A Hoosier Chronicle Part 59

He blinked at the names and changed his position slightly.

"I dare say they are," he answered coldly.

"I thought it best to see you and talk to you; and I'm glad I knew before it was too late."

His eyes surveyed her slowly now from head to foot. Why was she glad she had known before it was too late? Her calmness made him uneasy, restless. It was a familiar characteristic of Morton Ba.s.sett that he met storm and stress stoically. He was prepared for scorn, recrimination, tears; but this dark-eyed girl, sitting before him in her gray walking-dress and plain hat with a bunch of scarlet flowers showing through the veil she had caught up over them, seemed in no danger of yielding to tears. Her voice fell in cool, even tones. He had said that he expected her, but she did not know what manner of meeting he had been counting on in his speculations. After a long look he pa.s.sed his hand across his face.

"I hope you haven't thought--you didn't think I should let them bring you into it."

He spoke as though this were something due her; that she was ent.i.tled to his rea.s.surance that the threatened cataclysm should not drag her down with him. When she made no reply he seemed to feel that he had not made himself clear, and he repeated, in other terms, that she need not be concerned for the outcome; that he meant to s.h.i.+eld her.

"Yes; I supposed you would do that; I had expected that."

"And," he went on, as though to antic.i.p.ate her, to eliminate the necessity for her further explanations, "you have a right to ask what you please. Or we can meet again to arrange matters. I am prepared to satisfy your demands in the fullest sense."

His embarra.s.sment had pa.s.sed. She had sought the interview, but he had taken charge of it. Beyond the closed door the stage waited. This was the briefest interlude before the moment of his triumphant entrance.

Sylvia smiled, an incredulous smile, and shook her head slowly, like a worn, tired mother whose patience is sorely taxed by a stubborn, unyielding child at her knee. Her lips trembled, but she bent her head for a moment and then spoke more quickly than before, as though overriding some inner spirit that strove rebelliously within her breast.

"I know--almost all I ever need to know. But there are some things you must tell me now. This is the first--and the last--time that I shall ever speak to you of these things. I know enough--things I have stumbled upon--and I have built them up until I see the horror, the blackness.

And I want to feel sure that you, too, see the pity of it all."

Her note of subdued pa.s.sion roused him now to earnestness, and he framed a disavowal of the worst she might have imagined. He could calm her fears at once, and the lines in his face relaxed at the thought that it was in his power to afford her this relief.

"I married your mother. There was nothing wrong about it. It was all straight."

"And you thought, oh, you thought I came for that--you believed I came to have you satisfy me of her honor! I never doubted her!" and she lifted her head proudly. "And that is what you thought I came for?" The indignation that flashed in her first stammered sentences died falteringly in a contemptuous whisper.

Her words had cut him deep; he turned away aimlessly, fingering some papers on the table beside him. Then he plunged to the heart of the matter, as though in haste to exculpate himself.

"I never meant that it should happen as it did. I knew her in New York when we were both students there. My father had been ill a long time; he was bent upon my marrying the daughter of his old friend Singleton, a man of wealth and influence in our part of the state. I persuaded your mother to run away and we were married, under an a.s.sumed name,--but it was a marriage good in law. There's no question of that, you understand.

Then I left her up there in the Adirondacks, and went home. My father's illness was prolonged, and his condition justified me in asking your mother to wait. She knew the circ.u.mstances and agreed to remain away until I saw my way clear to acknowledging her and taking her home. You were born up there. Your mother grew impatient and hurt because I could not go back to her. But I could not--it would have ruined all my chances at home. When I went to find my wife she had disappeared. She was a proud woman, and I suppose she had good cause for hating me."

He told the story fully, filling in the gaps in her own knowledge. He did not disguise the fact of his own half-hearted search for the woman he had deserted. He even told of the precautions he had taken to a.s.sure himself of the death of Edna Kelton by visiting Montgomery to look at her grave before his marriage to Hallie Singleton. He had gone back again shortly before he made the offer to pay for Sylvia's schooling, and had seen her with her grandfather in the little garden among the roses.

Outside the guard slowly pa.s.sed back and forth. Sylvia did not speak; her seeming inattention vexed and perplexed him. He thought her lacking in appreciation of his frankness.

"Thatcher knows much of this story, but he doesn't know the whole," he went on. "He believes it was irregular. He's been keeping it back to spring as a sensation. He's told those men out there that he can break me; that at the last minute he will crush me. They're waiting for me now--Thatcher and his crowd; probably chuckling to think how at last they've got me cornered. That's the situation. They think they're about rid of Morton Ba.s.sett."

"You left her; you deserted her; you left her to die alone, unprotected, without even a name. You accepted her loyalty and fidelity, and then threw her aside; you slunk away alone to her grave to be sure she wouldn't trouble you again. Oh, it is black, it is horrible!"

Sylvia was looking at him with a kind of awed wonder in her eyes. For an instant there had been a faint suggestion of contrition in his tone, but it was overwhelmed by his desire for self-justification. It was of himself he was thinking, not of the deed in itself, not of the woman he had left to bear her child in an alien wilderness.

"I tried to do what I could for you. I want you to know that. I meant to have cared for you, that no harm should come to you," he said, and the words jarred upon his own ears as he spoke them.

In her face there was less of disdain than of marvel. He wished to escape from her eyes, but they held him fast. Messengers ran hurriedly through the corridors; men pa.s.sed the door talking in tones faintly audible; but the excitement in the rival camps communicated nothing of its intensity to this quiet chamber. Men had feared Morton Ba.s.sett; this girl, with her wondering dark eyes, did not fear him. But he was following a course he had planned for this meeting, and he dared not s.h.i.+ft his ground.

"I don't want you to think that I haven't been grieved to see you working for your living; I never meant that you should do that.

Hereafter that will be unnecessary; but I am busy to-night. To-morrow, at any time you say, we will talk of those things."

There was dismissal in his manner and tone. He was anxious to be rid of her. The color deepened in her olive cheeks, but she bent upon him once more her patient, wondering, baffling smile.

"Please never propose such a thing again, Mr. Ba.s.sett. There is absolutely nothing of that kind that you can do for me."

"You want to make it hard for me; but I hope you will think better of that. It is right that I should make the only reparation that is possible now."

This rang so false and was so palpably insincere that he was relieved when she ignored it.

"You said a moment ago that your enemies, waiting out there, thought they had you beaten. I want you to tell me just how you propose to meet Mr. Thatcher's threat."

"What am I going to do?" he broke out angrily. "I'm going into that caucus and beat Thatcher's game; I'm going to tell his story first! But don't misunderstand me; I'm going to protect you. I know men, and those men will respect me for coming out with it. I haven't been in politics all these years to be beaten at last by Ed Thatcher. I've pledged votes enough to-day to give me a majority of three on the next ballot; but I'll explode Thatcher's bombsh.e.l.l in his own hands. I'm all prepared for him; I have the doc.u.ments--the marriage certificate and the whole business. But you won't suffer; you won't be brought into it. That's what I'm going to do about it!"

The failure of his declaration to shake her composure disturbed him; perhaps after all his contemplated _coup_ was not so charged with electricity as he had imagined. Nothing in his bald statement of his marriage to her mother and the subsequent desertion had evoked the reproach, the recrimination, for which he had steeled himself when she entered the room. He felt his hold upon the interview lessening. He had believed himself expert in calculating effects, yet apparently she had heard his announcement, delivered with a brutal directness, without emotion.

"This isn't quite all, Mr. Ba.s.sett," Sylvia began after a moment. "You have offered me reparation, or what you called by that name. You can't deny that I have a right to be satisfied with that reparation."

"Certainly; anything in reason. It is for you to name the terms; I expect you to make them--adequate."

"Let us go back a moment," she began, smiling at the care with which he had chosen his last word. "Last night I fought out for myself the whole matter of your scoundrelly, cowardly treatment of my mother. You can make no reparation to her. The time pa.s.sed long ago for that. And there is absolutely nothing you can do for me. I will accept nothing from you, neither the name you denied to her nor money, now or later. So there is only one other person whose interest or whose happiness we need consider."

He stared at her frowning, not understanding. Once more, as on that day when she had laughed at him, or again when she had taken the affairs of his own household into her hands, he was conscious of the strength that lay in her, of her power to drive him back upon himself. Something of his own masterful spirit had entered into her, but with a difference.

Her self-control, her patient persistence, her sobriety of judgment, her reasoning mind, were like his own. She was as keen and resourceful as he, and he was eager for the explanation she withheld, as though, knowing that she had driven in his pickets, he awaited the charge of her lines. He bent toward her, feeling her charm, yielding to the fascination she had for him.

"No," he said gently and kindly. "I don't see; I don't understand you."

She saw and felt the change in him; but she was on guard against a reaction. He could not know how her heart throbbed, or how it had seemed for a moment that words would not come to her lips.

"It is to you; it is to yourself that you must make the reparation. And you must make it now. There may never be a time like this; it is your great opportunity."

"You think, you ask--" he began warily; and she was quick to see that the precise moment for the full stroke had not come; that the ground required preparation.

"I think," she interrupted, smiling gravely, "that you want me to be your friend. More than that, we have long been friends. And deep down in your heart I believe you want my regard; you want me to think well of you. And I must tell you that there's a kind of happiness--for it must be happiness--that comes to me at the thought of it. Something there is between you and me that is different; somehow we understand each other."

His response was beyond anything she had hoped for; a light shone suddenly in his face. There was no doubt of the sincerity of the feeling with which he replied:--

"Yes; I have felt it; I felt it the first day we met!"

"And because there is this understanding, this tie, I dare to be frank with you: I mean to make your reparation difficult. But you will not refuse it; you will not disappoint me. I mean, that you must throw away the victory you are prepared to win."

He shook his head slowly, but he could not evade the pleading of her eyes.

"I can't do it; it's too much," he muttered. "It's the goal I have sought for ten years. It would be like throwing away life itself."

"Yes; it would be bitter; but it would be the first sacrifice you ever made in your life. You have built your life on lies. You have lurked in shadows, hating the light. You have done your work in the dark, creeping, hiding, mocking, vanis.h.i.+ng. What you propose doing to-night in antic.i.p.ating the blow of your enemy is only an act of bravado. There is no real courage in that. When you thrust Dan Harwood into the convention to utter your sneer for you, it was the act of a coward. And that was contemptible cowardice. You picked him up, a clean young man of ideals, and tried to train him in your cowardly shadow ways. When the p.r.i.c.king of your conscience made you feel some responsibility for me, you manifested it like a coward. You sent a cowardly message to the best man that ever lived, not knowing, not caring how it would wound him. And you have been a great thief, stealing away from men the thing they should prize most, but you have taught them to distrust it--their faith in their country--even more, their faith in each other! The shadows have followed you to your own home. You have hidden yourself behind a veil of mystery, so that your own wife and children don't know the man you are.

You have never been true to anything--not to yourself, not to those who should be near and dear to you. And you have sneered at the people who send you here to represent them; you have betrayed them, not once but a hundred times; and you know it hasn't paid. You are the unhappiest man in the world. But there's a real power in you, or you could never have done the things you have done--the mean and vile things. You have brains and a genius for organizing and managing men. You could never have lasted so long without the personal qualities that a man must have to lead men. And you have led them, down and down."

To all appearances she had spoken to dull ears. Occasionally their eyes had met, but his gaze had wandered away to range the walls. When she ceased he moved restlessly about the room.

"You think I am as bad as that?" he asked, pausing by the table and looking down at her.