the night. I do not even see them standing in groups of three, their right hands thrust under their coat fronts, gravely muttering at each other. I see them invariably doing their poor best to make some pretty woman forget they could be bores if they were not vigilant."

"The pretty women I shall ask will not think them bores. The thing to do at first, of course, is to get them there."

"Oh, there will be no difficulty about that. Why do you want a _salon_? Are you ambitious?"

Betty nodded. "Yes, I think I am. At first I only wanted a new experience. Now that I have met so many men with careers, I want one too. If I succeed, I shall be the most famous woman in America."

"You certainly would be. Very well, I will do all I can to help you. It is possible, as I said. And you have many qualifications--"

"Ah!" Betty's face lit up. "If there is war with Spain, they will talk of nothing else--Don't frown so at me. I'm sure I don't want a war if you don't. Those are my politics. Here is the water lane between the two lakes. I almost had forgotten it. I hope it isn't overgrown."

She spoke lightly, but more truly than she was wholly willing to admit. Women see political questions, as they see all life, through the eyes of some man. If he is not their lover, he is a public character for whom they have a pleasing sentiment.

Senator North pulled into the long winding lane of water in a cleft of the mountains. It was dark and chill here they were in the heart of the forest; they had but to turn their heads to look straight into the long vistas, heavy with silence and shadows.

He rowed for some moments without speaking. He felt their profound and picturesque isolation, and had no desire to break the spell of it. She recalled her wish that the Adirondacks would swing off into space, but smiled: she was too happy in the mere presence of the man to wish for anything more. He let his eyes meet hers and linger in their depths, and when he smiled at the end of that long communion it was with tenderness. But when he spoke he addressed himself to her mind alone.