Through one administrati.., p.45
Through One Administration, page 45
“The devil take it all,” cried Richard, dashing his fist on the table. “I must tell some one, or I shall go mad.” But the misery which impelled him notwithstanding, he always told his story in his own way, and gave it a complexion more delicate than a less graceful historian might have been generous enough to bestow. He “had been too sanguine and enthusiastic; he had made mistakes; he had been led by the duplicity of a wily world into follies; he had been unfortunate; those more experienced than himself had betrayed the confidence it had been only natural he should repose in them. And throughout the labyrinth of the relation he wound his way, — a graceful, agile, supple figure, lightly avoiding an obstacle here, dexterously overstepping a barrier there, and untouched by any shadow but that of misfortune.
At first he spoke chiefly of the complications which bore heavily upon him; and these complications, arising entirely from the actions of others, committed him to so little that the colonel listened with apprehension more grave than the open confession of greater blunders would have awakened in him. “He would tell more,” he thought, “if there were less to tell.”
The grim fancy came to him sometimes as he listened, that it was as if he watched a man circling about the edge of a volcano, drawing nearer and nearer, until at last, in spite of himself, and impelled by some dread necessity, he must plunge headlong in. And so Richard circled about his crater: sometimes drawn nearer by the emotion and excitement of the moment, sometimes withdrawing a trifle through a caution as momentary, but in each of his circlings revealing a little more of the truth. The revelations were principally connected with the Westoria lands scheme, and were such in many instances as the colonel was not wholly unprepared to hear. He had not looked on during the last year for nothing, and often, when Richard had been in gay good spirits, and had imagined himself telling nothing, his silent companion had heard his pleasantries with forebodings which he could not control. He was not deceived by any appearance of entire frankness, and knew that he had not been told all until one dark and stormy night, as he sat in his room, Richard was announced, and came in pallid, haggard, beaten by the rain, and at the lowest ebb of depression. He had had a hard and bitter day of it, and it had followed several others quite as hard and bitter; he had been fagging about the Capitol, going the old rounds, using the old arguments, trying new ones, overcoming one obstacle only to find himself confronted with another, feeling that he was losing ground where it was a matter of life and death that he should gain it; spirits and courage deserting him just when he needed them most; and all this being over, he dropped into his office to find awaiting him there letters containing news which gave the final blow.
He sat down by the table and began his outpourings, graceful, attractive, injured. The colonel thought him so, as he watched him and listened, recognizing meanwhile the incompleteness of his recital, and making up his mind that the time had come when it was safer that the whole truth should be told. In the hours in which he had pondered upon the subject he gradually decided that such an occasion would arrive; and here it was.
So at a certain fitting juncture, just as Richard was lightly skirting a delicate point, Tredennis leaned forward and laid his open hand on the table with a curious simplicity of gesture.
“I think,” he said, “you had better tell me the whole story. You have never done it yet. What do you say?”
The boarder on the floor below, who had heard him walking to and fro on the first New Year’s night he had spent in Washington, and on many a night since, heard his firm, regular tread again during the half hour in which Richard told, in fitful outbursts, what he had not found himself equal to telling before. It was not easy to tell it in a very clear and connected matter; it was necessary to interlard it with many explanations and extenuations, and even when these were supplied there was a baldness about the facts, as they gradually grouped themselves together, which it was not agreeable to contemplate; and Richard felt this himself gallingly.
“I know how it appears to you,” he said; “I know how it sounds! That is the maddening side of it, — it looks so much worse than it really is! There is not a man living who would accuse me of intentional wrong. Confound it! I seem to have been forced into doing the very things it was least natural to me to do! Bertha herself would say it, — she would understand it. She is always just and generous!”
“Yes,” said the colonel; “I should say she had been generous.”
“You mean that I have betrayed her generosity!” cried Richard. “That, of course! I expected it.”
“You will find,” said the colonel, “that others will say the same thing.”
He had heard even more than his worst misgivings had suggested to him, and the shock of it had destroyed something of his self-control. For the time being he was in no lenient mood.
“I know what people will say!” Richard exclaimed. “ Do you suppose I have not thought of it a thousand times? I know what I should say if I did not know the circumstances. It is the circumstances that make the difference.”
“The fact that they are your circumstances, and not another man’s,” began Tredennis; but there he checked himself. “I beg your pardon,” he said, coldly. “I have no right to meet your confidence with blame. It will do no good. If I can give you no help, I might better be silent. There were circumstances which appeared extenuating to you, I suppose.”
He was angered by his own anger, as he had often been before. He told himself that he was making the matter a personal cause, as usual; but how could he hear that her very generosity and simplicity had been used against her by the man who should have guarded her interests as his first duty, without burning with sharp and fierce indignation.
“If I understand you,” he said, “your only hope of recovering what you have lost lies in the success of the Westoria scheme?”
“Yes,” answered Amory, with his forehead on his hands, “ that is the diabolical truth!”
“And you have lost?”
“Once I was driven into saying to you that if the thing should fail it would mean ruin to me. That was the truth, too.”
The colonel stood still.
“Ruin to you!” he said. “Ruin to your wife —ruin to your children — serious loss to the old man who” —
“Who trusted me!” Richard finished, gnawing his white lips. “I see it in exactly the same light myself, and it does not make it easier to bear. That is the way a thing looks when it fails. Suppose it had succeeded. It may succeed yet. They trusted me, and, I tell you, I trusted myself.”
It was easy to see just what despair would seize him if the worst came to the worst, and how powerless he would be in its clutches. He was like a reed beaten by the wind, even now. A sudden paroxysm of fear fell upon him.
“Great God!” he cried. “It can’t fail! What could I say to them — how could I explain it?”
A thousand wild thoughts surged through Tredennis’ brain as he heard him. The old sense of helplessness was strong upon him. To his upright strength there seemed no way of judging fairly of, or dealing practically with, such dishonor and weakness. What standard could be applied to a man who lied agreeably in his very thoughts of himself and his actions? He had scarcely made a statement during the last hour which had not contained some airy falsehood. Of whom was it he thought in his momentary anguish? Not of Bertha — not of her children — not of the gentle old scholar, who had always been lenient with his faults. It was of himself he was thinking — of Richard Amory, robbed of his refined picturesqueness by mere circumstance and placed by bad luck at a baleful disadvantage!
For a few minutes there was a silence. Richard sat with his brow upon his hands, his elbows on the table before him. Tredennis paced to and fro, looking downward. At length Richard raised his head. He did so because Tredennis had stopped his walk.
“What is it?” he asked.
Tredennis walked over to him and sat down. He was pale, and wore a set and rigid look, the chief characteristic of which was that it expressed absolutely nothing. His voice was just as hard and expressed as little when he spoke.
“I have a proposition to make to you,” he said, “and I will preface it by the statement that, as a business man, I am perfectly well aware that it is almost madness to make it. I say ‘almost.‘ Let it rest there. I will assume the risks you have run in the Westoria scheme. Invest the money you have charge of in something safer. You say there are chances of success. I will take those chances.”
“What!” cried Richard. “What!”
He sat upright, staring. He did not believe the evidence of his senses; but Tredennis went on, without the quiver of a muscle, speaking steadily, almost monotonously.
“I have money,” he said. “More than you know, perhaps. I have had recently a legacy which would of itself make me a comparatively rich man. That I was not dependent upon my pay you knew before. I have no family. I shall not marry. I am fond of your children, of Janey particularly. I should have provided for her future in any case. You have made a bad investment in these lands; transfer them to me and invest in something safer.”
“And if the bill fails to pass!” exclaimed Richard.
“If it fails to pass I shall have the land on my hands; if it passes I shall have made something by a venture, and Janey will be the richer; but, as it stands, the venture had better be mine than yours. You have lost enough.”
Richard gave his hair an excited toss backward, and stared at him as he had done before; a slight, cold moisture broke out on his forehead.
“You mean”— he began, breathlessly.
“Do you remember,” said Tredennis, “what I told you of the comments people were beginning to make? They have assumed the form I told you they would. It is best for — for your children that they should be put an end to. If I assume these risks there will be no farther need for you to use — to exert yourself.” He began to look white about the mouth, and through his iron stolidity there was something revealed before which Richard felt himself quail. “The night that Blundel came in to your wife’s reception, and remained so short a time, he had heard a remark upon the influence she was exerting over him, and it had had a bad effect. The remark was made publicly at one of the hotels.” He turned a little whiter, and the something all the strength in him had held down at the outset leaped to the surface. “I have no wife to — to use,” he said; “if I had, by Heavens, I would have spared her!”
He had held himself in hand and been silent a long time, but he could not do it now.
“She is the mother of your children,” he cried, clenching his great hand. “And women are beginning to avoid her, and men to bandy her name to and fro. You have deceived her; you have thrown away her fortune; you have used her as an instrument in your schemes, I, who am only an outsider, with no right to defend her — I defend her for her father’s sake, for her child’s, for her own! You are on the verge of ruin and disgrace. I offer you the chance to retrieve yourself — to retrieve her! Take it, if you are a man!”
Richard had fallen back in his chair breathless and ashen. In all his imaginings of what the future might bold he had never thought of such a possibility as this, — that it should be this man who would turn upon him and place an interpretation so fiercely unsparing upon what he had done! Under all his admiration and respect for the colonel there had been hidden, it must be admitted, an almost unconscious touch of contempt for him, as a rather heavy and unsophisticated personage, scarcely versatile or agile enough, and formed in a mould somewhat obsolete and quixotic, — a safe person to confide in, and one to invite confidence passively by his belief in what was presented to him; a man to make a good listener and to encourage one to believe in one’s own statements, certainly not a man to embarrass and discourage a historian by asking difficult questions or translating too literally what was said. He had not asked questions until to-night, and his face had said very little for him on any occasion. Among other things Richard had secretly — though leniently — felt him to be a trifle stolid, and had amiably forgiven him for it. It was this very thing which made the sudden change appear so keen an injustice and injury; it amounted to a breach of confidence, that he should have formed a deliberate and obstinate opinion of his own, entirely unbiassed by the presentation of the case offered to him. He had spoken more than once, it was true, in a manner which had suggested prejudice; but it had been the prejudice of the primeval mind, unable to adjust itself to modern conditions and easily disregarded by more experienced. But now! — he was stolid no longer. His first words had startled Richard beyond expression. His face said more for him than his words; it burned white with the fire it had hidden so long; his great frame quivered with the passion of the moment; when he had clenched his hand it had been in the vain effort to hold it still; and yet the man who saw it recognized in it only the wrath and scorn which had reference to himself. Perhaps it was best that it should have been so, — best that his triviality was so complete that he could see nothing which was not in some way connected with his own personality.
“Tredennis,” he gasped out, “you are terribly harsh! I did not think you”—
“Even if I could lie and palter to you,” said Tredennis, his clenched hand still on the table, “this is not the time for it. I have tried before to make you face the truth, but you have refused to do it. Perhaps you had made yourself believe what you told me, — that no harm was meant or done. I know what harm has been done. I have heard the talk of the hotel corridors and clubs!” His hand clenched itself harder and he drew in a sharp breath.
“It is time that you should give this thing up,” he continued, with deadly determination. “ And I am willing to shoulder it. Who else would do the same thing?”
“No one else,” said Richard, bitterly. “And it is not for my sake you do it either; it is for the sake of some of your ideal fancies that are too fine for us worldlings to understand, I swear!” And he felt it specially hard that it was so.
“Yes,” replied the colonel, “I suppose you might call it that. It is not for your sake, as you say. It has been one of my fancies that a man might even deny himself for the sake of an — an idea, and I am not denying myself. I am only giving to your child, in one way, what I meant to give to her in another. She would be willing to share it with her mother, I think.”
And then, somehow, Richard began to feel that this offer was a demand, and that, even if his sanguine mood should come upon him again, he would not find it exactly easy to avoid it. It seemed actually as if there was something in this man — some principle of strength, of feeling, of conviction — which almost constituted a right by which he might contend for what he asked; and before it, in his temporary abasement and anguish of mind, Richard Amory faltered. He said a great deal, it is true, and argued his case as he had argued it before, being betrayed in the course of the argument by the exigencies of the case to add facts as well as fancies. He endeavored to adorn his position as much as possible, and, naturally, his failure, was not entire. There were hopes of the passage of the bill, sometimes strong hopes, it seemed; if the money he had invested had been his own; if it had not been for the failure of his speculations in other quarters; if so much had not depended upon failure and success, — he would have run all risks willingly. There were, indeed, moments when it almost appeared that his companion was on the point of making a capital investment, and being much favored thereby.
“It is really not half so bad as it seems,” he said, gaining cheerfulness as he talked. “ But, after such a day as I have had, a man loses courage and cannot look at things collectedly. I have been up and down in the scale a score of times in the last eight hours. That is where the wear and tear comes in. A great deal depends on Blundel; and I had a talk with him which carried us farther than we have ever been before.”
“Farther,” said Tredennis. “In what direction?”
Richard flushed slightly.
“I think I sounded him pretty well,” he said. “There is no use mincing matters; it has to be done. We have never been able to get at his views of things exactly, and I won’t say he went very far this afternoon; but I was in a desperate mood, and — well, I think I reached bottom. He half promised to call at the house this evening. I dare say he is with Bertha now.”
Something in his flush, which had a slightly excited and triumphant air, something in his look and tone, caused Tredennis to start in his chair.
“What is he there for?” he said. “What do you mean?”
Richard thrust his hands in his pockets. For a moment he seemed to have lost all his grace and refinement of charm, — for the moment he was a distinctly coarse and undraped human being.
“He has gone to make an evening call,” he said. “ And if she manages him as well as she has managed him before, — as well as she can manage any man she chooses to take in hand, and yet not give him more than a smile or so, — your investment, if you make it, may not turn out such a bad one.”
Chapter 34
Bertha had spent the greater part of the day with her children, as she had spent part of many days lately. She had gone up to the nursery after breakfast to see Jack and Janey at their lessons, and had remained with them and given herself up to their entertainment. She was not well; the weather was bad; she might give herself a holiday, and she would spend it in her own way, in the one refuge which never failed her. “It is always quiet here,” she said to herself. “If I could give up all the rest — all of it — and spend all my days here, and think of nothing else, I might be better. There are women who live so. I think they must be better in every way than I am — and happier. I am sure I should have been happier if I had begun so long ago.”
And as she sat, with Janey at her side, in the large chair which held them both, her arm thrown round the child’s waist, there came to her a vague thought of what the unknown future might form itself into when she “began again.” It would be beginning again when the sea was between the new life and the old; everything would be left behind — but the children. She would live as she had lived in Virginia, always with the children — always with the children. “It is the only safe thing,” she thought, clasping Janey closer. “Nothing else is safe for a woman who is unhappy. If one is happy one may be gay, and look on at the world with the rest; but there are some who must not look on — who dare not.”
