Part 16

Helen had been too thoroughly frightened to laugh then, but she preserved in memory the picture of "Bobby's stunt," and many a time afterward laughed at it till the tears came. For many moons she could not think of Kipling or "flaunting an iron pride" without an insane impulse to giggle.

Prince William, having caused all the distress, afterward acted very nicely about it. He permitted himself to be caught, and carried Mr. Scott back to Hill-Top in the most manageable and equable of tempers. Mr. Scott himself, however, was in a temper entirely other. Inwardly he was choking with stifled oaths, for in Helen's presence he must needs be decent in speech. He began at once to berate Hayward, but realized before he had finished a sentence that he could not make out a case against him, and he saw disapproval in Helen's face. He gave it over as a situation to which no words were adequate, and the ride home was a strenuous essay at lofty silence.

Helen, despite her rising mirth and her contempt for Bobby's puerile desire to shift the blame for his mishap, had enough pity for him in his miserable plight to suggest that they make a detour and approach home from the rear side and avoid the eyes of the people assembled there. Bobby was grateful for the suggestion. It promised success. That Hayward should see him, he of course expected, and he rode up to the stable-door, dismounted and handed his bridle to the footman with an air of unconcern and assurance befitting a man at ease with himself and in good humour with the world. Hayward regarded him calmly from head to heel, but did not betray his flunkey's role by so much as the tremble of an eyelash. This made Mr. Scott angry. He had expected something different, and had prepared a very dignified reproof.

"Damn that insufferable negro. Why didn't he laugh outright?" he growled as he walked around the house. Helen had run away as soon as she had dismounted in order to save her fast toppling dignity. Mr. Scott's flanking movement was successful and he was almost safe when--he ran plump into Caroline and Tom Radwine on the side porch. Caroline's outburst brought the others to see what the fun was.

"Mis-ter Scott!" she exclaimed. "What kind of a stunt have you been doing? You look comical to kill. Oo--ooh!"

Bobby took on a sickly grin when Caroline's gaze first fell upon him; but when she called him comical it was a serious affair at once, and his face showed it. Dorothy rushed up at that moment.

"Oh, Robert, Robert!" she cried, putting her hand upon his shoulder, "what have you done? Tell me. Are you hurt? Have you been pulling Helen out of the lake?" A glance at Helen answered that question. "Well what, then, you precious boy?"

This was the first time that his older sister had ever complied with Bobby's insistent request that she call him Robert, and he somehow wished she hadn't.

"Oh, Dorothy, have some sense--let me go--I must have on some dry clothes. I took a tumble into the lake--yes--that's all."

"Next time you decide to do that, Mr. Scott, I'll be glad to loan you a bathing-suit." This from Tom Radwine made Bobby mad as a hornet.

"Took a tumble into the lake, you say, Mr. Scott?" asked President Phillips, pushing through the crowd. "How did that happen?"

"I was riding your horse, Prince William, sir, and he was on edge. He spilled me off the drive into the water at that sharp turn a couple of miles up. I had only a snaffle-rein and could not hold him."

"Only a snaffle-rein! Why I would never think of riding that rascal myself without a curb. Hayward," he called to the footman, who was passing, "what kind of carelessness is this?--your sending the Prince to Mr. Scott with only a snaffle-rein? You know very well that brute cannot be controlled without a curb. I'm surprised at you. Such a lack of sense as that is almost criminal. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Don't repeat that performance--see to it you don't!"

As Helen was standing in a yard of her father, Hayward heard this stinging rebuke in unalloyed surprise, but as she made no demur, he saluted when the President was done, and said only:

"Yes, sir; it shall not occur again, sir."

When her father had spoken so sharply to the footman Helen had turned to Mr. Scott, expecting him to exonerate Hayward; but Caroline Whitney's look of genuine sympathy when Mr. Phillips spoke of that brute's being uncontrollable without the curb bribed the bedraggled young man to silence. Helen saw Caroline's glance, and caught the reason for Bobby's lack of candour, but she was disgusted with him.

She was uncomfortable because of the injustice her silence had done, for she was of an eminently fair mind: and she told her father the whole truth of the affair at the first opportunity....

She could not see how Hayward bore himself so composedly under the undeserved rebuke. If he would abase himself thus, would barter his self-respect, would lick the hand that smote him, in order that he might obtain his commission--if he would sell his manhood for it--for anything--he would be contemptible in her sight.... Again the question came: Why was he a footman? She could not remember that he had ever answered it. Oh, yes,--the idea had but just recurred to her--she would read _Ruy Blas_.

So, on a long summer's afternoon she read _Ruy Blas_--read the tale of the love of a flunkey for his Queen: and while, when the idea finally dawned upon her, and she first clearly understood the significance of it all, she was-- But let us not detail that.

* * * * *

Helen and Hayward Graham were married on a day in late October.

*CHAPTER XXIV*

The chronicler of these events is aware that to the readers of this history the bare statement of the fact that Helen and her footman were wed comes as a shock. Nevertheless, it was a plain and straightforward path by which a careless and pitiless Fate had blindly brought Helen to her husband. A girl, treading by chance such a way as has been followed since the world was young by the feet of maidens of high degree who have loved below their station,--among the accidents and incidents of her romance she had come, unwitting, to an open door, an ill-placed door not designed for her passage, a "door of hope for the negro race" which her idolized father had thought to fashion and set wide: and she had passed it through--in reverse.

A secret marriage was not characteristic of Helen's ideas. She was betrayed into that by her warm impulsiveness. She had had a beautiful programme arranged for the fates to follow in. With a heart full of love and of dreams, and with faith in a future that would order itself at her bidding, she had planned the whole course of events that should lead up to a resplendent army wedding after Hayward had won his commission. She never doubted for a moment that all her roseate imaginings would come to pass, and railed upon him that he had not her faith: for Hayward was a doubter. The sheer altitude of his good fortune made him fearful and distrustful.

For the twentieth time she told off to him on her finger-tips the order in which his fortune should ascend.

--"And then, when you are an officer--and famous--you will marry--me."

"But that may never be," the man had answered. "Suppose the Senate should refuse to confirm my nomination? By your condition I should lose the commission and--infinitely more--you. If your love and faith are supreme you will marry me whether I win or lose."

"You shall not doubt my love or faith," Helen exclaimed impetuously. "I will marry you now, and as the President's son-in-law you can the more surely succeed. The Senators would not offer a personal affront to--"

"But I must bring this honour to you, not you to me," Hayward interrupted; "and, besides that, while I willingly, gladly, here and now, surrender all hope of this commission for ever and for ever if only you will marry me now, it is only fair to you for me to remind you that your father would never appoint his own son-in-law to a lieutenancy in the army."

"Oh, bother!" Helen protested. "I have my heart set on being a soldier's wife. Of course Papa couldn't give a commission to one of his family--what was I thinking about.... Well, there's nothing to do but wait, I suppose."

"And it may be an endless wait if the commission is to come first," Hayward reiterated. "It was an awful temptation to silence a moment ago when you said you'd marry me now, but I could not trick you into it, knowing how much you desire that commission."

Helen's mind worked rapidly for half a minute.

"But I _will_ marry you--and _now_!" she cried. The girl's romantic spirit was aroused and her spontaneous, unsophisticated feminine ideal of love was in the ascendant. "I will _prove_ my love and faith. I will marry you now, and you may claim me when you have won your laurels. Let the Senate refuse you a commission if they dare!"

"And would you be willing to trust me to keep that secret?" Hayward asked. "I almost would be afraid to trust myself--I would want to yell it from the housetops! Married to you and not tell it! Why, it would just tell itself to any open-eyed man who looked at me."

"No, no," Helen answered. "I'm willing to trust you. It's a hardship that cannot be avoided, and we must make the best of it."

* * * * *

"And now," Helen had given her husband a last laughing admonition, "since we must be clandestine against our wills, let's be romantic to the last most fiercely orthodox degree. No love-lit glances or conscious looks. You be a perfect footman with that indifferent and superior and high-and-mighty air while you can, for when your bondage actually begins you will never swagger again; and I will be so haughty as almost to spurn your very presence. We must make no foolish attempts at conversation, and when we write must deliver our letters personally into the hand, not trusting even the mails with our secret. And then, when you become an officer we will give the dear people the surprise of their lives. My! won't it be fun to see them! And it may be that when the time comes we will not tell them that we are already married, but will have another ceremony, a brilliant army affair such as I have set my heart on. Wouldn't that be gorgeous!"

"I hardly would have acquaintances enough among the officers to provide my share of the attendants," Hayward answered.

"Oh, yes, you would. You would make then fast enough," the girl replied. "An American army officer has the entree everywhere--I've heard papa say so a score of times--and, besides, Mr. Humility, I suppose that my friends among the officers would be numerous enough to fill all vacancies."

Hayward saw clearly wherein his wife's forecasts were faulty; but it profited nothing to take issue with her enthusiasms and he gladly joined in them. She was his wife--that could not be changed; and he felt that with that a fact accomplished he reasonably might work for, and hope for, and expect, anything. He returned to his work in the city, therefore, overflowing with happiness and pride. It was not surprising that as a White House footman he was more than ever the subject of notice and comment, for never one carried a perfect physique with such an air. If his confident swing and tread had been the expression of personal vanity, it had been insufferable; but love is not insolent nor its struttings offensive.

Hayward was on good terms with the world. For the first time he accepted the overbearing manner of superiority of white men with complacency and even with amusement. His time was coming--he could wait. He went so far as almost to invite affronts from several negroes of more or less prominence, who had aforetime rebuffed his advances, in order, as it were, to keep their offences in pickle so that their chagrin might be more keen when the day of his elevation should come. He was at particular pains to keep Henry Porter's opposition going, and smiled when he thought how thoroughly he would pay him off in his own coin.

For a few weeks he put himself with buoyant determination to the regular study of his text-books, which he had theretofore read with more or less intermittent interest, and began to lay out plans for the political campaign which would be necessary to bring about the issuing and confirmation of his commission. He arranged with a personal friend, a lawyer in New Hampshire, for the transmission of all correspondence and papers relating to the matter in the name of John H. Graham through this lawyer's hands,--thus to conceal from the President even after the request for the appointment had been made the fact that his footman was the applicant.

The thinking out and arranging of these details and the first rush of his attack upon his military studies engrossed him for a month or more in every moment he was off duty. So closely did he hold himself that Lily Porter reproved him gently for his remissness several times before he made his first call upon her. He was really working very hard--in his leisure hours. He had completely reversed the order of work and diversion. To the one-time monotony of his daily tasks he was now held by the fascination of chance moments of speech--most often conventional, occasionally personal, always delightful--with the radiant young woman his wife, upon whom even to look in silence was enough to send his blood a-leap. Every day from the very first he took time from his work of preparation to write to her.... The habit grew. At first briefly, though always with fervent protestations, and, as the days and weeks ran on, more and more at length and with livening heat did he put his heart-beats in his letters.... The habit grew too fast. By the time that Congress met and the currents of the great capital were in full swing, the forces of Hayward's love had eaten into his ambition's boundaries and the time that he gave to thoughts of Helen, and in seeking variant and worthy phrases in which to indite his passion, more than equalled that in which he worked to earn those things which by her decree should precede possession of her.... It was hard not to stop and think of her. He wrote:

"You disturb me in my work. You ride ruthlessly through the plans of battle and campaign my textbooks show, and make sixes and sevens of them. At sight of you the heaviest lines of battle dissolve into thin air and into mist the fastest fortress falls. At the coming thought of you brigades and armies melt away, and your face stands out a radiant evangel of peace, the very thought even of wars and turbulences dispelling.... What am I to do? I cannot chain myself to study the science of strife when this heavenly vision is calling me--and it is ever calling--to love and love only.... I am fully persuaded there is only one thing worth thinking on in all the earth--and that is you."

* * * * *

His wife's letters were all that mortal man could desire, but only the more distracting for all that. They were always short, but grew in warmth as the sense of freedom grew upon the writer. Hayward devoured them with increasing hunger, and with the ever-recurring, never varying signature, "Your wife," spark upon spark of impatience was enkindled with his love. Finally he must of very necessity have some vent for his restlessness. He sought diversion in the society of Lily Porter. In fact he could with difficulty avoid her: she too had set her heart on an army wedding.

Hayward had only the very kindliest of purposes toward Lily. He had continued his correspondence with her during the summer. For the sake of his plans unfolded to her in their last meeting before his going away he could not break abruptly away from her--though the task of remaining on friendly terms and yet not proceeding with the suit so nearly openly avowed was a serious tax upon his resources and ingenuity. In his apprehension "the fury of a woman scorned" loomed fearful and threatening. The object of his apprehensions, on the other hand, while she felt rather than saw the subtle change in him, was yet flattered by his unaccustomed submissiveness to her caprices and experienced delightful thrills of expectancy as she waited for a trembling confession to crown his new-found humility.

"Lily," her father had said to her on a morning after one of Hayward's scattered visits, "I tol' you once to drop that feller and I hoped you'd done it. Understan' I don' want any footman comin' here. We ain't in that class. You ought to have mo' respec' for yourse'f. What you want with a servant hangin' roun' you when you can take your pick of the professional men in town, I can't see."

"Don't worry about me, papa," the girl sang as she danced over to the piano, "I'll wed a military-tary man."

"Well, thank Heaven you ain't got no idee of marryin' that Hayward. I'll make it wuth while for you to marry a professional or a military man either one, but none of my money for a footman, I tell you now."

"No footman for me either, papa. I'll not marry a footman, I promise you. I tell you I'm thinking of a military man."

"Not that Ohio major who was here with the troops at the inauguration? I'd forgot all about him," her father questioned.

"He's not the only soldier in sight, but don't you think he would do in a pinch?" Lily had forgotten about him too, till her father mentioned him.

"I'd better look into that and see what sort of a feller he is," said the father jokingly, greatly relieved in mind.

"Maybe you had," the daughter replied insinuatingly.

Lily had as many aristocratic notions as her father. More, in fact. Her promise was sincerely given. It was only when Hayward had told her of his purpose and prospect of becoming an officer that he had broken through her reserve. While she had always liked him she had never had any idea of marrying a footman. But an officer in the army!--she would have capitulated on that evening she heard his story but for her father's timely appearance. The idea had grown upon her since, and she loved to reflect upon it and plan for the outcome; though she had had time to collect her thoughts and decide not to precipitate or render a final decision till the commission was in the footman's name. She really had to hold herself firmly in hand to manage it so, for she loved the young fellow with a whole-hearted fervour, and of his love for her she was blissfully assured.

The girl was developing quite an interest in military matters. In one of their not unusual discussions of Hayward's career it was arranged that at his first convenient opportunity he should accompany her out to Fort Myer to see a parade. Hayward went for her on his first half holiday--rather, he went with her, for she drove him out in her own stanhope. As they were turning a corner they were halted for a moment in a knot of vehicles. Lily was driving and Hayward was talking to her with so much interest in her and in what he was saying to her that he was oblivious to the things about them.... He was accustomed to sit quiet and indifferent while another driver solved the problems of the streets.... The first thing that diverted his attention from the girl beside him was the small red-white-and-blue White House cockades on the headstalls of a pair of horses just drawing ahead of Lily's cob. He glanced quickly across to the carriage--and met the full gaze of his wife's eyes. She was sitting on the front seat of the landau facing to the rear, and her eyes were upon him for a half minute at very close range. Helen looked away several times in her effort to be unconscious of his presence. But she could not be perfectly oblivious or withhold her glances altogether. She had heard the very speech--the very gallant speech--Hayward was making.

Lily looked about to find the cause of collapse in her escort's talk, and saw the man's peculiar look at Helen, whom she knew by sight. She accounted for his confusion at once, but the blush that came to the young Miss Phillips' cheek and her evident self-consciousness were so unaccountable as to be puzzling. She searched Hayward's face keenly for an explanation of his young mistress's behaviour--and he did not bear the scrutiny with entire nonchalance. Lily felt insulted in a way.

"I hope she will know us next time she sees us," she said snappishly.

No answer from Hayward; though he felt like a traitor for letting the implied criticism go unchallenged.

"You must hurry and get your commission. It seems to disturb the fine lady to see her footman enjoy the privileges of a gentleman. No doubt she thinks it impertinent for a servant to deal in gallant speeches at all, especially such a beautiful sentiment as she must have heard you speaking."

Lily had hit the mark in the centre--but of course she did not know it. That finely turned sentiment which he had thrown out with such impromptu grace and rhetorical finish was taken word for word from his last letter to his wife, and he had puzzled his brain for an hour in the choosing and setting of the dozen words in which it sparkled. There was nothing particularly personal in that dozen words, but how was Helen to know but that they had been strung upon the same thread in the man's conversation with his unknown companion as they were in the letter lying at that moment upon her own bosom.

Hayward did not enjoy the afternoon with Lily. He had hoped Helen had not heard what he was saying, but Lily's statement of opinion that she had heard seemed to put the matter beyond doubt. He came home quite disturbed in mind. He debated to himself whether to write to Helen or wait for her answer to his last letter. He decided not to plead till he was accused.

With the next morning came--no letter. Night--no letter. Another morning--no letter. He wrote:

"Why do you not write to me--and why is your face so cold?"

The answer came: "Who is that woman? She is not your sister--for your sister would not look at you like that--no, nor would you look at your sister like that--nor would you say such a speech to your sister. Who is she? And what right has such a woman, what right has any woman to hear what your letters have said to me? That sentiment is mine--you gave it to me. It is mine, _mine_--do you understand?--and you take it and fritter it away on that--who is she? Keep away from her."