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  [Illustration: AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FROM THE PAINTING BY ELLEN EMMET

  _Copyright, 1908, by Ellen Emmet_]

  McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

  VOL. XXXI      JUNE, 1908       No. 2

  MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA
  THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
  PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS
  THE CRYSTAL-GAZER
  BOB, DÉBUTANT
  TWO PORTRAITS BY GILBERT STUART
  MARY BAKER G. EDDY
  HER FRUITS
  THE KEY TO THE DOOR
  THE WAYFARERS
  THE PROBLEMS OF SUICIDE
  PRAIRIE DAWN
  THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL
  YOUNG HENRY AND THE OLD MAN
  EDITORIAL

  Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents was
                      added by the transcriber.

MY FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA[1]

BY

ELLEN TERRY

The first time that there was any talk of my going to America was, I
think, in 1874, when I was playing in "The Wandering Heir." Dion
Boucicault wanted me to go, and dazzled me with figures, but I expect
the cautious Charles Reade influenced me against accepting the
engagement.

When I did go, in 1883, I was thirty-five and had an assured position in
my profession. It was the first of eight tours, seven of which I went
with Henry Irving. The last was in 1907, after his death. I also went to
America one summer on a pleasure trip. The tours lasted three months at
least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
something for my adaptableness!

"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
Frenchman, who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case
it is almost imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country
is so vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
impressions soon find that there still are mountains more. I have lived
in New York, Boston, and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
that to know any of these great towns even superficially would take a
year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of Americans,
but I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain
unknown.

[Illustration: _Copyrighted by Window & Grove From the collections of
Miss Frances Johnson and Mrs. Evelyn Smalley_

ELLEN TERRY OPHELIA, AND HENRIETTA MARIA, THREE PARTS WHICH SHE PLAYED
ON THE FIRST AMERICAN TOUR]

_The Unknown Dangers of America_

I set out in 1883 from Liverpool on board the "Britannic" with the fixed
conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
started the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst into
floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my parrot, my
"aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see again alive, just because she
said I never would, and I was going to face the unknown dangers of the
Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell performances in
London had cheered me up a little--though I wept copiously at every
one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry Irving's position
seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his
departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to
listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it
was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing:
"Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face
the perils of the far North. He is not going like A---- to face
something else. He is not going to China," etc.--and so on. After about
the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, who was one of the
guests, grew very impatient and interrupted the orator with: "Of course
he isn't! He's going to New York by the Cunard Line. It'll take him
about a week!"

_New York Before the "Sky-scrapers"_

My first voyage was a voyage of enchantment to me. The ship was laden
with pig-iron, but she rolled and rolled and rolled. She could never
roll too much for me. I have always been a splendid sailor, and I feel
jolly at sea. The sudden leap from home into the wilderness of waves
does not give me any sensation of melancholy.

What I thought I was going to see when I arrived in America, I hardly
remember. I had a vague idea that all American women wore red flannel
shirts and bowie knives and that I might be sandbagged in the street!
From somewhere or other I had derived an impression that New York was an
ugly, noisy place.

Ugly! When I first saw that marvellous harbour I nearly cried--it was so
beautiful. Whenever I come now to the unequalled approach to New York I
wonder what Americans must think of the approach from the sea to London.
How different are the mean, flat, marshy banks of the Thames, and the
wooden toy light-house at Dungeness, to the vast, spreading harbour,
with its busy multitude of steam boats and ferry boats, its wharf upon
wharf, and its tall statue of Liberty dominating all the racket and
bustle of the sea traffic of the world!

That was one of the few times in America when I did not miss the poetry
of the past. The poetry of the present, gigantic, colossal, and
enormous, made me forget it. The "sky-scrapers," so splendid in the
landscape now, did not exist in 1883; but I find it difficult to divide
my early impressions from my later ones. There was Brooklyn Bridge,
though, hung up high in the air like a vast spider's web. Between 1883
and 1893 I noticed a great change in New York and other cities. In ten
years they seemed to have grown with the energy of tropical plants. But
between 1893 and 1907 I saw no evidence of such feverish increase. It is
possible that the Americans are arriving at a stage when they can no
longer beat the record! There is a vast difference between one of the
old New York brownstone houses and one of the fourteen-storied buildings
near the river, but between this and the Times Square Building or the
still more amazing Flatiron Building, which is said to oscillate at the
top--it is so far from the ground--there is very little difference. I
hear that they are now beginning to build downwards into the earth, but
this will not change the appearance of New York for a long time.

[Illustration: _From the collection of Miss Evelyn Smalley_

HENRY IRVING AS MATHIAS IN "THE BELLS"

THE PART IN WHICH IRVING MADE HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN AMERICA]

I had not to endure the wooden shed in which most people landing in
America have to struggle with the custom-house officials--a struggle as
brutal as a "round in the ring" as Paul Bourget describes it. We were
taken off the "Britannic" in a tug, and Mr. Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, and
many other friends met us--including the much-dreaded reporters.

[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._

THE REJECTED DESIGN FOR A COLUMBIAN MEDAL MADE BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS]

When we landed, I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.
There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then--the
building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first
evidence of _beauty_ in the city. There were horse trams instead of
cable cars; but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly
dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy
sidewalks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets. Had the
elevated railway, the first sign of _power_ that one notices after
leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets? I cannot
remember New York without it.

[Illustration: _Lent by The Century Co._

THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF BASTIEN-LEPAGE MODELED BY AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS. SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THE PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY]

I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless _hansoms_ of London plying
in the streets for hire. People in New York get about in the cars,
unless they have their own carriages. The hired carriage has no reason
for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by
charging two dollars for a journey which in London would not cost fifty
cents!

[Illustration: THE BAS-RELIEF PORTRAIT OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON MODELED
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR THE ST. GILES CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH.
SAINT-GAUDENS GAVE A CAST OF THIS PORTRAIT TO MISS TERRY'S DAUGHTER,
EDITH CRAIG]

_Irving Brings Shakespeare to America_

There were very few theatres in New York when we first went there. All
that part of the city which is now "up town" did not exist, and what was
then "up" is now more than "down" town. The American stage has changed
almost as much. Even then there was a liking for local plays which
showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more
violent and crude than now. The original American genius and the true
dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very
complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real
pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its
naïveté. The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked
feature in social life is reflected in American plays. This is by the
way. What I want to make clear is that in 1883 there was no living
American drama as there is now, that such productions of romantic plays
and Shakespeare as Henry Irving brought over from England, were unknown,
and that the extraordinary success of our first tours would be
impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were
_new_. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson
Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which
was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the
footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, and the
dressing-rooms were inferior.

[Illustration: HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET

FROM THE STATUE BY E. ONSLOW FORD, R. A., IN THE GUILDHALL OF THE CITY OF
LONDON]

[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS IMOGEN

DRAWN BY ALMA-TADEMA FOR MISS TERRY'S JUBILEE IN 1906]

[Illustration: ELLEN TERRY AS PORTIA

FROM THE PAINTING BY SIR JOHN MILLAIS, R. A.]

_Our First Appearance Before an American Audience_

Henry made his first appearance in America in "The Bells." He was not at
his best on the first night, but he could be pretty good even when he
was not at his best. I watched him from a box. Nervousness made the
company very slow. The audience was a splendid one--discriminating and
appreciative. We felt that the Americans _wanted_ to like us. We felt in
a few days so extraordinarily at home. The first sensation of entering a
foreign city was quickly wiped out.

[Illustration: WILLIAM WINTER--

ONE OF THE FIRST CRITICS TO WELCOME IRVING TO THIS COUNTRY]

On the second night in New York it was my turn. "Command yourself--this
is the time to show you can act!" I said to myself as I went on the
stage of the Star Theatre, dressed as Henrietta Maria. But I could not
command myself. I played badly and cried too much in the last act. But
the people liked me, and they liked the play, perhaps because it was
historical, and of history the Americans are passionately fond. The
audience took many points which had been ignored in London. I had always
thought Henry as Charles I. most moving when he made that involuntary
effort to kneel to his subject, Moray, but the Lyceum audiences never
seemed to notice it. In New York the audience burst out into the most
sympathetic, spontaneous applause that I have ever heard in a theatre.

_American Clothes_

My impression of the way the American women dressed in 1883 was not
favourable. Some of them wore Indian shawls and diamond ear-rings. They
dressed too grandly in the street and too dowdily in the theatre. All
this has changed. The stores in New York are now the most beautiful in
the world, and the women are dressed to perfection. They are as clever
at the _demi-toilette_ as the Parisian, and the extreme neatness and
smartness of their walking gowns is very refreshing after the floppy,
blowsy, trailing dresses, accompanied by the inevitable feather boa, of
which English girls, who used to be so tidy and "tailor-made," now seem
so fond. The universal white "waist" is so pretty and trim on the
American girl. It is one of the distinguishing marks of a land of the
free, a land where "class" hardly exists. The girl in the store wears
the white waist; so does the rich girl on Fifth Avenue. It costs
anything from seventy-five cents to fifty dollars!

London, when I come back from America, always seems at first like an
ill-lighted village, strangely tame, peaceful, and backward. Above all,
I miss the sunlight of America, and the clear blue skies of an evening.

"Are you glad to get back?" said an English friend.

"Very."

"It's a land of vulgarity, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, if you mean by that a wonderful land--a land of sunshine and
light, of happiness, of faith in the future!" I answered. I saw no
misery or poverty there. Everyone looked happy. What hurts me on coming
back to England is the _hopeless_ look on so many faces; the dejection
and apathy of the people standing about in the streets. Of course there
is poverty in New York, but not among the Americans. The Italians, the
Russians, the Poles--all the host of immigrants washed in daily across
the harbour--these are poor, but you don't see them unless you go Bowery
ways and even then you can't help feeling that in their sufferings there
is always hope. Vulgarity? I saw little of it. I thought that the people
who had amassed large fortunes used their wealth beautifully. When a man
is rich enough to build himself a big, new house, he remembers some old
house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the
technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for
the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lake-side in
Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One
millionaire's house is modelled on a French château, another on an old
Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is
like an Italian _palazzo_. And their imitations are never weak or
pretentious. The architects in America seem to me to be far more able
than ours, or else they have a freer hand and more money.

_The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens_

It is sad to remember that Mr. Stanford White was one of the best of
these splendid architects. It was Stanford White with Saint-Gaudens,
that great sculptor, whose work dignifies nearly all the great cities in
America, who had most to do with the Exhibition buildings of the World's
Fair in Chicago in 1893. It was odd to see that fair dream city rising
out of the lake, so far more beautiful in its fleeting loveliness than
the Chicago of the stock-yards and the pit which had provided the money
for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at
all. They gave their thousands--and stood aside. The result was one of
the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their
work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries
instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down!
The World's Fair recalled to me the story of how Michelangelo carved a
figure in snow which, says the chronicler Vasari who saw it, "was
superb."

Saint-Gaudens gave me a cast of his medallion of Bastien-Lepage, and
wrote to a friend of mine: "Bastien had '_le coeur au métier_.' So has
Miss Terry, and I will place that saying in the frame that is to replace
the present unsatisfactory one." He was very fastidious about this frame
and took such a lot of trouble to get it right.

It must have been very irritating to Saint-Gaudens when he fell a victim
to that extraordinary official Puritanism which sometimes exercises a
petty censorship over works of art in America. The medal that he made
for the World's Fair was rejected at Washington because it had on it a
beautiful little nude figure of a boy--holding an olive
branch--emblematical of young America. I think a commonplace wreath and
some lettering were substituted.

Saint-Gaudens did the fine bas-relief of Robert Louis Stevenson which
was chosen for the monument in St. Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. He gave
my daughter a medallion cast from this, because he knew that she was a
great lover of Stevenson. The bas-relief was dedicated to his friend,
Joe Evans. I knew Saint-Gaudens first through Joe Evans, an artist who,
while he lived, was to me and to my daughter the dearest of all in
America. His character was so fine and noble--his nature so perfect.
Many were the birthday cards he did for me, original in design,
beautiful in execution. Whatever he did, he put the best of himself
into it. I wrote this in my diary the year he died:

     "I heard on Saturday that our dear Joe Evans is dangerously ill.
     Yesterday came the worst news. Joe was not happy, but he was just
     heroic, and this world wasn't half good enough for him. I wonder if
     he has gone to a better. I keep on getting letters about him. He
     seems to have been so glad to die. It was like a child's funeral, I
     am told, and all his American friends seem to have been
     there--Saint-Gaudens, Taber, etc. A poem about the dear fellow by
     Mr. Gilder has one very good line in which he says the grave 'might
     snatch a brightness from his presence there.' I thought that was
     very happy, the love of light and gladness being the most
     remarkable thing about him, the dear sad Joe."

_Robert Taber_

Robert Taber, dear, and rather sad too, was a great friend of Joe's.
They both came to me first in the shape of a little book in which was
inscribed: "Never anything can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender
it." "Upon this hint I spake," the book began. It was all the work of a
few boys and girls who from the gallery of the Star Theatre, New York,
had watched Irving's productions and learned to love him and me. Joe
Evans had done a lovely picture by way of frontispiece of a group of
eager heads hanging over the gallery's edge, his own and Taber's among
them. Eventually Taber came to England and acted with Henry Irving in
"Peter the Great" and other plays.

Like his friend Joe, he too was heroic. His health was bad and his life
none too happy--but he struggled on. His career was cut short by
consumption and he died in the Adirondacks in 1904.

I cannot speak of all my friends in America, or anywhere, for the matter
of that, _individually_. My personal friends are so many, and they are
_all_ wonderful--wonderfully staunch to me! I have "tried" them so, and
they have never given me up as a bad job.

_Dramatic Criticism in America_

William Winter, poet, critic, and exquisite man, was one of the first to
write of Henry with whole-hearted appreciation. But all the criticism in
America, favourable and unfavourable, surprised us by the scholarly
knowledge it displayed. In Chicago the notices were worthy of the
_Temps_ or the _Journal des Débats_. There was no attempt to force the
personality of the writer into the foreground nor to write a style that
would attract attention to the critic and leave the thing criticised to
take care of itself. William Winter and, of late years, Alan Dale have
had their personalities associated with their criticisms, but they are
exceptions. Curiously enough, the art of acting appears to bore most
dramatic critics, the very people who might be expected to be interested
in it. The American critics, however, at the time of our early visits,
were keenly interested, and showed it by their observation of many
points which our English critics had passed over. For instance, writing
of "Much Ado about Nothing," one of the Americans said of Henry in the
Church Scene that "something of him as a subtle interpreter of doubtful
situations was exquisitely shown in the early part of this fine scene by
his suspicion of Don John--felt by him alone, and expressed only by a
quick covert look, but a look so full of intelligence as to proclaim him
a sharer in the secret with his audience."

"Wherein does the superiority lie?" wrote another critic in comparing
our productions with those which had been seen in America up to 1884.
"Not in the amount of money expended, but in the amount of brains; in
the artistic intelligence and careful and earnest pains with which every
detail is studied and worked out. Nor is there any reason why Mr. Irving
or any other foreigner should have a monopoly of either intelligence or
pains. They are common property and one man's money can buy them as well
as another's. The defect in the American manager's policy heretofore has
been that he has squandered his money upon high salaries for a few of
his actors; and in costly, because unintelligent, expenditure for mere
dazzle and show."

_William Winter and His Children_

William Winter soon became a great personal friend of ours, and visited
us in England. He was one of the few _sad_ people I met in America. He
could have sat upon the ground and "told sad stories of the deaths of
kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and
knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry
of the _immediate_ past--Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats, and the rest. He _liked_ us, so everything we did was right to
him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he
disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this
play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter could never take
that unemotional point of view.

His children came to stay with me in London. When we were all coming
home from the theatre one night after Faust (the year must have been
1886), I said to little Willie:

"Well, what do you think of the play?"

"Oh my!" said he, "it takes the cake."

"Takes the _cake_," said his little sister scornfully. "It takes the
ice-cream!"

"Won't you give me a kiss?" said Henry to the same little girl one
night.

"No, I _won't_, with all that blue stuff on your face." (He was made up
for Mephistopheles.) Then, after a pause, "But why--why don't you _take_
it!" She was only five years old at the time!

_Discovering the Southern Darkey_

For quite a while during the first tour I stayed in Washington with my
friend, Miss Olive Seward, and all the servants of that delightful
household were coloured. This was my first introduction to the negroes,
whose presence in the country makes America seem more foreign than
anything to European eyes. They are more sharply divided into high and
low types than white people, and are not in the least alike in their
types. It is safe to call any coloured man "George." They all love it,
perhaps because of George Washington; and most of them are really named
George. I never met with such perfect service as they can give. _Some_
of them are delightful. The beautiful, full voice of the "darkey" is so
attractive--so soothing, and they are so deft and gentle. Some of the
women are beautiful, and all the young appeared to me to be well-formed.
As for the babies! I washed two or three little piccaninnies when I was
in the South, and the way they rolled their gorgeous eyes at me was "too
cute," which means, in British-English, "fascinating."

At the Washington house, the servants danced a cake-walk for me--the
coloured cook, a magnificent type, who "took the cake," saying, "That
was because I chose a good handsome boy to dance with, Missie." They
sang, too. Their voices were beautiful--with such illimitable power, yet
as sweet as treacle.

The little page boy had a pet of a woolly head--Henry once gave him a
tip, a "fee," in American-English, and said: "There, that's for a new
wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair.
The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think!

"Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one
of the very old servants.

"Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!"

He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honour
of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the
blacks. The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like
one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some
hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce
pins from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of
white woolly hair. "Always handy then, Missie," he would say.

"Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom."

He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment
the servants were giving me.

"Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly."

"Why I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune.

"Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!"

_American Women_

Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did
not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of
women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines
in the background, untiringly turning out the dollars while their wives
and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present.

Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I
was much struck by their culture--by the evidence that they had read far
more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen.
Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary naïveté. Their vivacity, the
appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of
American women, delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite
of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life,
even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men
either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a
curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a
cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a
point of her _education_ to admire it.

There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to
avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such
extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York, and the
warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves!

THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE

BY MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR G. DOVE

James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
Park, and which may, indeed, be said to have private grounds of their
own, for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
entitled locally the "Inclosure."

Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
like to live in Cumberland Crescent, and now he was living there; very
early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.

To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and was about to
cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled undercut before him,
when he heard the postman's steps hurrying around the Crescent. He rose
with a certain quick deliberateness, and, going out into the hall,
opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
and glanced over the type-written sheet of note-paper:

    SHORTERS COURT,
    THROGMORTON ST.
    November 4, 190-.

    DEAR JAMES:

    In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford
    Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the Decree
    will be made Absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a
    wire before this letter reaches you.

    Your affect' brother,
    WM. A. TAPSTER.

In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
soon."

Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes traveled down again to the
postscript: "Maud will be round to see them soon." Well, he would see
about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally, as most men feeling
as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if she will!" knowing
the while that Maud certainly would.

His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlor-maid as she
hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for having
neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang. After a pause, he
rose and turned toward the door--but no, he could not face the large,
cheerless drawing-room up-stairs; instead, he sat down by the fire, and
set himself to consider his future and, in a more hazy sense, that of
his now motherless children.

But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
memory.

Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
point of view, a better filled life than James Tapster. How he had
scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer--in a word, all
those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
always been self-respecting and conscientious--not a prig, mind you, but
inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life; and,
so inclining, he had found contentment and great material prosperity.

Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man,
sitting alone by his dining-room fire, remembered only what had been
good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
William and William's wife, Maud, both thought that even now he had much
to be thankful for. His line of business was brisk, scarcely touched by
foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate of
progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy. But, alas! now
that, in place of there being a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
spend easily earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done. His very
children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly, his
greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved little
boys and a charming baby girl into three unruly, fretful imps, setting
him at defiance, and terrorizing their two attendants, who, though
carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them as well
as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.

Looking back at the whole horrible affair--for so, in his own mind, Mr.
Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
the successful petitioner--he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
wisely--wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.

He knew very well that had it not been for William, or rather, for Maud,
he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more, he was
dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
would have been forgiven and forgotten, had not William, and more
especially Maud, said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own
sake,--ah, what irony!--then for that of his children.

Of course, he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame and sometimes
almost to hate his kind brother and sister. To them both, or rather, to
Maud, he really owed the break-up of his life; for, when all was said
and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
her of it), that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
watering-place, a place full of low English!

Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
greatly she--and William--had been to blame. On one occasion Maud had
even said how surprised she had been that James had cared to go away to
America, leaving his pretty young wife alone for as long as three
months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then? Of course, he had
thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after and kept out of
mischief by Maud and William. But he had been, in more than one sense,
alas! bitterly deceived.

Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
from his chair and walked around the room, looking absently, as he did
so, at the large Landseer engravings, of which he was naturally proud.
If only he could forget, put out of his mind forever, the whole affair!
Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.

He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mama.

By the way, would Flossy still be their mama after the Decree had been
made Absolute? So Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated,
perplexed. But, yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or
even efface, that fact. The more so--though surely here James Tapster
showed himself less logical than usual--the more so that Flossy, in
spite of what Maud had always said about her, had been a loving and, in
her own light-hearted way, a careful mother. But, though Flossy would
remain the mother of his children,--odd that the Law hadn't provided for
that contingency--she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let no
man join together."

To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
done or more admirably conducted than the way the whole matter had been
carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor, Mr.
Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but every one, including
the judge, had been most kind. As for his counsel, the leading man who
makes a specialty of these sad affairs, not even James Tapster himself
could have put his own case in a more delicate and moving fashion. "A
gentleman possessed of considerable fortune--" so had he justly been
described; and counsel, without undue insistence on irrelevant detail,
had drawn a touching and a true picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance,
his marriage eight years before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an
undischarged bankrupt. Even the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's
dreadful ingratitude in its true colors till he had heard his counsel's
moderate comments on the case.

[Illustration: "HE REMINDED HIMSELF THAT FLOSSY, WICKED, UNGRATEFUL
FLOSSY, HAD DISAPPEARED OUT OF HIS LIFE"]

This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
have had the heart to break up his happy home. Why, but for him and his
offer of marriage, Flossy Ball--that had been his wife's maiden
name--would have had to earn her own living! And as she had been very
pretty, very "fetching," she would probably have married some
good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age, lacking the means to
support a wife in decent comfort,--such a fellow, for instance, as the
wretched "co" in the case; while with Mr. Tapster--why, she had had
everything the heart of woman could wish for--a good home, beautiful
clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A strange choking
feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good he had been to
Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that kindness.

But this--this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor motherless children!
Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again. If her
lover did not marry her--and, from what Mr. Greenfield had discovered
about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a position to
do so--she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon: Mr.
Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged that
William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as he
now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
that allowance at three pounds a week, a sum which had astonished, in
fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
by the way.

"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year is
a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on----"

"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
allowance."

But, though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and
though Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet
Flossy had not reappeared. Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he
only knew where she was, what she was doing,--whether she was still with
that young fellow, for instance,--he would think much less about her
than he did now. Only last night, going for a moment into the night
nursery,--poor Mr. Tapster now enjoyed his children's company only when
he was quite sure that they were asleep,--he had had an extraordinary,
almost a physical impression of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt
a faint whiff of her favorite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent,
and, though Maud always said that the use of scent was most unladylike,
he, James, did not dislike it.

With sudden soreness, Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit. It
had been a wild, oddly worded appeal to him to take her back, not--as
Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter--because she was sorry
for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
shameless and unwomanly in the extreme, and even William, who had never
judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
magnitude of her offense against God and man.

Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
curious little sound. He knew it for that of the front door being first
opened, and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
chair by the fire, then sat down again heavily.

By Maud's advice, he always locked the area gate himself when he came
home each evening. But how foolish of Maud--such a sensible woman,
too--to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented so
easily. Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
evening, and the policeman--a most respectable officer standing at point
duty a few yards lower down the road--must be well aware of these
disgraceful "goings on".

For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
At last she suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
were--by Maud. Unfortunately, they had all been more or less of his own
age, and plain, very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.

It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
Maud's domestic thraldom; for his sister-in-law, offended by his
rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more, she had reminded
him with a smile that she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women. This
insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
younger servants.

Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law now interfered only where his children were
concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
trained. As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two
nephews and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that
there had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who
had been successively engaged by her during the last year.

The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six, and the second four; the
youngest child, a little girl named, unfortunately, Flora, after her
mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase, this.

[Illustration: "THERE STOOD CLOSE TO HIM, SO CLOSE THAT HE COULD ALMOST
HAVE TOUCHED HER, FLOSSY, HIS WIFE"]

And yet, Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
capable. They had become, so he was told by their indignant nurses, the
terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
of the Park Inclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.

Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
curious little sound--that of some one creeping softly down the
staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his
chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent
annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going
out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had
declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little
communication as possible between the kitchen and the nursery, but Mr.
Tapster sometimes found himself in secret sympathy with the two women
whose disagreeable duty it was to be always with his three turbulent
children.

Mr. Tapster frowned and stared gloomily into the fire; then he suddenly
pulled himself together rather sharply, for the door behind him had
slowly swung open. This was intolerable! The parlor-maid had again and
again been told that, whatever might have been the case in her former
places, no door in Mr. Tapster's house was to be opened without the
preliminary of a respectful knock.

Fortified by the memory of what had been a positive order, he turned
round, nerving himself to deliver the necessary rebuke. But instead of
the shifty-eyed, impudent-looking woman he had thought to see, there
stood close to him, so close that he could almost have touched her,
Flossy, his wife, or rather the woman who, though no longer his wife,
had still, as he had been informed to his discomfiture, the right to
bear his name.

A very strange feeling, and one so complicated that it sat uneasily upon
him, took instant possession of Mr. Tapster: anger, surprise, and relief
warred with one another in his heart.

Then he began to think that his eyes must be playing him some curious
trick, for the figure at which he was staring remained strangely still
and motionless. Was it possible that his mind, dwelling constantly on
Flossy, had evoked her wraith? But, no, looking up in startled silence
at the still figure standing before him, he realized that not so would
memory have conjured up the pretty, bright little woman of whom he had
once been proud. Flossy still looked pretty, but she was thin and pale,
and there were dark rings round her eyes; also, her dress was worn, her
hat curiously shabby.

As Mr. Tapster stared up at her, noting these things, one of her hands
began playing nervously with the fringe of the dining-table cover, and
the other sought the back of what had once been one of her dining-room
chairs. As he watched her making these slight movements, nature so far
reasserted itself that a feeling of poignant regret, of pity for her, as
well as, of course, a much larger share of pity for himself, came over
James Tapster.

Had Flossy spoken then,--had she possessed the intuitive knowledge of
men which is the gift of so many otherwise unintelligent women,--the
whole of Mr. Tapster's future, to say nothing of her own, might have
been different and, it may be suggested, happier.

But the moment of softening and mansuetude slipped quickly by, and was
succeeded by a burst of anger; for Mr. Tapster suddenly became aware
that Flossy's left hand, the little thin hand resting on the back of the
chair, was holding two keys which he recognized at once as his property.
The one was a replica of the latch-key which always hung on his
watch-chain, while the other and larger key, to which was attached a
brass tag bearing the name of Tapster and the address of the house, gave
access to the Inclosure Garden opposite Cumberland Crescent!

Avoiding her eager, pitiful look, Mr. Tapster set himself to realize,
with a shrewdness for which William and Maud would never have given him
credit, what Flossy's possession of those two keys had meant during the
last few months.

This woman, who both was and was not Mrs. Tapster, had retained the
power to come freely in and out of _his_ house! She had been able to
make her way, with or without the connivance of the servants, into _his_
children's nursery at any hour of the day or night convenient to
herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen
the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to
enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all those
of happy wifehood!

His mind hastened heavily on. What a fool he must have looked before
his servants! How they must have laughed to think that he was being so
deceived and taken in! Why, even the policeman who stood at point duty
outside must have known all about it!

Small wonder that Mr. Tapster felt extremely incensed; small wonder that
his heart, hardening, solidifying, expelled any feeling of pity provoked
by Flossy's sad and downcast appearance.

"I must request you," he said, in a voice which even to himself sounded
harsh and needlessly loud, "to give me up those keys which you hold in
your hand. You have no right to their possession, and I grieve to think
that you took advantage of my great distress of mind not to return them
with the things of which I sent you a list by my brother William. I
cannot believe"--and now Mr. Tapster lied as only the very truthful can
lie on occasion--"I cannot believe, I say, that you have taken advantage
of my having overlooked them, and that you have ever before to-night
forced yourself into this house! Still less can I believe that you have
taught our--_my_--children to deceive their father!"

Even when uttering his first sentence, he had noticed that there had
come over Flossy's face--which was thinner, if quite as pretty and
youthful-looking, as when he had last seen it--an expression of
obstinacy which he had once well known and always dreaded. It had been
Flossy's one poor weapon against her husband's superior sense and power
of getting his own way, and sometimes it had vanquished him in that fair
fight which is always being waged between the average husband and wife.

"You are right," she cried passionately. "I have not taught the children
to deceive you! I have never come into this house until I felt sure that
they were asleep and alone, though I've often wondered that they never
woke up and knew that their own mother was there! But more than once,
James, I've felt like going after that society which looks after badly
treated children--for the last nurse you had for them was so cruel! If
she hadn't left you soon I should have _had_ to do something! I used to
feel desperate when I saw her shake Baby in her pram; why, one day, in
the Inclosure, a lady spoke to her about it, and threatened to tell
her--her mistress----"

Flossy's voice sank to a shamed whisper. The tears were rolling down her
cheeks; she was speaking in angry gasps, and what she said actually made
James Tapster feel, what he knew full well he had no reason to feel,
ashamed of himself. "That is why," she went on, "that is why I have, as
you say, forced myself into your house, and why, too, I have now come
here to ask you to forgive me--to take me back--just for the sake of the
children."

Mr. Tapster's mind was one that traveled surely, if slowly. He saw his
chance, and seized it. "And why," he said impressively, "had that
woman--the nurse, I mean--no mistress? Tell me that, Flossy. You should
have thought of all that before you behaved as you did!"

"I didn't know--I didn't think----"

Mr. Tapster finished the sentence for her: "You didn't think," he
observed impressively, "that I should ever find you out."

Then there came over him a morbid wish to discover--to learn from her
own lips--why Flossy had done such a shameful and extraordinary thing as
to be unfaithful to her marriage vow.

"Whatever made you behave so?" he asked in a low voice. "I wasn't unkind
to you, was I? You had a nice, comfortable home, hadn't you?"

"I was mad," she answered, with a touch of sharp weariness. "I don't
suppose I could ever make you understand; and yet,"--she looked at him
deprecatingly,--"I suppose, James, that you too were young once,
and--and--mad?"

Mr. Tapster stared at Flossy. What extraordinary things she said! Of
course he had been young once; for the matter of that, he didn't feel
old--not to say _old_--even now. But he had always been perfectly
sane--she knew that well enough! As for her calling herself mad, that
was a mere figure of speech. Of course, in a sense, she had been mad to
do what she had done, and he was glad that she now understood this; but
her saying so simply begged the whole question, and left him no wiser
than he was before.

There was a long, tense silence between them. Then Mr. Tapster slowly
rose from his arm-chair and faced his wife.

"I see," he said, "that William was right. I mean, I suppose I may take
it that that young fellow has gone and left you?"

"Yes," she said, with a curious indifference, "he has gone and left me.
His father made him take a job out in Brazil just after the case was
through."

"And what have you been doing since then?" asked Mr. Tapster
suspiciously. "How have you been living?"

"His father gives me a pound a week." Flossy still spoke with that
curious indifference. "I tried to get something to do"--she hesitated,
then offered the lame explanation--"just to have something to do, for
I've been awfully lonely and miserable, James; but I don't seem to be
able to get anything."

"If you had written to Mr. Greenfield or to William, they would have
told you that I had arranged for you to have an allowance," he said, and
then again he fell into silence....

Mr. Tapster was seeing a vision of himself, magnanimous,
forgiving--taking the peccant Flossy back to his heart and becoming once
more, in a material sense, comfortable! If he acceded to her wish, if he
made up his mind to forgive her, he would have to begin life all over
again, move away from Cumberland Crescent to some distant place where
the story was not known--perhaps to Clapham, where he had spent his
boyhood.

But how about Maud? How about William? How about the very considerable
expense to which he had been put in connection with the divorce
proceedings? Was all that money to be wasted? Mr. Tapster suddenly saw
the whole of his little world rising up in judgment, smiling pityingly
at his folly and weakness. During the whole of a long and of what had
been, till this last year, a very prosperous life, Mr. Tapster had
always steered his safe course by what may be called the compass of
public opinion, and now, when navigating an unknown sea, he could not
afford to throw that compass overboard, so----

"No," he said; "no, Flossy. It would not be right for me to take you
back. _It wouldn't do._"

"Wouldn't it?" she asked piteously. "Oh, James, don't say no like that,
all at once! People do forgive each other--sometimes. I don't ask you to
be as kind to me as you were before--only to let me come home and see
after the children!"

But Mr. Tapster shook his head. The children! Always the children! He
noticed, even now, that she didn't say a word of wanting to come back to
_him_; and yet, he had been such a kind, nay, if Maud were to be
believed, such a foolishly indulgent husband.

And then, Flossy looked so different. Mr. Tapster felt as if a stranger
were standing there before him. Her appearance of poverty shocked him.
Had she looked well and prosperous, he would have felt injured, and yet
her pinched face and shabby clothes certainly repelled him. So again he
shook his head, and there came into his face a look which Flossy had
always known in old days to spell finality, and when he again spoke she
saw that her knowledge had not misled her.

"I don't want to be unkind," he said ponderously. "If you will only go
to William, or write to him if you would rather not go to the
office,"--Mr. Tapster did not like to think that any one once closely
connected with him should "look like that" in his brother's office,--"he
will tell you what you had better do. I'm quite ready to make you a
handsome allowance--in fact, it is all arranged. You need not have
anything more to do with that fellow's father--an army colonel, isn't
he?--and his pound a week; but William thinks, and I must say I agree,
that you ought to go back to your maiden name, Flossy, as being more
fair to me."

"And am I never to see the children again?" she asked.

"No; it wouldn't be right for me to let you do so." He hesitated, then
added, "They don't miss you any more now"; with no unkindly intent he
concluded, "soon they'll have forgotten you altogether."

And then, just as Mr. Tapster was hesitating, seeking for a suitable and
not unkindly sentence of farewell, he saw a very strange, almost a
desperate look come over Flossy's face, and, to his surprise, she
suddenly turned and left the room, closing the door very carefully
behind her.

He stared after her. How very odd of her to say nothing! And what a
strange look had come over her face! He could not help feeling hurt that
she had not thanked him for what he knew to be a very generous and
unusual provision on the part of an injured husband.... Mr. Tapster took
a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it twice over his face,
then once more he sought and sank into the arm-chair by the fire.

Even now he still felt keenly conscious of Flossy's nearness. What could
she be doing? Then he straightened himself and listened; yes, it was as
he feared; she had gone up-stairs--up-stairs to look at the children,
for now he could hear her coming down again. How obstinate she was, how
obstinate and ungrateful! Mr. Tapster wished he had the courage to go
out into the hall and face her, in order to tell her how wrong her
conduct was. Why, she had actually kept the keys--those keys that were
his property!

Suddenly he heard her light footsteps hurrying down the hall; now she
was opening the front door--it slammed, and again Mr. Tapster felt
pained to think how strangely indifferent Flossie was to his interests.
Why, what would the servants think, hearing the front door slam like
that?

But still, now that it was over, he was glad the interview had taken
place, for henceforth--or so, at least, Mr. Tapster believed--the Flossy
of the past, the bright, pretty, prosperous Flossy of whom he had been
so proud, would cease to haunt him. He remembered, with a feeling of
relief, that she was going to his brother William; of course, she would
then, among greater renunciations, be compelled to return the two
keys--for they, that is, his brother and himself, would have her in
their power. They would not behave unkindly to her--far from it; in
fact, they would arrange for her to live with some quiet, religious lady
in a country town a few hours from London.

[Illustration: "HE SAW THAT WHICH RATHER SURPRISED HIM, AND MADE HIM
FEEL ACTIVELY INDIGNANT"]

Then Mr. Tapster began going over each incident of the strange little
interview, for he wanted to tell his brother William exactly what had
taken place.

His conscience was quite clear, except with regard to one matter, and
that, after all, needn't be mentioned to William. He felt rather ashamed
of having asked the question which had provoked so strange and wild an
answer--so unexpected a retort. Mad? What had Flossy meant by asking him
if he had ever been mad? No one had ever used the word in connection
with James Tapster before--save once. Oddly enough, that occasion also
had been in a way connected with Flossy, for it had happened when he had
gone to tell William and Maud of his engagement.

It was on a fine day nine years ago come this May, and he had found
William and William's wife walking in their little garden on Havenstock
Hill. His kind brother, as always, had been most sympathetic, and had
even made a suitable joke--Mr. Tapster remembered it very sadly
to-night--concerning the spring and a young man's fancy; but Maud had
been really disagreeable. She had said, "It's no use talking to you,
James, for you're mad, quite mad!"

Strange that he should remember all this to-night, for, after all, it
had nothing to do with the present state of affairs.

Mr. Tapster felt rather shaken and nervous; he pulled out his repeater
watch, but, alas! it was still very early--only ten minutes to nine. He
couldn't go to bed yet. Perhaps he would do well to join a club. He had
always thought rather poorly of men who belonged to clubs--most of them
were idle, lazy fellows; but still, circumstances alter cases.

Suddenly he began to wish that Flossy had remained a little longer. He
thought of all sorts of things--improving, kindly remarks--he would have
liked to say to her. He blamed himself for not having offered her any
refreshment; she would probably have refused to take anything, but
still, it was wrong on his part not to have thought of it. A pound a
week for everything! No wonder she looked starved. Why, his own
household bills, exclusive of wine or beer, had worked out, since he had
had this new expensive housekeeper, at something like fifteen shillings
a head, a fact which he had managed to conceal from Maud, who "did" her
William so well on exactly ten shillings and ninepence all round!

It struck nine from the neighboring church, where Mr. Tapster had
sittings,--but where he seldom was able to go on Sunday mornings, for he
was proud of being among those old-fashioned folk who still regard
Sunday as essentially a day of rest,--and there came a sudden sound of
hoarse shouting from the road outside. Though he was glad of anything
that broke the oppressive silence with which he felt encompassed, Mr.
Tapster found time to tell himself that it was disgraceful that vulgar
street brawlers should invade so quiet a residential thoroughfare as
Cumberland Crescent. But order would soon be restored, for the sound of
a policeman's whistle cut sharply through the air.

The noise, however, continued; he could hear the tramp of feet hurrying
past his house and then leaving the pavement for the other side of the
road. What could be the matter? Something very exciting must be going on
just opposite his front door, that is, close to the Inclosure railings.

Mr. Tapster got up from his chair, and walked in a leisurely way to the
wide window. He drew aside the thick red rep curtains, and lifted a
corner of the blind. Then, through the slightly foggy haze, he saw that
which rather surprised him and made him feel actively indignant; for a
string of people, men, women, and boys, were hurrying into the Inclosure
Garden--that sacred place set apart for the exclusive use of the
nobility and gentry who lived in Cumberland Crescent and the adjoining
terraces.

What an abominable thing! Why, the grass would all be trampled down; and
these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth
when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,--a
fire, for instance, or a brawl,--might easily bring infectious diseases
on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run
about, playing their innocent games. Some careless person had evidently
left the gate unlocked, and the fight, or whatever it was, must be
taking place inside the Inclosure!

Mr. Tapster tried in vain to see what was going on inside the railings,
but everything beyond the brightly lighted road was wrapped in gray
darkness. Some one suddenly held up high a flaming torch, and the
watcher at the window saw that the shadowy crowd which had managed to
force its way into the Park hung together, like bees swarming, on the
farther lawn through which flowed the Serpentine. With the gleaming of
the yellow, wavering light there had fallen a sudden hush and silence,
and Mr. Tapster wondered uneasily what those people were doing there,
and what it was they were pressing forward so eagerly to see.

[Illustration: "HE ... TURNED TO SEE HIS HALL INVADED BY A STRANGE AND
SINISTER QUARTET"]

Then he realized that it must have been a fight, after all, for now the
crowd was parting in two, and down the lane so formed Mr. Tapster saw
coming toward the gate, and so in a sense toward himself, a rather
pitiful little procession. Some one had evidently been injured, and that
seriously; for four men, bearing a sheep-hurdle on which lay a huddled
mass, were walking slowly toward the gate, and he heard distinctly the
gruffly uttered words: "Stand back, please--back, there! We're going
across the road." The now large crowd suddenly swayed forward; indeed,
to Mr. Tapster's astonished eyes, they seemed to be actually making a
rush for his house, and a moment later they were pressing around his
area-railings.

Looking down on the upturned faces below him, Mr. Tapster was very glad
that a stout pane of glass stood between himself and the
sinister-looking men and women who seemed to be staring up at him, or
rather at his windows, with faces full of cruel, wolfish curiosity. He
let the blind fall to gently. His interest in the vulgar, sordid scene
had suddenly died down; the drama was now over; in a moment the crowd
would disperse, the human vermin (but Mr. Tapster would never have used,
even to himself, so coarse an expression) would be on their way back to
their burrows. But before he had even time to rearrange the curtains in
their right folds, there came a sudden loud, persistent knocking at his
front door.

Mr. Tapster turned around sharply, feeling justly incensed. Of course,
he knew what it was--some good-for-nothing urchin finding a vent for his
excited feelings. His parlor-maid, who was never in any hurry to open
the door,--she had once kept him waiting ten minutes when he had
forgotten his latch-key,--would certainly take no notice of this
unseemly noise, but he, James Tapster, would himself hurry out and try
to catch the delinquent, take his name and address, and thoroughly
frighten him.

As he reached the door of the dining-room, Mr. Tapster heard the front
door open--open, too,--and this was certainly very surprising,--from the
outside! In the hall he saw that it was a policeman--in fact, the
officer on point duty close by--who had opened his front door, and
apparently with a latch-key.

The constable spoke, as constables always do to the Mr. Tapsters of this
world, in respectful and subdued tones:

"Can I just come in and speak to you, sir? There's been a sad
accident--your lady fallen in the water; we found these keys in her
pocket, and then some one said she was Mrs. Tapster"; and the policeman
held out the two keys which had played a not unimportant part in Mr.
Tapster's interview with Flossy. "A man on the bridge saw her go in,"
went on the policeman, "so she wasn't in the water long,--something like
a quarter of an hour,--for we soon found her. I suppose you would like
her taken up-stairs, sir?"

"No, no," stammered Mr. Tapster, "not up-stairs; the children are
up-stairs."

Mr. Tapster's round, prominent eyes were shadowed with a great horror
and an even greater surprise. He stood staring at the man before him,
his hands clasped in a wholly unconscious gesture of supplication.

The constable gradually edged himself backward into the dining-room.
Realizing that he must take on himself the onus of decision, he gave a
quiet look round.

"If that's the case," he said firmly, "we had better bring her in here;
that sofa that you have there, sir, will do nicely for her to be laid
upon while they try to bring her round. We've got a doctor already."

Mr. Tapster bent his head; he was too much bewildered to propose any
other plan; and then he turned, turned to see his hall invaded by a
strange and sinister quartet. It was composed of two policemen and of
two of those loafers of whom he so greatly disapproved. They were
carrying a hurdle from which Mr. Tapster quickly averted his eyes. But,
though he was able to shut out the sight he feared to see, he could not
prevent himself from hearing certain sounds, those, for instance, made
by the two loafers, who breathed with ostentatious difficulty as if to
show they were unaccustomed to bearing even so comparatively light a
burden as Flossy drowned.

There came a sudden short whisper-filled delay. The doorway of the
dining-room was found to be too narrow, and the hurdle was perforce left
in the hall.

An urgent voice, full of wholly unconscious irony, muttered in Mr.
Tapster's ear: "Of course, you would like to see her, sir," and he felt
himself being propelled forward. Making an effort to bear himself so
that he should not feel afterward ashamed of his lack of nerve, he
forced himself to stare with dread-filled yet fascinated eyes at that
which had just been laid upon the leather sofa.

Flossy's hat, the shabby hat which had shocked Mr. Tapster's sense of
what was seemly, was gone; her fair hair had all come down, and hung in
pale-gold wisps about the face already fixed in the soft dignity which
seems so soon to drape the features of those who die by drowning. Her
widely opened eyes were now wholly emptied of the anguish with which
they had gazed on Mr. Tapster in this very room less than an hour ago.
Her mean brown serge gown, from which the water was still dripping,
clung closely to her limbs, revealing the slender body which had four
times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural
ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come
to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now
suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every
married woman's day's work--and pleasure.

It might have been a moment, for all that he knew, or it might have been
an hour, when at last something came to relieve the unbearable tension
of Mr. Tapster's feelings. He had been standing aside, helpless, aware
of and yet not watching the efforts made to restore Flossy to
consciousness.

The doctor raised himself and straightened his cramped shoulders and
tired arms. With a look of great concern on his face, he approached the
bereaved husband.

"I'm afraid it's no good," he said; "the shock of the plunge in the cold
water probably killed her. She was evidently in poor health, and--and
ill-nourished; but, of course, we shall go on for some time longer,
and----"

But whatever he had meant to say remained unspoken, for a telegraph-boy,
with the impudence natural to his kind, was forcing his way into and
through the crowded room. "James Tapster, Esquire?" he cried in a high,
childish treble.

The master of the house held out his hand mechanically. He took the buff
envelop and stared down at it, sufficiently master of himself to
perceive that some fool had apparently imagined Cumberland Crescent to
be in South London; before his eyes swam the line, "Delayed in
transmission." Then, opening the envelop, he saw the message for which
he had now been waiting so eagerly for some days; but it was with
indifference that he read the words,

"_The Decree has been made Absolute._"

PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS WAR ON CONGRESS

BY

CARL SCHURZ

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

I was on the point of returning to the West when I received a message
from Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the New York _Tribune_, asking
me to take charge of the news bureau of that journal in Washington, as
its chief correspondent. Although the terms offered by Mr. Greeley were
tempting, I was disinclined to accept, because I doubted whether the
work would be congenial to me, and because it would keep me in the East.
But Mr. Greeley, as well as some of my friends in Congress, persuaded me
that, since I had studied the condition of things in the South and could
give reliable information concerning it, my presence in Washington might
be useful while the Southern question was under debate. This determined
me to assent, with the understanding, however, that I should not
consider myself bound beyond the pending session of Congress.

Thus I entered the journalistic fraternity. My most agreeable experience
consisted in my association with other members of the craft. I found
among the correspondents of the press a number of gentlemen of uncommon
ability and high principle--genuine gentlemen, who loved truth for its
own sake, who heartily detested sham and false pretense, and whose sense
of honor was of the finest. This was the rule, to which, as to all
rules, there were of course some exceptions; but they were rare. My more
or less intimate contact with public men high and low was not so
uniformly gratifying. I enjoyed, indeed, the privilege of meeting
statesmen of high purpose, of well-stored minds, of unselfish
patriotism, and of the courage of their convictions. But disgustingly
large was, on the other hand, the number of small, selfish politicians I
ran against--men who seemed to know no higher end than the advantage of
their party, which involved their own; who were always nervously
sniffing for the popular breeze; whose most demonstrative ebullitions of
virtue consisted in the most violent denunciations of the opposition;
whose moral courage quaked at the appearance of the slightest danger to
their own or their party's fortunes; and whose littlenesses exposed them
sometimes with involuntary frankness to the newspaper correspondent whom
they approached to beg for a "favorable notice" or for the suppression
of an unwelcome news item. They were by no means in all instances men of
small parts. On the contrary, there were men of marked ability and large
acquirements among them. But never until then had I known how great a
moral coward a member of Congress may be.

It is probably now as it was then. There were few places in the United
States where the public men appearing on the national stage were judged
as fairly and accurately as they were in Newspaper Row in Washington.

[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY

AT WHOSE REQUEST CARL SCHURZ BECAME THE CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE IN 1865]

I remained at the head of the _Tribune_ office in Washington, according
to my promise to Mr. Greeley, to the end of the winter season, and then
accepted the chief-editorship of the Detroit _Post_, a new journal
established at Detroit, Michigan, which was offered to me--I might
almost say urged upon me--by Senator Zachariah Chandler. In the meantime
I had occasion to witness the beginning of the political war between the
executive and the legislative power concerning the reconstruction of the
"States lately in rebellion."

_The Beginnings of the Struggle_

I am sure I do not exaggerate when I say that this political war has
been one of the most unfortunate events in the history of this Republic,
for it made the most important problem of the time, a problem of
extraordinary complexity, which required the calmest and most delicate
and circumspect treatment, the foot-ball of a personal and party brawl
which was in the highest degree apt to inflame the passions and to
obscure the judgment of everybody concerned in it. Since my return from
the South, the evil effects of Mr. Johnson's conduct in encouraging the
reactionary spirit prevalent among the Southern whites had become more
and more evident and alarming from day to day. Charles Sumner told me
that his personal experience with the President had been very much like
mine. When Sumner left Washington in the spring, he had received from
Mr. Johnson at repeated intervals the most emphatic assurances that he
would do nothing to precipitate the restoration of the "States lately in
rebellion" to the full exercise of self-governing functions, and even
that he favored the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen. The two
men had parted with all the appearance of a perfect friendly
understanding. But when the Senator returned to Washington in the late
autumn that understanding seemed to have entirely vanished from the
President's mind and to have given place to an irritated temper and a
certain acerbity of tone in the assertion of the "President's policy."

From various other members of Congress I heard the same story. Mr.
Johnson, strikingly unlike Abraham Lincoln, evidently belonged to that
unfortunate class of men with whom a difference of opinion on any
important matter will at once cause personal ill feeling and a
disturbance of friendly intercourse. By many Congressmen Mr. Johnson was
regarded as one who had broken faith, and the memory of the disgraceful
exhibition of himself in a drunken state at the inauguration ceremonies,
which under ordinary circumstances everybody would have been glad to
forget, was revived, so as to make him appear as a person of
ungentlemanly character. All these things combined to impart to the
controversies which followed a flavor of reckless defiance and rancorous
bitterness, the outbursts of which were sometimes almost ferocious.

[Illustration: TWO PORTRAITS OF CHARLES SUMNER]

The first gun of the political war between the President and Congress,
which was to rage four years, was fired by Thaddeus Stevens in the House
of Representatives by the introduction, even before the hearing of the
President's Message, of the resolution already mentioned, which
substantially proclaimed that the reconstruction of the late rebel
States was the business, not of the President alone, but of Congress.
This theory, which was constitutionally correct, was readily supported
by the Republican majority, and thus the war was declared. Of
Republican dissenters who openly took the President's part, there were
but few--in the Senate, Doolittle of Wisconsin, Dixon of Connecticut,
Norton of Minnesota, Cowan of Pennsylvania, and, for a short period,
Morgan of New York, as the personal friend of Mr. Seward. In the House
of Representatives, Mr. Raymond of New York, the famous founder of the
New York _Times_, acted as the principal Republican champion of the
"President's policy."

[Illustration: PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON

WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION POLICY LED TO THE FOUR YEARS' WAR BETWEEN HIMSELF
AND CONGRESS]

_Stevens the Dominating Figure of the Struggle_

Thaddeus Stevens was the acknowledged leader of the Republicans in the
House. Few historic characters have ever been more differently judged
from different points of view. A Southern writer of fiction has painted
him as the fiend incarnate; others have spoken of him as a great leader
of his time, far-sighted, a man of uncompromising convictions,
intellectually honest, of unflinching courage and energy. I had come
into personal contact with him in the Presidential campaigns of 1860 and
1864, when he seemed to be pleased with my efforts. I had once heard him
make a stump speech which was evidently inspired by intense hatred of
slavery, and remarkable for argumentative pith and sarcastic wit. But
the impression his personality made upon me was not sympathetic: his
face, long and pallid, topped with an ample dark-brown wig which was at
the first glance recognized as such; beetling brows overhanging keen
eyes of uncertain color which sometimes seemed to scintillate with a
sudden gleam; the under lip defiantly protruding; the whole expression
usually stern. His figure would have looked stalwart but for a deformed
foot which made him bend and limp. His conversation, carried on in a
hollow voice devoid of music, easily disclosed a well-informed mind, but
also a certain absolutism of opinion, with contemptuous scorn for
adverse argument. He belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men
who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous
abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he
himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which
he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot
out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he
accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham
Lincoln's hearty laugh at his own jests.

[Illustration: _From the collection of P. H. Meserve_

JOHN SHERMAN

WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE]

[Illustration: THADDEUS STEVENS

THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST
BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S ANTAGONISTS]

Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic,
inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain
or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him--I say "escaped him,"
because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his
character on the outside--which indicated that there was behind his
cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was
strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his
home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a
night. With them, even with many of his political opponents, "old
Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no
end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive
slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many
benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and
orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his
friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of
the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards,
which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with
affectionate lenity of judgment.

When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth
Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last
meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask,
and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart
young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they
had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my
good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes
glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his
mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age--he was then
seventy-four--and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best
he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with
an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his
time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To
compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He
had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been
quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory.
He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.

[Illustration: WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN

HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY
PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN "IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY"]

Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President
Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great
work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his
contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound
to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed
beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to
be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible
Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled
any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old
friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was
chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a
certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were
rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is _our_ rascal?" He said
this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated
Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub
to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's
reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and
commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed
to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of
persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable
circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With
inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions
from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he
brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect.
Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist
sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the
luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily
charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest
debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely,
lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he
inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership--not a
wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required
the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.

_William Pitt Fessenden_

A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine,
who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on
Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt
Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd.
There was nothing in his slight figure, his thin face framed in spare
gray hair and side whiskers, and his quiet demeanor, to attract
particular notice. Neither did his appearance in the Senate Chamber
impress one at first sight as that of a great power in that important
assembly. I saw him more than once there walk with slow steps up and
down in the open space behind the seats, with his hands in his trousers
pockets, with seeming listlessness, while another senator was speaking,
and then ask to be heard, and, without changing his attitude, make an
argument in a calm conversational tone, unmixed with the slightest
oratorical flourish, so solid and complete that little more remained to
be said on the subject in question. He gave the impression of having at
his disposal a rich and perfectly ordered store of thought and knowledge
upon which he could draw with perfect ease and assurance. When I was
first introduced to him, he appeared to be rather distant in manner than
inviting friendly approach. But I was told that ill health had made him
unsociable and somewhat morose and testy, and, indeed, there was often
the trace of suffering and weariness in his face. It was also remarked
in the Senate that at times he was ill-tempered and inclined to indulge
in biting sarcasms and to administer unkind lectures to other senators,
which in some instances disturbed his personal intercourse with his
colleagues. But there was not one of them who did not hold him in the
highest esteem as a statesman of commanding ability and of lofty ideals,
as a gentleman of truth and conscience, as a great jurist and an eminent
constitutional lawyer, as a party man of most honorable principles and
methods, and as a patriot of noblest ambition for his country.

[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS

WHOM PRESIDENT JOHNSON NAMED AS ONE OF THE ENEMIES OF THE REPUBLIC IN
HIS SPEECH OF FEBRUARY 22]

Being a man also of conservative instincts, averse to unnecessary
conflicts, and always disinclined to go to extremes, in action as well
as in language, he was expected to exert a moderating influence in his
committee; and this expectation was not disappointed so far as his
efforts to prevent a final breach between the President and the
Republican majority in Congress were concerned. But regarding the main
question whether the "States lately in rebellion" should be fully
restored to their self-governing functions and to full participation in
the government of the Republic without having given reasonable
guaranties for the maintenance of the "legitimate results of the war,"
he was in point of principle not far apart from Mr. Stevens.

_The President's Logic_

It must be admitted that, if we accept his premises, Mr. Johnson made in
point of logic a pretty plausible case. His proposition was that a
State, in the view of the Federal Constitution, is indestructible; that
an ordinance of secession adopted by its inhabitants, or its political
organs, did not take it out of the Union; that by declaring and treating
those ordinances of secession as "null and void," of no force, virtually
non-existent, the Federal government itself had accepted and sanctioned
that theory; that during the rebellion the constitutional rights and
functions of those States were merely suspended, and that when the
rebellion ceased they were _ipso facto_ restored; that, therefore, the
rebellion having actually ceased, those States were at once entitled to
their former rights and privileges--that is, to the recognition of their
self-elected State governments and to their representation in Congress.
Admitting the premises, this was logically correct in the abstract.

But this was one of the cases to which a saying, many years later set
afloat by President Cleveland, might properly have been applied: we were
confronting a condition, not a theory. The condition was this: Certain
States had through their regular political organs declared themselves
independent of the Union. They had, for all practical purposes, actually
separated themselves from the Union. They had made war upon the Union.
That war put those States in a position not foreseen by the
Constitution. It imposed upon the government of the Union duties not
foreseen by the Constitution; by "military necessity," war necessity,
the Union was compelled to emancipate the negroes from slavery and to
accept their military services. The war had compelled the government of
the Union to levy large loans of money and thus to contract a huge
public debt. The government had also, in the course of the war, the aid
of the Union men of the South. It had thus assumed solemn obligations
for value received or services rendered. It had assumed the duty to
protect the emancipated negroes in their freedom, the Southern Union men
in their security, and the public creditor from loss. This duty was a
duty of honor as well as of policy. The Union could, therefore, not
consent, either in point of honor or of sound policy, to the restoration
of the late rebel States to the functions of self-government and to full
participation in the national government so long as that restoration was
reasonably certain to put the freedom of the emancipated slaves, or the
security of the Southern Union men, or the rights of the public
creditor, into serious jeopardy.

[Illustration: SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL

WHO MOVED THAT THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU BILL OF JANUARY 12 BE PASSED OVER
PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VETO]

_Lincoln's Policy versus Johnson's_

It was pretended at the time, and it has since been asserted by
historians and publicists of high standing, that Mr. Johnson's
Reconstruction policy was only a continuation of that of Mr. Lincoln.
This was true only in a superficial sense, and not in reality. Mr.
Lincoln had, indeed, put forth reconstruction plans which contemplated
an early restoration of some of the rebel States; but he had done this
while the Civil War was still going on, and for the evident purpose of
encouraging loyal movements in those States and of weakening the
Confederate State governments there by opposing to them governments
organized in the interest of the Union, which could serve as
rallying-points to the Union men. So long as the rebellion continued in
any form and to any extent, the State governments he contemplated would
have been substantially in the control of really loyal men who had been
on the side of the Union during the war. Moreover, he always
emphatically affirmed, in public as well as private utterance, that no
plan of reconstruction he had ever put forth was meant to be "exclusive
and inflexible," but might be changed according to different
circumstances.

Now circumstances did change; they changed essentially with the collapse
of the Confederacy. There was no more organized armed resistance to the
national government, to distract which loyal State governments in the
South might have been efficacious. But there was an effort of persons
lately in rebellion to get possession of the reconstructed Southern
State governments for the purpose, in part, of using their power to save
or restore as much of the system of slavery as could be saved or
restored. The success of these efforts was to be accomplished by the
precipitate and unconditional readmission of the late rebel States to
all their constitutional functions. This situation had not yet developed
when Lincoln was assassinated. He had not contemplated it when he put
forth his plans of reconstructing Louisiana and the other States. Had he
lived, he would have as ardently wished to stop bloodshed and to reunite
all the States as he ever did. But is it to be supposed, for a moment,
that, seeing the late master class in the South still under the
influence of their old traditional notions and prejudices, and at the
same time sorely pressed by the distressing necessities of their
situation, intent upon subjecting the freedmen again to a system very
much akin to slavery, Lincoln would have consented to abandon those
freedmen to the mercies of that master class!

_The Personal Bitterness of the Struggle_

No less striking was the difference of the two policies in what may be
called the personal character of the controversies of the time. When the
Republican majority in Congress had already declared its unwillingness
to accept President Johnson's leadership in the matter of
reconstruction, a strong desire was still manifested by many Republican
senators and members of the House to prevent a decided and irremediable
breach with the President. Some of them were sanguine enough to hope
that more or less harmonious coöperation, or at least a peaceable
_modus vivendi_, might still be obtained. Others apprehended that the
President's policy, with its plausibilities, might after all find favor
with the popular mind, which was naturally tired of strife and
excitement, eager for peace and quiet, and that its opponents might
appear as reckless disturbers. Still others stood in fear of a rupture
in the Republican party, which, among other evil consequences, might
prove disastrous to their own political fortunes. Several men of
importance, such as Fessenden and Sherman in the Senate and some
prominent members of the House, seriously endeavored to pour oil upon
the agitated waters by making speeches of a conciliatory tenor. Indeed,
if Andrew Johnson had possessed only a little of Abraham Lincoln's sweet
temper, generous tolerance, and patient tact in the treatment of
opponents, he might at least have prevented the conflict of opinions
from degenerating into an angry and vicious personal brawl. But the
brawl was Johnson's congenial atmosphere.

The Judiciary Committee of the Senate, on January 12, 1866, reported a
bill to continue the existence, to increase the personnel, and to
enlarge the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau. It was discussed in both
Houses with great thoroughness and in a temperate spirit, and the
necessity of the measure for the protection of the freedmen and the
introduction of free labor in the South was so generally acknowledged
that the recognized Republican friends of the President in the Senate as
well as in the House supported it. It passed by overwhelming majorities
in both Houses, and everybody, even those most intimate with the
President, confidently expected that he would willingly accept and sign
it. But on the 19th of February he returned it with his veto, mainly on
the assumed ground that it was unnecessary and unconstitutional, and
also because it was passed by a Congress from which eleven States, those
lately in rebellion, were excluded--thus throwing out a dark hint that
before the admission of the late rebel States to representation this
Congress might be considered constitutionally unable to make any valid
laws at all. Senator Trumbull, in an uncommonly able, statesmanlike, and
calm speech, combated the President's arguments and moved that the bill
pass, the President's veto notwithstanding. But the "Administration
Republicans," although they had voted for the bill, now voted to sustain
the veto, and, there being no two-thirds majority to overcome it, the
veto prevailed. Thus President Johnson had won a victory over the
Republican majority in Congress. This victory may have made him believe
that he would be able to kill with his veto all legislation unpalatable
to him, and that, therefore, he was actually master of the situation. He
made the grave mistake of underestimating the opposition.

_A Humiliating Spectacle_

On February 22, 1866, a public meeting was held in Washington for the
purpose of expressing popular approval of the President's reconstruction
policy. The crowd marched from the meeting-place to the White House to
congratulate the President upon his successful veto of the Freedmen's
Bureau Bill. The President, called upon to make a speech in response,
could not resist the temptation. He then dealt a blow to himself from
which he never recovered. He spoke, in the egotistic strain usual with
him, of the righteousness of his own course, and then began to inveigh
in the most violent terms against those who opposed him. He denounced
the joint Committee on Reconstruction, the committee headed by
Fessenden, as "an irresponsible central directory" that had assumed the
powers of Congress, described how he had fought the leaders of the
rebellion, and added that there were men on the other side of the line
who also worked for the dissolution of the Union. By this time some of
the uproarious crowd felt that he had descended to their level, and
called for names. He mentioned Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and
Wendell Phillips as men who worked against the fundamental principles of
the government, and excited the boisterous merriment of the audience by
calling John W. Forney, the Secretary of the Senate and a prominent
journalist, "a dead duck" upon whom "he would not waste his ammunition."
Again he spoke of his rise from humble origin,--a tailor who "always
made a close fit,"--and broadly insinuated that there were men in high
places who were not satisfied with Lincoln's blood, but, wanting more,
thought of getting rid of him, too, in the same way.

I remember well the impression made by this speech as it came out in the
newspapers. Many if not most of the public men I saw in Washington,
remembering the disgraceful appearance of Andrew Johnson in a drunken
state at the inauguration, at once expressed a belief that he must have
been in the same condition when delivering that speech. Most of the
newspapers favoring the President's policy were struck dumb. Of those
opposing him, most of them spoke of it in grave but evidently restrained
language. The general feeling was one of profound shame and humiliation
in behalf of the country.

In Congress, where Mr. Stevens, with his characteristic sarcasm,
described the whole story of the President's speech as a malignant
invention of Mr. Johnson's enemies, the hope of preventing a permanent
breach between him and the Republican majority was even then not
entirely extinct. On the 26th of February, Sherman made a long and
carefully prepared speech in the Senate, advocating harmony. He
recounted all the virtues Andrew Johnson professed and all the services
he had rendered, and solemnly affirmed his belief that he had always
acted upon patriotic motives and in good faith. But he could not refrain
from "deeply regretting his speech of the 22d of February," He added
that it was "impossible to conceive a more humiliating spectacle than
the President of the United States invoking the wild passions of a mob
around him with the utterance of such sentiments as he uttered on that
day." Still, Mr. Sherman thought that "this was no time to quarrel with
the Chief Magistrate." Other prominent Republicans, such as General
J. D. Cox of Ohio--one of the noblest men I have ever known,--called
upon him to expostulate with him in a friendly spirit, and he gave them
amiable assurances, which, however, subsequently turned out to have been
without meaning. Then something happened which cut off the last chance
of mutual approach.

On March 13th the House passed the Civil Rights Bill, which the Senate
had already passed on the 2d of February. Its main provision was that
all persons born in the United States, excepting Indians, not taxed,
were declared to be citizens of the United States, and such citizens of
every race and color should have the same right in every State and
Territory of the United States to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be
parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and
convey real and personal property, and to have the full and equal
benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and
property as was enjoyed by white citizens. The bill had nothing to do
with "social equity," and did not in any way interfere with Mr.
Johnson's scheme of reconstruction. In fact, it was asserted, no doubt
truthfully, that Mr. Johnson himself had at various times shown himself,
by word and act, favorable to its provisions. It appeared, indeed, in
every one of its features so reasonable and so necessary for the
enforcement of the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment prohibiting
slavery, that disapproval of it by the President was regarded as almost
impossible. Aside from the merits of the bill, there was another
reason, a reason of policy, for the President to sign it. Had he done
so, he would have greatly encouraged the conciliatory spirit which, in
spite of all that had happened, was still flickering in many Republican
bosoms, and he might thus, even at this late hour, have secured an
effective following among the Republicans in Congress. But he did not.
He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument
that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to
kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the
sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were
unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of
the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned.

_False Encouragement to the South_

Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a
two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became
a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the
surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the
Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way
he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now
believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last
chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly
gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent
upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as
possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of
delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the
freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they
hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever.
Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere
temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President,
aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the
North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal
with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The
reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness
by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal
ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a
state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for
the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced
in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of
insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national
Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in
rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these
seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the
national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary
Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations
and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.

The impression made by these things upon the minds of the Northern
people can easily be imagined. Men of sober ways of thinking, not
accessible to sensational appeals, asked themselves quite seriously
whether there was not real danger that the legitimate results of the
war, for the achievement of which they had sacrificed uncounted
thousands of lives and the fruits of many, many years of labor, were in
grave jeopardy again. Their alarm was not artificially produced by
political agitation; it was sincere and profound, and began to grow
angry. The gradual softening of the passions and resentments of the war
was checked. The feeling that the Union had to be saved once more from
the rule of the "rebels with the President at their head" spread with
fearful rapidity, and well-meaning people looking to Congress to come to
the rescue were becoming less and less squeamish as to the character of
the means to be used to that end.

This popular temper could not fail to exercise its influence upon
Congress and to stimulate the radical tendencies among its members. Even
men of a comparatively conservative and cautious disposition admitted
that strong remedies were necessary to avert the threatening danger, and
they soon turned to the most drastic as the best. Moreover, the partizan
motive pressed to the front to reinforce the patriotic purpose. It had
gradually become evident that President Johnson, whether such had been
his original design or not,--probably not,--would by his political
course be led into the Democratic party. The Democrats, delighted, of
course, with the prospect of capturing a President elected by the
Republicans, zealously supported his measures and flattered his vanity
without stint. The old alliance between the pro-slavery sentiment in the
South and the Democratic party in the North was thus revived--that
alliance which had already cost the South so dearly in the recent past
by making Southern people believe that if they revolted against the
Federal Government the Northern Democracy would stand by them and help
them to victory.

    THE JULY INSTALMENT OF CARL SCHURZ' MEMOIRS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY
    OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STRUGGLE WITH CONGRESS

THE CRYSTAL-GAZER

BY MARY S. WATTS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT NORTH ROAD," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK A. NANKIVELL

The carrier's cart--for my means afforded no more lordly style of
travel--set me down at an elbow of white highroad, whence, between the
sloping hills, I could see a V-shaped patch of blue, this half water and
that sky; here and there the gable of a farmhouse with a plume of smoke
streaming sidewise; and below me, in the exact point of the V, the masts
and naked yards of a ketch at her moorings. Even in that sheltered
harbor, to judge by the faint oscillations of her masts, she felt the
tug of the waters around her keel. There had been a storm the night
before; without, the sea ran strong about all these exposed coasts; and
I knew that, hidden from sight behind the upper headland, the surf must
be bursting in a cloud over the Brown Cow, and the perturbed tide
setting like a mill-race between that great dun rock and the shore
through the narrow gut we called the Cat's Mouth.

"You'll be noticing some changes, Mr. Nick?" the carrier hinted at last,
lingering to observe me. "Well, there's a deal may happen in two or
three years. You can't look to find things just the way you left 'em."

He used a certain respectful familiarity, having known me all my life,
and, as he spoke, eyed me with the kind and open curiosity of a dog. He
was a gentle little man, with a manner oddly compounded of the sailor's
simplicity and the rustic's bootless cunning,--for he had followed both
walks in his day,--and was popularly held to be somewhat weak-witted
since a fall from the masthead to the decks of the brig _Hyperion_ some
years before.

"I am not near enough to see any changes yet, Crump," I answered him.
"The changes, if any, show most, I dare say, in myself."

"So they do, sir; so they do," he assented heartily. "My wife used to
say you were a pretty boy, and had the makings of a fine, personable
man. First thing I thought, when I clapped eyes on you to-day, was:
'Well, this here's a lesson to Sarah not to be hasty in her judgments!'
'Tain't often I get the better o' Sarah, you know, sir. They tell me
you've been in Italy and learned to paint?"

"I'm afraid I haven't quite learned all the art yet, Crump. It takes
more than two or three years."

"Depends on the person, I shouldn't wonder," he said, wagging his head.
"Some people are slow by nature. Could a man make his living by it, d'ye
think, sir?"

I answered this devious inquiry as to my own financial standing by
assuring him that I had contrived so far to make mine. "I'm not riding
in my coach-and-four yet, as you see, Crump, but the time may come."

"I'm sure I hope it will, Mr. Nick," he said rather dubiously. "But it's
kind o' tempting Providence, seems to me. You might 'a' been walking
your own quarter-deck, captain o' some tall East Indiaman by this, like
your father and grandfather before you, making a safe, easy living, and
looked up to by everybody."

I interrupted his moralizing to ask, as, indeed, I had already done more
than once, without being able to get his attention: "How does my
grandfather seem?"

Momentary gravity fell upon him. "He--he don't always answer the helm,
Mr. Nicol," he said, and touched his forehead with a meaning look.
"Barring that, I'd rate him seaworthy, for all he's cruised so
long--nigh eighty year, ain't it?"

"I'm glad I came home," I said, concerned. "The old man should not be
alone."

"He ain't exactly alone," said Crump, with an uneasy glance into my
face. "He's signed on two new hands here lately--about a month ago, I
b'lieve. I dessay he was making pretty heavy weather of it by himself,
and so he--er--well----" He cleared his throat, hesitating in an odd
embarrassment; he plainly felt that here was information bound to be
distasteful, and set about imparting it with a painful diplomacy. "The
cap'n--Cap'n Pendarves, your grandfather, sir, was, as you might say,
short-handed, you being in foreign parts, and old John Behenna having
slipped his cable 'long about the last o' May, as I was telling you; and
so the cap'n he ups and ships these here--and--and, in fac', Mr. Nick,
one of 'em's a woman!" He drew a long breath and wiped his forehead.

"You don't mean he's married!" I shouted, and with, I am afraid, a
pretty strong term of disapproval.

"There, now, I _thought_ you'd take it that way!" Crump remarked, not
without gratification. "But it ain't so bad as that, Mr. Nicol." And he
went on to explain, with a variety of nautical metaphors, that the
couple, an elderly man and a young girl supposedly his grandchild, had
appeared in Chepstow some weeks ago during fair-time; that the young
woman "took observations," which I translated to mean that she told
fortunes, supporting them both, it would seem, by the pennies she gained
this way, for the man did no work, and was most often seen "hove to,
transhipping cargo," at the bar of the Three Old Cronies or elsewhere,
Crump said. He did not know how or when or where my grandfather had
first fallen in with these vagabonds. For several successive days he had
been noticed in their company, or laying a straight course for the
little booth wherein the girl plied her mean trade; and then, all at
once, to the stupefied astonishment of Chepstow,--where the captain was
reckoned, with reason, a particularly hard, sour, dour sort of body,
anything but friendly or hospitable,--the pair of them were discovered
comfortably installed beneath the Pendarves' roof, as snug as if they
had lived there all their lives and never meant to go away! The thing
was a mystery; it went near to being a scandal. For a final touch, Crump
assured me that these precious gentry were all but nameless; no one had
ever heard the woman called anything, and the man's name defied
pronunciation.

Upon all this agreeable intelligence, we parted, as Crump's way was by
the round-about hill road, while I struck straight across by short cuts
to my grandfathers house. If I had been content to loiter on the path
heretofore, no amount of haste could satisfy me now. I doubt if any
honest artist lad returning to the place of his birth after three years'
absence ever met a grayer welcome. I had left my grandfather unimpaired,
and it was well-nigh impossible to figure that harsh and domineering
spirit in decay. Abram Pendarves belonged to the ancient hearty, savage
race of British sea-captains, now fast waning to extinction. After a
youth of wild and black adventure under the rule of just such salt-water
despots as he himself became, he had spent some two score years
practising the tyrannies and what one may call the brutal virtues he had
learned on every sea and beneath every sky this planet owns; then came
at last to settle down in the storm-beaten house on the cliffs by
Chepstow (the house his father's father had built), whence he could see
the surf whiten on the rocks and gulls forever circling about the Brown
Cow. His was a narrow and surly old age, not overwell provided, for he
had never been a thrifty man; and he found among the rattletrap
furnishings of his neglected home one living chattel quite as
worthless--a weird, lean goblin of a boy, his sole descendant,
fatherless and motherless, playing lonely little games in corners,
making crass drawings with a charred stick on the walls, and viewing the
blossoming orchards of spring with a crazy delight in color. I fear
there was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long
years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly
and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome
and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin
roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an
exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at
caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, I in my
young way, he in his old one; and as I trudged along the quiet homeward
paths, it shamed me to remember with what hard words we had parted.

II

The sun was going down as I conquered the last steep rise toward my
grandfather's gate. Hereabouts a pair of steps had been cut into the
cliff and a hand-rail erected to help the visitor against the wind,
coming, as it so often did, in flaws of extraordinary force and fury
around the headland. From this high point a great expanse of ocean
filled the eye, and the ceaseless, uneasy rumor of water assailed one
even in the fairest weather. There was always a thin run of surf about
the base of the Brown Cow and among those narrow conical rocks which,
set in a rough crescent near the lower end of the Cat's Mouth, had not
inaptly been named the Cat's Teeth.

[Illustration: "'YOU DIDN'T SEE THE SIGN, I SUPPOSE?'"]

The path followed the edge of the cliff on the hither side of a stone
wall, behind which some few experienced old apple-trees bent and
flattened themselves into strange, tortuous shapes to escape the winds.
The inclosure went by the name of orchard, though it was in truth little
else than a wild jungle of weeds and rubbish; but one tree in the most
sheltered corner yearly made a conscientious effort to supply us with a
bushel or so of pippins, and adventurous Chepstow urchins as regularly
defeated the hope. I purposed to shorten my road by crossing here; and
so, finding a toe-rest in certain familiar crannies of the masonry,
clambered easily to the top of the wall, and paused there a moment,
astride of the coping, to put aside the branches and take a distant view
of the forlorn pile of ruins I called home. It was a dreary place; its
roofs sagged, its chimneys leaned at perilous slants. Yet my heart
warmed to the sight of it. I took hold of the stoutest bough to swing me
to the ground, when----

"Don't touch those apples, young man!" said somebody sharply.

I was so startled as nearly to lose my hold, and came down with a run
and hands well scored on the rough bark. There I stood, knee-high in
rank undergrowth, staring all about in a surprise that must have been
not a little ludicrous, for the voice uttered a short cicada-chirrup of
laughter, shrill and sweet.

"Here I am. What bats men are!" it said.

I looked. She was standing almost immediately beneath the place where I
had climbed over; my boot must have grazed her. She was what old women
call a slip of a girl, in a cotton gown, white, figured with fine sprigs
of green sadly faded, for it was not new. The wind whipped her red hair
into her eyes. Her face was very much freckled; properly speaking, it
was one freckle from brow to chin. She wore, besides, as I remember, a
little muslin tucker (I think the garment is so named) and a little
frilled muslin apron; and these articles, together with her old print
frock, were washed, starched, and ironed to a degree it hath not entered
into the mind of man to conceive. I took off my hat; and something about
this young woman moved me thereafter hastily to adjust my cravat and
shirt-ruffle. I believe these signs of perturbation (which were entirely
genuine) pleased her in some subtle way, like a tribute, for she stopped
to inquire: "You want to cut through here to the highroad? I'm very
sorry, but I really cannot allow it. I've had a great deal of trouble
keeping the village boys away from this tree. These are fine apples and
good winter keepers--that is, I think they are----" she added a little
tentatively, searching my face. "You didn't see the sign, I suppose?"

I followed her gesture and beheld, nailed aloft on the stub of a dead
tree, a square of white planking whereon was neatly lettered the legend:

  NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF

  THE LAW

  ABRAM AND NICOL PENDARVES, PROPRIETORS
  PER MARY SMITH

"I did it myself with a red-hot poker," she said proudly.

I gazed from her to the sign-board, all but speechless. "It's very well
done," I managed to get out at last.

"Yes, isn't it? But, somehow, it doesn't keep the boys from coming.
They're not at all law-abiding. I don't think they've been very well
brought up. And then, of course, they're not accustomed to seeing any
one in charge here." She looked around, and smoothed her apron with the
most astonishing little air of resource and command. "I saw a bill with
the names at the bottom that way, and per So-and-So below, so I copied
it," she continued, surveying her handiwork fondly.

"Ah? You are Miss Mary Smith?"

"Yes." And now she looked at me, and away again, with a strange and
sudden flush. "Yes, _Smith_. That's--that's a very good name, _I_
think." There was a kind of tremulous defiance in her tone, as if she
half expected me to question it.

"I've heard it before, I believe," said I stupidly--for, in fact, I had
scarcely yet got myself together. "You live here?"

She nodded, with a perplexed and inquiring eye on me. "I'm Captain
Pendarves' housekeeper," she said, with a prim and bridling air, and
once more her expression challenged me. "Deny it if you can, sir!" was
evidently her unspoken thought.

"And how long has my--ahem!--has Captain Pendarves been employing you,
may I ask?" I said, wondering that Crump had not prepared me for this as
for the other changes.

"Young man," said Mary Smith severely, "I have no time to stand here
answering idle questions. If you want to see Captain Pendarves, I will
speak to him; but if not, I really think you had better be getting on,
for it's late."

"I was thinking of stopping awhile," said I humbly, "with my
grandfather. You see, I'm Nicol Pendarves."

Had I said, "I am the Prince of Darkness," the announcement could not
have wrought a more appalling change in her. She fell back a step,
putting out one faltering hand to the wall for support. Her small
bullying mien vanished like a garment twitched from her shoulders by
unseen magic. Her face blanched piteously; terror looked from her eyes.
"Oh, I was afraid of this!" she gasped, in a voice that went to the
heart. "Sir, I--I--meant no harm!"

"Harm!" said I, both touched and puzzled. "Why, you've done none. There
is no need for excuses. I never saw a better steward; you did not know
me, and you were within your rights to send me about my business."

"Sir," she said, still in a tremble, "I have done no wrong. You will
find everything just as you left it."

"I shall find everything in a good deal better case, judging by what
I've seen already, I think," said I heartily. "How long have you been
here?"

"Four weeks--next Wednesday," she answered nervously.

"Then," said I, "maybe you can tell me something about the drift of
things here. For--not to boggle about it--I am in some uneasiness, Miss
Smith. These people--this man and woman who I hear have settled
themselves upon Captain Pendarves of late--who are they? what are they?"

As I spoke we emerged upon the stone-paved walk leading to our kitchen
door; it had been picked free of weeds, and the currant-bushes on either
side trimly harnessed up to a set of stakes. A white curtain flounced
behind the old lattice; there was a row of flowering geraniums in pots
upon the sill. Through the open door you might see a clear fire and Mary
Smith's saucepans glowing on the wall. The place, I thought, wore, for a
kitchen, the best air conceivable of decent and humble dignity; nor
would one have supposed that mere thrift and cleanliness could be so
comely. I turned to her with some such words, and found her facing me,
so much of haggard trouble in her eyes that I stopped, aghast.

"Sir," she said, twisting her fingers, "I see you do not understand--I
thought you knew. I--I am the woman you speak of. Your grandfather is
within, and the other--the man--with him."

Our old house being designed and built with a shiplike compactness,
there was but one room on the ground floor besides the kitchen and its
offices. It was a plain, comfortable place, wainscoted about, with
shelves and lockers in the whimsical copy of a vessel's cabin. And it
contained the single work of art our establishment could show; that is,
a portrait of my grandfather's grandfather,--he who founded this
house,--in a finicking attitude, with a brocade coat and a pair of
compasses. In his rear were to be seen a pillar and a red velvet
curtain, and (distantly) a fine storm of clouds and lightning. Never was
a respectable old sailorman so misrepresented; but all his descendants
except one regarded this gaudy daub with almost religious veneration.
Every family has its one great man; the admiral was ours. His was the
distinction of being the only Pendarves who had ever managed to amass a
fortune. It had dribbled through the fingers of succeeding generations;
but there was a tradition that some part of it, buried or otherwise
secreted with an admirable forethought by the old gentleman, might yet
be discovered, to the further glorification of our house.

The picture hung directly opposite the door, favoring me, as I entered,
with a disconcerting smirk; it needed no great stretch of fancy to
credit him with cherishing some secret and villainous joke. Beneath it
sat my grandfather, with his pipe, in the same place and attitude as I
remembered him for upward of twenty years, but so spectral a likeness of
himself that the sight of him shocked me like a blow. He had wasted to a
mere parchment envelop of bones, and the eyes he turned to mine were
bright with inward fever. I had looked for I do not know what signs of
an unstable mind, but at first, save for the eyes, saw none. He showed
only a not too well pleased surprise.

"Nicol!" he said, and pushed back his chair, without rising. "Nicol!"
and then for a moment sat staring closely at me under his heavy brows.
With his next action something of the horror of his affliction came home
to me, for I saw that, but for some confused sense that I had been
absent against his will, he had utterly forgot everything concerning me,
the terms of our last meeting, and the events of many years besides.

"Hush, and sit down!" he said, in the habitually chiding tone he had
used to the boy of ten or twelve. "Take your books and get your lesson!"
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to a stool in the corner where, as
a lad, I had passed more than one grim hour, and turned to his
companion, as older people turn from the interruptions of children.

Mary Smith, following behind, touched me gently on the arm. "Go and sit
down," she formed the words with her lips rather than voiced them.

There sat beside my grandfather a vast, fat creature with a forest of
greasy black hair and beard about his pallid face; his heavy hands lay
motionless in his lap, forcibly reminding me of an image I had seen of
some Oriental god upon his throne. His eyes were scarcely opened, his
breathing was almost imperceptible; a gross animal content appeared in
him as of a full-fed, lethargic crocodile. Side by side, he and the
gaunt, fierce-eyed old man presented no mean allegory of spirit and
body. A table was before them, and in the middle of it a toy the like of
which I had never seen in this house or elsewhere--a globe of crystal,
perhaps the size of an orange, held up on a little bronze pedestal. The
fat man's eyes, or so much of them as one might see, were fixed upon
this thing with a kind of stupid intensity; one could have fancied him
paying tribute to some idolatrous shrine. The captain watched him with
an equal earnestness; so might the Roman mob have hung upon the reading
of the sacred entrails; and there was about it the air of a
well-practised, familiar rite. At last my grandfather asked:

"What do you see?"

[Illustration: "THE FAT MAN'S EYES ... WERE FIXED UPON THIS THING WITH A
KIND OF STUPID INTENSITY"]

The other's lips moved, and an unintelligible whisper reached me.

"Ay, that's it, that's it," said the captain, and sent a quick,
searching look about the room. "Doubloons--pieces-of-eight--Spanish
pillar-dollars--doubloons, doubloons! That is what it would likely be
made up of, eh? But where--try to see that--where?"

Another interval of silent gazing, and the oracle uttered some further
statement, which my grandfather received with an impatient groan.

"Doubloons--piles of gold--I know!" he said. "And a ship. But
whereabouts was it, eh? Surely you can see whereabouts it was?"

"It's all a mist; I can see nothing," the other answered, after a pause.

I could have found it in me to laugh at the whole miserable hocus-pocus,
had I been less indignant. The situation was, besides, sufficiently
grave; and as I listened to this silly and profane juggling, and
observed the wildness of my grandfather's bearing, it became plain to me
that he could not long endure such an influence. I guessed from his talk
that the old man's disorder was based upon the idea of treasure lost,
sunk, or hidden hereabout; for our coast was dangerous, a menace to
vessels, and not innocent, besides, of smugglers and worse. Perhaps the
poverty of his later years was at the root of his delusion; perhaps his
madness would have taken this form anyhow. However he had fallen into
the fat man's hands, this was the secret of the latter's power. While I
pondered gloomily, the sitting (so to call it) came to an end. Perhaps
my unwelcome appearance somewhat contracted it. My grandfather lapsed
into his chair, his chin on his chest, brooding. Excitement died in him
almost visibly, like the flickering down of a spent fire. Instead of
eighty, he looked a hundred and eighty, and his face was as lifeless as