Stories by American Authors Volume IV Part 13

"Not so much as I did then."

"What an implacable little Quaker you are!"

"A tyrant is _always_ hated," said Dorothy, trying to release her hands.

"If you will look in my eyes, Dorothy, and call me by my name, just once,--I'll let 'thee' go."

"Walter Evesham!" said Dorothy, with great firmness and decision.

"No! that won't do! You must look at me,--and say it softly,--in a little sentence, Dorothy!"

"Will thee please let me go, Walter?"

Walter Evesham was a man of his word, but as Dorothy sped away, he looked as if he wished he were not.

The next evening, Friend Barton sat by his wife's easy-chair, drawn into the circle of firelight, with his elbows on his knees, and his head between his hands.

The worn spot on the top of his head had widened considerably during the summer, but Rachel looked stronger and brighter than she had for many a day. There was even a little flush on her cheek, but that might have come from the excitement of a long talk with her husband.

"I'm sorry thee takes it so hard, Thomas; I was afraid thee would. But the way didn't seem to open for me to do much. I can see now, that Dorothy's inclinations have been turning this way for some time, though it's not likely she would own it, poor child; and Walter Evesham's not one who is easily gainsayed. If _thee_ could only feel differently about it, I can't say but it would make me very happy to see Dorothy's heart satisfied. Can't thee bring thyself into unity with it, father?

He's a nice young man. They're nice folks. Thee can't complain of the _blood_. Margaret Evesham tells me a cousin of hers married one of the Lawrences, so we are kind of kin, after all."

"I don't complain of the blood; they're well enough placed as far as the world is concerned! But their ways are not our ways, Rachel! Their faith is not our faith!"

"Well! I can't see such a very great difference, come to live among them! 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' To comfort the widow and the fatherless, and keep ourselves unspotted from the world!--thee's always preached that, father! I really can't see any more worldliness here than among many households with us,--and I'm sure if we haven't been the widow and the fatherless this summer, we've been next to it!"

Friend Barton raised his head a little, and rested his forehead on his clasped hands.

"Rachel," he said, "look at that!" He pointed upward to an ancient sword with belt and trappings, which gleamed on the panelled chimney-piece--crossed by an old queen's arm. Evesham had given up his large sunny room to Dorothy's mother, but he had not removed all his lares and penates.

"Yes, dear; that's his grandfather's sword--Colonel Evesham, who was killed at Saratoga!"

"Why does he hang up that thing of abomination for a light and a guide to his footsteps, if his way be not far from ours?"

"Why, father! Colonel Evesham was a good man!--I dare say he fought for the same reason that thee preaches--because he felt it his duty!"

"I find no fault with _him_, Rachel. Doubtless he followed his light, as thee says; but he followed it in better ways too. He cleared land and built a homestead and a meeting-house. Why don't his grandson hang up his old broad-ax and ploughshare, and wors.h.i.+p _them_, if he must have idols, instead of that symbol of strife and bloodshed. Does thee want our Dorothy's children to grow up under the shadow of that sword?"

There was a stern light of prophecy in the old man's eyes.

"Maybe Walter Evesham would take it down," said Rachel, leaning back wearily and closing her eyes. "I never was much of a hand to argue, even if I had the strength for it; but it would hurt me a good deal--I must say it--if thee denies Dorothy in this matter, Thomas. It's a very serious thing to have old folks try to turn young hearts the way they think they ought to go. I remember now,--I was thinking about it last night, and it all came back as fres.h.!.+ I don't know that I ever told thee about that young friend who visited me before I heard thee preach at Stony Valley? Well! _father, he_ was wonderful pleased with him, but I didn't feel any drawing that way. He urged me a good deal, more than was pleasant for either of us. He wasn't at all reconciled to thee, Thomas, if thee remember."

"I remember," said Thomas Barton, "it was an anxious time."

"Well dear, if father _had_ insisted, and sent thee away, I can't say but life would have been a very different thing to me."

"I thank thee for saying it, Rachel." Friend Barton's head drooped between his hands.

"Thee's suffered much through me; thee's had a hard life, but thee's been well beloved."

The flames leaped and flickered in the chimney, they touched the wrinkled hands, whose only beauty was in their deeds; they crossed the room and lit the pillows where, for three generations, young heads had dreamed, and gray heads had watched and suffered; then they mounted to the chimney and struck a gleam from the sword.

"Well, father," said Rachel, "what answer is thee going to give Walter Evesham?"

"I shall say no more, my dear. Let the young folks have their way.

There's strife and contention enough in the world without my stirring up more. And it may be I'm resisting the Master's will; I left her in His care: this may be His way of dealing with her."

Walter Evesham did not take down his grandfather's sword. Fifty years later another went up beside it,--the sword of a young Evesham who never left the field of s.h.i.+loh; and beneath them both hangs the portrait of the Quaker grandmother, Dorothy Evesham, at the age of sixty-nine.

The golden ripples, silver now, are hidden under a "round-eared cap,"

the quick flush has faded in her cheek, and fold upon fold of snowy gauze and creamy silk are crossed over the bosom that thrilled to the fiddles of Sloc.u.m's barn. She has found the cool grays and the still waters; but on Dorothy's children rests the "Shadow of the Sword"!

AN INSPIRED LOBBYIST.

By J. W. DeForest.

(_Atlantic Monthly, December,_ 1872.)

A certain fallen angel (politeness toward his numerous and influential friends forbids me to mention his name abruptly) lately entered into the body of Mr. Ananias Pullwool, of Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

As the said body was a capacious one, having been greatly enlarged circ.u.mferentially since it acquired its full longitude, there was accommodation in it for both the soul of Pullwool himself (it was a very little one) and for his distinguished visitant. Indeed, there was so much room in it that they never crowded each other, and that Pullwool hardly knew, if he even so much as mistrusted, that there was a chap in with him. But other people must have been aware of this double tenantry, or at least must have been shrewdly suspicious of it, for it soon became quite common to hear fellows say, "Pullwool has got the Devil in him."

There was, indeed, a remarkable change--a change not so much moral as physical and mental--in this gentleman's ways of deporting and behaving himself. From being logy in movement and slow if not absolutely dull in mind, he became wonderfully agile and energetic. He had been a lobbyist, and he remained a lobbyist still, but such a different one, so much more vigorous, eager, clever, and impudent, that his best friends (if he could be said to have any friends) scarcely knew him for the same Pullwool. His fat fingers were in the b.u.t.tonholes of Congressmen from the time when they put those b.u.t.tonholes on in the morning to the time when they took them off at night. He seemed to be at one and the same moment treating some honorable member in the bar-room of the Arlington and running another honorable member to cover in the committee-rooms of the Capitol. He log-rolled bills which n.o.body else believed could be log-rolled, and he pocketed fees which absolutely and point-blank refused to go into other people's pockets.

During this short period of his life he was the most successful and famous lobbyist in Was.h.i.+ngton, and the most sought after by the most rascally and desperate claimants of unlawful millions.

But, like many another man who has the Devil in him, Mr. Pullwool ran his luck until he ran himself into trouble. An investigating committee pounced upon him; he was put in confinement for refusing to answer questions; his filchings were held up to the execration of the envious both by virtuous members and a virtuous press; and when he at last got out of durance he found it good to quit the District of Columbia for a season. Thus it happened that Mr. Pullwool and his eminent lodger took the cars and went to and fro upon the earth seeking what they might devour.

In the course of their travels they arrived in a little State, which may have been Rhode Island, or may have been Connecticut, or may have been one of the Pleiades, but which at all events had two capitals.

Without regard to Morse's Gazetteer, or to whatever other Gazetteer may now be in currency, we shall affirm that one of these capitals was called s...o...b..rg and the other Fastburg. For some hundreds of years (let us say five hundred, in order to be sure and get it high enough) s...o...b..rg and Fastburg had shared between them, turn and turn about, year on and year off, all the gubernatorial and legislative pomps and emoluments that the said State had to bestow. On the 1st of April of every odd year the governor, preceded by citizen soldiers, straddling or curvetting through the mud--the governor, followed by twenty barouches full of eminent citizens, who were not known to be eminent at any other time, but who made a rush for a ride on this occasion as certain old ladies do at funerals--the governor, taking off his hat to pavements full of citizens of all ages, sizes, and colors, who did not pretend to be eminent--the governor, catching a fresh cold at every corner, and wis.h.i.+ng the whole thing were pa.s.sing at the equator,--the governor triumphantly entered s...o...b..rg,--observe, s...o...b..rg,--read his always enormously long message there, and convened the legislature there. On the 1st of April of every even year the same governor, or a better one who had succeeded him, went through the same ceremonies in Fastburg. Each of these capitals boasted, or rather blushed over, a shabby old barn of a State-House, and each of them maintained a company of foot-guards and ditto of horse-guards, the latter very loose in their saddles. In each the hotels and boarding-houses had a full year and a lean year, according as the legislature sat in the one or in the other. In each there was a loud call for fresh shad and stewed oysters, or a comparatively feeble call for fresh shad and stewed oysters, under the same biennial conditions.

Such was the oscillation of grandeur and power between the two cities.

It was an old-time arrangement, and like many other old-fas.h.i.+oned things, as for instance wood fires in open fireplaces, it had not only its substantial merits but its superficial inconveniences. Every year certain ancient officials were obliged to pack up hundreds of public doc.u.ments and expedite them from Fastburg to s...o...b..rg, or from s...o...b..rg back to Fastburg. Every year there was an expense of a few dollars on this account, which the State treasurer figured up with agonies of terror, and which the opposition roared at as if the administration could have helped it. The State-Houses were two mere deformities of patched plaster and leprous whitewash; they were such shapeless, graceless, dilapidated wigwams, that no sensitive patriot could look at them without wanting to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth; and yet it was not possible to build new ones, and hardly possible to obtain appropriations enough to s.h.i.+ngle out the weather; for Fastburg would vote no money to adorn s...o...b..rg, and s...o...b..rg was equally n.i.g.g.ardly toward Fastburg. The same jealousy produced the same frugality in the management of other public inst.i.tutions, so that the patients of the lunatic asylum were not much better lodged and fed than the average sane citizen, and the gallows-birds in the State's prison were brought down to a temperance which caused admirers of that species of fowl to tremble with indignation. In short, the two capitals were as much at odds as the two poles of a magnet, and the results of this repulsion were not all of them worthy of hysterical admiration.

But advantages seesawed with disadvantages. In this double-ender of a State political jobbery was at fault, because it had no headquarters.

It could not get together a ring; it could not raise a corps of lobbyists. Such few axe-grinders as there were had to dodge back and forth between the Fastburg grindstone and the s...o...b..rg grindstone, without ever fairly getting their tools sharpened. Legislature here and legislature there; it was like guessing at a pea between two thimbles; you could hardly ever put your finger on the right one. Then what one capital favored the other disfavored; and between them appropriations were kicked and hustled under the table; the grandest of railroad schemes shrunk into waste-paper baskets; in short, the public treasury was next door to the unapproachable. Such, indeed, was the desperate condition of lobbyists in this State, that, had it contained a single philanthropist of the advanced radical stripe, he would surely have brought in a bill for their relief and encouragement.

Into the midst of this happily divided community dropped Mr. Ananias Pullwool with the Devil in him. It remains to be seen whether this pair could figure up anything worth pocketing out of the problem of two capitals.

It was one of the even years, and the legislature met in Fastburg, and the little city was brimful. Mr. Pullwool with difficulty found a place for himself without causing the population to slop over. Of course he went to a hotel, for he needed to make as many acquaintances as possible, and he knew that a bar was a perfect hot-house for ripening such friends.h.i.+ps as he cared for. He took the best room he could get; and as soon as chance favored he took a better one, with parlor attached; and on the sideboard in the parlor he always had cigars and decanters. The result was that in a week or so he was on jovial terms with several senators, numerous members of the lower house, and all the members of the "third house." But lobbying did not work in Fastburg as Mr. Pullwool had found it to work in other capitals. He exhibited the most dazzling double-edged axes, but n.o.body would grind them; he pointed out the most attractive and convenient of logs for rolling, but n.o.body would put a lever to them.

"What the doose does this mean?" he at last inquired of Mr. Josiah d.i.c.ker, a member who had smoked dozens of his cigars and drunk quarts out of his decanters. "I don't understand this little old legislature at all, Mr. d.i.c.ker. n.o.body wants to make any money; at least, n.o.body has the spirit to try to make any. And yet the State is full; never been bled a drop; full as a tick. What does it mean?"

Mr. d.i.c.ker looked disconsolate. Perhaps it may be worth a moment's time to explain that he could not well look otherwise. Broken in fortune and broken in health, he was a failure and knew it. His large forehead showed power, and he was in fact a lawyer of some ability; and still he could not support his family, could not keep a mould of mortgages from creeping all over his house-lot, and had so many creditors that he could not walk the streets comfortably. The trouble lay in hard drinking, with its resultant waste of time, infidelity to trust, and impatience of application. Thin, haggard, duskily pallid, deeply wrinkled at forty, his black eyes watery and set in baggy circles of a dull brown, his lean dark hands shaky and dirty, his linen wrinkled and b.u.t.tonless, his clothing frayed and unbrushed, he was an impersonation of failure. He had gone into the legislature with a desperate hope of somehow finding money in it, and as yet he had discovered nothing more than his beggarly three dollars a day, and he felt himself more than ever a failure. No wonder that he wore an air of profound depression, approaching to absolute wretchedness and threatening suicide.