A Hoosier Chronicle Part 34

CHAPTER XX

INTERVIEWS IN TWO KEYS

Mrs. Ba.s.sett remained in bed the day following the convention, less exhausted by the scenes she had witnessed than appalled by their interpretation in the newspapers. The reappearance of Sylvia Garrison had revived the apprehensions which the girl's visit to Waupegan four years earlier had awakened. She had hoped that Sylvia's long absences might have operated to diminish Mrs. Owen's interest and she had managed in one way and another to keep them apart during the college holidays, but the death of Professor Kelton had evidently thrown Sylvia back upon Mrs. Owen. Jealous fears danced blackly in Mrs. Ba.s.sett's tired brain.

At a season when she was always busiest with her farms Mrs. Owen had made a long journey to see Sylvia graduated; and here was the girl established on the most intimate terms in the Delaware Street house, no doubt for the remainder of her life. Mrs. Owen did not lightly or often change her plans; but she had abandoned her project of spending the summer at the lake to accommodate herself to the convenience of her protegee. Mrs. Ba.s.sett's ill-health was by no means a matter of illusion; she was not well and her sojourns in sanatoriums had served to alienate her in a measure from her family. Marian had grown to womanhood without realizing her mother's ideals. She had hoped to make a very different person of her daughter, and Sylvia's reappearance intensified her sense of defeat. Even in the retrospect she saw no reason why Marian might not have pursued the course that Sylvia had followed; in her confused annoyances and agitations she was bitter not only against Marian but against Marian's father. The time had come when she must take a stand against his further dallyings in politics.

Her day at the convention hall had yielded only the most disagreeable impressions. Such incidents as had not eluded her own understanding on the spot had been freely rendered by the newspapers. It was all sordid and gross--not at all in keeping with her first experience of politics, gained in her girlhood, when her father had stood high in the councils of the nation, winning coveted positions without the support of such allies as she had seen cheering her husband's triumph on the floor of the convention. There had strayed into her hands an envelope of newspaper clippings from an agency that wished to supply her, as, its circular announced, it supplied the wives of many other prominent Americans, with newspaper comments on their husbands. As a bait for securing a client these examples of what the American press was saying of Morton Ba.s.sett were decidedly ill-chosen. The "Stop, Look, Listen"

editorial had suggested to many influential journals a re-indictment of bossism with the Ba.s.sett-Thatcher imbroglio as text. It was disenchanting to find one's husband enrolled in a list of political reprobates whose activities in so many states were a menace to public safety. Her father had served with distinction and honor this same commonwealth that her husband was debasing; he had been a statesman, not a politician, not a boss. Blackford Singleton had belonged to the coterie that included such men as h.o.a.r and Evarts, Thurman and Bayard; neither her imagination nor her affection could bridge the chasm that separated men of their type from her husband, who, in middle life, was content with a seat in the state legislature and busied himself with wars upon petty rivals. Such reflections as these did not contribute to her peace of mind.

She was alone in her room at Mrs. Owen's when Ba.s.sett appeared, late in the afternoon. Mrs. Owen was downtown on business matters; Marian, after exhausting all her devices for making her mother comfortable, had flown in search of acquaintances; and Sylvia had that day taken up her work in the normal school. Left to herself for the greater part of the warm afternoon, Mrs. Ba.s.sett had indulged luxuriously in forebodings. She had not expected her husband, and his unannounced entrance startled her.

"Well," she remarked drearily, "so you have come back to face it, have you?"

"I'm undoubtedly back, Hallie," he answered, with an effort at lightness, crossing to the bedside and taking her hand.

He had rarely discussed his political plans with her, but he realized that the rupture with Thatcher must naturally have distressed her; and there was also Thatcher's lawsuit involving her aunt, which had disagreeable possibilities.

"I'm sorry your name got into the papers, Hallie. I didn't want you to go to the convention, but of course I knew you went to please Marian.

Where is Marian?"

"Oh, she's off somewhere. I couldn't expect her to stay here in this hot room all day."

The room was not uncomfortable; but it seemed wiser not to debate questions of temperature. He found a chair and sat down beside her.

"You mustn't worry about the newspapers, Hallie; they always make the worst of everything. The temptation to distort facts to make a good story is strong; I have seen it in my connection with the 'Courier.'

It's lamentable, but you can't correct it in a day. I'm pretty well hardened to it myself, but I'm sorry you have let these attacks on me annoy you. The only thing to do is to ignore them. What's that you have there?"

She still clasped the envelope of clippings and thrust it at him accusingly. The calmness of his inspection irritated her and she broke out sharply:--

"I shouldn't think a man with a wife and family would lay himself open to such attacks in all the newspapers in the country. Those papers call you another such political boss as Quay and Gorman. There's nothing they don't say about you."

"Well, Hallie, they've been saying it for some time; they will go on saying it probably not only about me but about every other man who won't be dictated to by impractical reformers and pharisaical newspapers. But I must confess that this is rather hard luck!" He held up two of the cuttings. "I've undertaken to do just what papers like the New York 'Evening Post' and the Springfield 'Republican' are forever begging somebody with courage to do--I've been trying to drive a rascal out of politics. I'm glad of this chance to talk to you about Thatcher. He and I were friends for years, as you know."

"I never understood how you could tolerate that man; he's so coa.r.s.e and vulgar that his wife stays abroad to keep her daughters away from him."

"Well, that's not my affair. I have had all I want of him. There's nothing mysterious about my breaking with him; he got it into his head that he's a bigger man in this state than I am. I have known for several years that he intended to get rid of me as soon as he felt he could do it safely, and be ready to capture the senatorship when he saw that our party was in shape to win again. I've always distrusted him, and I've always kept an eye on him. When he came into Fraser County and stooped low enough to buy old Ike Pett.i.t, I thought it time to strike. You read a lot about courage in politics in such newspapers as these that have been philosophizing about me at long range. Well, I'm not going to brag about myself, but it required some courage on my part to take the initiative and read the riot act to Thatcher. I've done what men are sometimes praised for doing; but I don't want praise; I only want to be judged fairly. I've always avoided bringing business or politics home; I've always had an idea that when a man goes home he ought to close the door on everything but the interests the home has for him. I may have been wrong about that; and I'm very sorry that you have been troubled--sincerely sorry. But you may as well know the truth now, which is that Thatcher is out of it altogether. You know enough of him to understand that he's not a man to trust with power, and I've done the state and my party a service in turning him out of doors."

He had spoken quietly and earnestly, and his words had not been without their effect. He had never been harsh with her or the children; his manner to-day was kind and considerate. He had to an extent measurably rehabilitated himself as a heroic public character, a man of honor and a husband to be proud of; but she had not spent a sleepless night and a gray day without fortifying herself against him. All day her eyes had been fixed upon an abandoned squirrel box in the crotch of an elm outside her window; it had become the repository of her thoughts, the habitation of her sorrows. She turned her head slightly so that her eyes might rest upon this tabernacle of fear and illusion, and renewed the a.s.sault refreshed.

"How is it, then, that newspapers away off in New York and Ma.s.sachusetts speak of you in this outrageous fashion? They're so far away that it seems strange they speak of you at all."

He laughed with relief, feeling that the question marked a retreat toward weaker fortifications.

"You're not very complimentary, are you, Hallie? They must think me of some importance or they'd let me alone. I wouldn't subscribe to that clipping bureau if you fear we're too much in the limelight. I've been taking the service of one of these bureaus for several years, and I read every line the papers print about me. It's part of the regular routine in my office to paste them in sc.r.a.pbooks."

"I shouldn't think you could burn them fast enough; what if the children should see them some day!"

"Well, you may be surprised to know that they're not all so bitter. Once in a long while I get a kind word. That bill I got through the a.s.sembly separating hardened criminals from those susceptible of reform--the indeterminate sentence law--was praised by penologists all over the country. It's all in the day's work; sometimes you're patted on the back and the next time they kick you down stairs. Without political influence you have no chance to help the good causes or defeat the bad schemes."

"Yes, I suppose that is true," she murmured weakly.

He had successfully met and turned her attack and the worst had pa.s.sed; but he expected her to make some reference to Thatcher's lawsuit for the control of the "Courier" and he was not disappointed. Marian, who had a genius for collecting disagreeable information and a dramatic instinct for using it effectively, had apprised her of it. This hazarding of Mrs.

Owen's favor became now the gravamen of his offense, the culmination of all his offenses. She demanded to know why he had secretly borrowed money of her aunt, when from the time of their marriage it had been understood that they should never do so. Her own fortune he had been free to use as he liked; she demanded to know why he had not taken her own money; but to ask financial favors of Aunt Sally, and this, too, without consultation, was beyond her comprehension. She was on secure ground here; he had always shared her feeling that Mrs. Owen required cautious handling, but he had nevertheless violated their compact. She rushed breathlessly and with sobs through her recital.

"And you haven't seen Aunt Sally since; you have made no effort to make it right with her!"

"As to that, Hallie, I haven't had a chance to see her; she's only been home two days and I've been away myself since. Now that I'm in her house I shall explain it all to her before I leave."

"But you haven't explained to me why you did it! It seems to me that I have a right to know how you came to do such a thing."

"Well, then, the fact is that newspapers these days are not cheap and the 'Courier' cost a lot of money. I've been pretty well tied up in telephone and other investments of late; and I have never taken advantage of my ownership of the Ba.s.sett Bank to use its money except within my reasonable credit as it would be estimated by any one else.

Your own funds I have kept invested conservatively in gilt-edged securities wholly removed from speculative influences. I knew that if I didn't get the newspaper Thatcher would, so I made every possible turn to go in with him. I was fifty thousand dollars shy of what I needed to pay for my half, and after I had raked up all the money I could safely, I asked Aunt Sally if she would lend me that sum with all my stock as security."

"Fifty thousand dollars, Morton! You borrowed that much money of her!"

Her satisfaction in learning that Mrs. Owen commanded so large a sum was crushed beneath his stupendous error in having gone to her for money at all.

"Oh, she didn't lend it to me, after all, Hallie; she refused to do so; but she allowed me to buy enough shares for her to make up my quota.

Thatcher and I bought at eighty cents on the dollar and she paid the same. She has her shares and it's a good investment, and she knows it.

If she hadn't insisted on having the shares in her own name, Thatcher would never have known it."

He turned uneasily in his chair, and she was keenly alert at this sign of discomfiture, and not above taking advantage of it.

"So without her you are at Thatcher's mercy, are you? I haven't spoken to her about this and she hasn't said anything to me; but Marian with her usual heedlessness mentioned it, and it was clear that Aunt Sally was very angry."

"What did she say?" asked Ba.s.sett anxiously.

"She didn't say anything, but she shut her jaw tight and changed the subject. It was what she didn't say! You'd better think well before you broach the subject to her."

"I've been thinking about it. If I take her stock at par she ought to be satisfied. I'll pay more if it's necessary. And of course I'll make every effort to restore good feeling. I think I understand her. I'll take care of this, but you must stay out of it, and tell Marian to keep quiet.

"Well, Aunt Sally and Thatcher are friends. He rather amuses her, with his horse-racing, and drinking and gambling. That kind of thing doesn't seem so bad to her. She's so used to dealing with men that she makes allowances for them."

"Then," he said quickly, with a smile, eager to escape through any loophole, "maybe she will make some allowances for me! For the purpose of allaying her anger we'll a.s.sume that I'm as wicked as Thatcher."

"Well," she answered, gathering her strength for a final a.s.sault, "it doesn't look as simple as that to me. Your first mistake was in getting her into any of your businesses and the second was in making it possible for Thatcher to annoy her by all this ugly publicity of a lawsuit. And what do you think has happened on top of all this--_that girl is here_--here under this very roof!"

"That girl--what girl?"

His opacity incensed her; she had been brooding over her aunt's renewed interest in Sylvia Garrison all day and his dull ignorance was the last straw upon nerves screwed to the breaking-point. She sat up in bed and drew her dressing-gown about her as though it were the vesture of despair.

"That Garrison girl! She's not only back here, but from all appearances she's going to stay! Aunt Sally's infatuated with her. When the girl's grandfather died, Aunt Sally did everything for her--went over to Montgomery to take charge of the funeral, and then went back to Wellesley to see the girl graduate. And now she's giving up her plan of going to Waupegan for the summer to stay here in all the heat with a girl who hasn't the slightest claim on her. When the Keltons visited Waupegan four years ago I saw this coming. I wanted Marian to go to college and tried to get you interested in the plan because that was what first caught Aunt Sally's fancy--Sylvia's cleverness, and this college idea. But you wouldn't do anything about Marian, and now she's thrown away her chances, and here's this stranger graduating with honors and Aunt Sally going down there to see it! Aunt Sally's going to make a companion of her, and you can't tell what will happen! I'd like to know what you can say to your children when all Aunt Sally's money, that should rightly go to them, goes to a girl she's picked up out of nowhere. This is what your politics has got us into, Morton Ba.s.sett!"

The soberness to which this brought him at last satisfied her. She had freely expressed the anxiety caused by Sylvia's first appearance on the domestic horizon, but for a year or two, in his wife's absences in pursuit of health, he had heard little of her apprehensions. Marian's own disinclination for a college career had, from the beginning, seemed to him to interpose an insurmountable barrier to parental guidance in that direction. His wife's att.i.tude in these new circ.u.mstances of the return of her aunt's protegee struck him as wholly unjustified and unreasonable.