The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him Part 103

"He can't work harder than he has to get political power," said an usher. "Think of how anxious he must have been to get it, when he would spend so much time in the slums and saloons! He couldn't have liked the men he met there."

"I've taken him to task about that, and told him he had no business to waste his time so," said Ogden; "but he said that he was not taking care of other people's money or trying to build up a great business, and that if he chose to curtail his practice, so as to have some time to work in politics, it was a matter of personal judgment."

"I once asked Peter," said Miss De Voe, "how he could bear, with his tastes and feelings, to go into saloons, and spend so much time with politicians, and with the low, uneducated people of his district. He said, 'That is my way of trying to do good, and it is made enjoyable to me by helping men over rough spots, or by preventing political wrong. I have taken the world and humanity as it is, and have done what I could, without stopping to criticise or weep over shortcomings and sins. I admire men who stand for n.o.ble impossibilities. But I have given my own life to the doing of small possibilities. I don't say the way is the best. But it is my way, for I am a worker, not a preacher. And just because I have been willing to do things as the world is willing to have them done, power and success have come to me to do more.' I believe it was because Peter had no wish for worldly success, that it came to him."

"You are all wrong," groaned Lispenard. "I love Peter as much as I love my own kin, with due apology to those of it who are present, but I must say that his whole career has been the worst case of sheer, downright luck of which I ever saw or heard."

"Luck!" exclaimed Dorothy.

"Yes, luck!" said Lispenard. "Look at it. He starts in like all the rest of us. And Miss Luck calls him in to look at a sick kitten die. Very ordinary occurrence that! Health-board report several hundred every week. But Miss Luck knew what she was about and called him in to just the right kind of a kitten to make a big speech about. Thereupon he makes it, blackguarding and wiping the floor up with a millionaire brewer. Does the brewer wait for his turn to get even with him? Not a bit. Miss Luck takes a hand in and the brewer falls on Peter's breast-bone, and loves him ever afterwards. My cousin writes him, and he snubs her. Does she annihilate him as she would have other men? No. Miss Luck has arranged all that, and they become the best of friends."

"Lispenard--" Miss De Voe started to interrupt indignantly, but Lispenard continued, "Hold on till I finish. One at a time. Well. Miss Luck gets him chosen to a convention by a fluke and Peter votes against Costell's wishes. What happens? Costell promptly takes him up and pushes him for all he's worth. He snubs society, and society concludes that a man who is more snubby and exclusive than itself must be a man to cultivate. He refuses to talk, and every one promptly says: 'How interesting he is!' He gets in the way of a dynamite bomb. Does it kill him? Certainly not. Miss Luck has put an old fool there, to protect him.

He swears a bad word. Does it shock respectable people? No! Every one breathes easier, and likes him the better. He enrages and shoots the strikers. Does he lose votes? Not one. Miss Luck arranges that the directors shall yield things which they had sworn not to yield; and the strikers are reconciled and print a card in praise of him. He runs for office. Do the other parties make a good fight of it? No. They promptly nominate a scoundrelly demagogue and a nonent.i.ty who thinks votes are won by going about in shirtsleeves. So he is elected by the biggest plurality the State has ever given. Has Miss Luck done enough? No. She at once sets every one predicting that he'll get the presidential nomination two years from now, if he cares for it. Be it friend or enemy, intentional or unintentional, every one with whom he comes in contact gives him a boost. While look at me! There isn't a soul who ever gave me help. It's been pure, fire-with-your-eyes-shut luck.

"Was this morning luck too?" asked a bridesmaid.

"Absolutely," sighed Lispenard. "And what luck! I always said that Peter would never marry, because he would insist on taking women seriously, and because at heart he was afraid of them to a woeful degree, and showed it in such a way, as simply to make women think he didn't like them individually. But Miss Luck wouldn't allow that. Oh, no! Miss Luck isn't content even that Peter shall take his chance of getting a wife, with the rest of us. She's not going to have any accidents for him. So she takes the loveliest of girls and trots her all over Europe, so that she shan't have friends, or even know men well. She arranges too, that the young girl shall have her head filled with Peter by a lot of admiring women, who are determined to make him into a sad, unfortunate hero, instead of the successful man he is. A regular conspiracy to delude a young girl. Then before the girl has seen anything of the world, she trots her over here. Does she introduce them at a dance, so that Peter shall be awkward and silent? Not she! She puts him where he looks his best--on a horse. She starts the thing off romantically, so that he begins on the most intimate footing, before another man has left his pasteboard. So he's way ahead of the pack when they open cry. Is that enough? No! At the critical moment he is called to the aid of his country. Gets lauded for his pluck. Gets blown up. Gets everything to make a young girl worship him. Pure luck! It doesn't matter what Peter says or does. Miss Luck always arranges that it turn up the winning card."

"There is no luck in it," cried Mr. Pierce. "It was all due to his foresight and shrewdness. He plans things beforehand, and merely presses the b.u.t.ton. Why, look at his marriage alone? Does he fall in love early in life, and hamper himself with a Miss n.o.body? Not he! He waits till he has achieved a position where he can pick from the best, and then he does exactly that, if you'll pardon a doating grandfather's saying it."

"Well," said Watts, "we have all known Peter long enough to have found out what he is, yet there seems to be a slight divergence of opinion.

Are we fools, or is Peter a gay deceiver?"

"He is the most outspoken man I ever knew," said Miss De Voe.

"But he tells nothing," said an usher.

"Yes. He is absolutely silent," said a bridesmaid.

"Except when he's speechifying," said Ray.

"And Leonore says he talks and jokes a great deal," said Watts.

"I never knew any one who is deceiving herself so about a man," said Dorothy. "It's terrible. What do you think she had the face to say to me to-day?"

"What?"

"She was speaking of their plans after returning from the wedding journey, and she said: 'I am going to have Peter keep up his bachelor quarters.' 'Does he say he'll do it?' I asked. 'I haven't spoken to him,' she replied, 'but of course he will.' I said: 'Leonore, all women think they rule their husbands, but they don't in reality, and Peter will be less ruled than any man I know.' Then what do you think she said?"

"Don't keep us in suspense."

"She said: 'None of you ever understood Peter. But I do.' Think of it!

From that little chit, who's known Peter half the number of months that I've known him years!"

"I don't know," sighed Lispenard. "I'm not prepared to say it isn't so.

Indeed, after seeing Peter, who never seemed able to understand women till this one appeared on the scene, develop into a regulation lover, I am quite prepared to believe that every one knows more than I do. At the same time, I can't afford to risk my reputation for discrimination and insight over such a simple thing as Peter's character. You've all tried to say what Peter is. Now I'll tell you in two words and you'll all find you are right, and you'll all find you are wrong."

"You are as bad as Leonore," cried Dorothy.

"Well," said Watts, "we are all listening. What is Peter?"

"He is an extreme type of a man far from uncommon in this country, yet who has never been understood by foreigners, and by few Americans."

"Well?"

"Peter is a practical idealist"

CHAPTER LXI.

LEONORE'S THEORY.

And how well had that "talk-it-over" group at the end of Peters wedding-day grasped his character? How clearly do we ever gain an insight into the feelings and motives which induce conduct even in those whom we best know and love? Each had found something in Peter that no other had discovered. We speak of rose-colored gla.s.ses, and Shakespeare wrote, "All things are yellow to a jaundiced eye." When we take a bit of blue gla.s.s, and place it with yellow, it becomes green. When we put it with red, it becomes purple. Yet blue it is all the time. Is not each person responsible for the tint he seems to produce in others? Can we ever learn that the thing is blue, and that the green or purple aspect is only the tinge which we ourselves help to give? Can we ever learn that we love and are loved entirely as we give ourselves colors which may harmonize with those about us? That love, wins love; kindness, kindness; hate, hate. That just such elements as we give to the individual, the individual gives back to us? That the sides we show are the sides seen by the world. There were people who could truly believe that Peter was a ward boss; a frequenter of saloons; a drunkard; a liar; a swearer; a murderer, in intention, if not in act; a profligate; and a compromiser of many of his own strongest principles. Yet there were people who could, say other things of him.

But more important than the opinion of Peter's friends, and of the world, was the opinion of Peter's wife. Was she right in her theory that she was the only one who understood him? Or had she, as he had once done, reared an ideal, and given that ideal the love which she supposed she was giving Peter? It is always a problem in love to say whether we love people most for the qualities they actually possess, or for those with which our own love endows them. Here was a young girl, inexperienced in world and men, joyfully sinking her own life in that of a man whom, but a few months before, had been only a matter of hearsay to her. Yet she had apparently taken him, as women will, for better, for worse, till death, as trustfully as if he and men generally were as knowable as A B C, instead of as unknown as the algebraic X. Only once had she faltered in her trust of him, and then but for a moment. How far had her love, and the sight of Peter's misery, led her blindly to renew that trust? And would it hold? She had seen how little people thought of that scurrilous article, and how the decent papers had pa.s.sed it over without a word. But she had also seen, the scandal harped upon by partisans and noted that Peter failed to vindicate himself publicly, or vouchsafe an explanation to her. Had she taken Peter with trust or doubt, knowledge or blindness?

Perhaps a conversation between the two, a week later, will answer these questions. It occurred on the deck of a vessel. Yet this parting glimpse of Peter is very different from that which introduced him. The vessel is not drifting helplessly, but its great screw is whirling it towards the island of Martinique, as if itself anxious to reach that fairy land of fairy lands. Though the middle of November, the soft warmth of the tropics is in the air. Nor are the sea and sky now leaden. The first is turned into liquid gold by the phosph.o.r.escence, and the full moon silvers everything else. Neither is Peter pacing the deck with lines of pain and endurance on his face. He is up in the bow, where the vessel's forefoot throws up the white foam in silver drops in the moonlight. And he does not look miserable. Anything but that. He is sitting on an anchor stock, with his back comfortably braced against the rail. Another person is not far distant. What that person sits upon and leans against is immaterial to the narrative.

"Why don't you smoke?" asked that person.

"I'm too happy," said Peter, in a voice evidencing the truth of his words.

"Will you if I bite off the end?" asked Eve, Jr., placing temptation most temptingly.

"I like the idea exceedingly," said Peter. "But my right arm is so very pleasantly placed that it objects to moving."

"Don't move it. I know where they are. I even know about the matches."

And Peter sat calmly while his pockets were picked. He even seemed to enjoy the sensation of that small hand rummaging in his waistcoat pockets. "You see, dear, that I am learning your ways," Leonore continued, in a tone of voice which suggested that that was the chief end of woman. Perhaps it is. The Westminster catechism only tells us the chief end of man.

"There. Now are you really happy?"

"I don't know anybody more so."

"Then, dear, I want to talk with you."

"The wish is reciprocal. But what have we been doing for six days?"

"We've been telling each other everything, just as we ought. But now I want to ask two favors, dear."

"I don't think that's necessary. Just tell me what they are."

"Yes. These favors are. Though I know you'll say 'yes.'"

"Well?"