The Voice of the People Part 49

"I a.s.sure you, I have been positively longing to have you gratify my curiosity," declared Miss Preston. "You know you do such dear, eccentric things that we couldn't exist without you--at least I couldn't because I should perish of boredom. No, you shan't escape just yet, so stop looking at that beautiful Mrs. Galt. You must tell me first if it is really true that you once carried a woman out of a burning building in your right hand. It is so delightful to be strong, don't you think?"

The governor regarded her gravely. Before her animated chatter his gravity became almost grotesque. "The only burning building I was ever in was a burning smoke-house," he returned quietly. "I never carried a woman out of anything in either hand."

There was a bored expression in his eyes, and he glanced beyond the group to where Juliet stood surrounded.

"Pardon me," he said in a moment, and pa.s.sed on.

In the crowd about him, where pretty women were as plentiful as pinks in a garden bed, he moved awkwardly, with the hesitating steps of a man who is uncertain of his pathway. His powerful frame and the splendid vigour in his daring strides seemed out of place amid a profusion of exotics that trembled as he pa.s.sed. His appearance suggested the battlegrounds of nature--high places, or the breadth of the open fields; at the plough he would have been grandly picturesque, in the centre of a throng of graceful men and women he loomed merely large and ill at ease.

Above his evening clothes his face showed rough, rather than refined, and his stubborn jaw gave an impression of heaviness.

As he reached Juliet she uttered an exclamation of pleasure and held out her hand. "Emma, you have heard of my Sunday-school scholar," she said to a girl beside her. "My prize scholar, I mean. Sally, have you seen the governor?"

Emma Carr, a pink-and-white girl who bore herself with the air of an acknowledged belle, bowed, with a plat.i.tude that sounded original on her lovely lips, and Sally Ba.s.sett turned with a hearty handshake.

"And he is our Nick Burr!" she exclaimed. "Tom, where are you?"

She spoke with an impulsive flutter which he had remembered as the sparkle of mere girlish liveliness. Now he saw that it had degenerated into a restlessness that appeared to result from a continued waste of nervous energy. She looked older than Juliet, though she was in fact much younger, and her face was drawn and heavily lined as if by years of ill-health. Her physical strength was prodigious; one perceived it with the suddenness of surprise. Much the same impression was produced by her youthful manner in connection with her worn features; yet, in spite of her faded prettiness, there was a singular charm in her unabated vivacity.

She darted off in pursuit of Tom, to be arrested by the first newcomer she encountered, and Nicholas was responding gravely to Juliet's banter when his eyes fell full upon Eugenia Battle as she stood at a little distance.

He had not seen her for fifteen years, and he started quickly as if from an unsuspected shock. She was talking rapidly in her fervent voice, the old illumination in her look. Her n.o.ble figure, in a straight flaxen gown, was drawn against a background of green, her head was bent forward on her long white neck, her kindly hands were outstretched. She had developed from a girl into a woman, but to him she was unchanged. Her face was, perhaps, older, her bosom fuller, but he did not see it--to him she appeared as the resurrected spirit of his youth. Miss Carr was speaking and he made some brief rejoinder. Eugenia had turned and was looking at him; in a moment he heard her voice.

"Are old friends too far beneath the eyes of your excellency?" she asked, and he heard the soft laugh pulse in her throat.

Her hand was outstretched, and he took it for an instant in his own.

"I am very glad to see you," he remarked lamely as he let it fall--so lamely that he bit his lip at the remembrance. "You are looking well,"

he added.

"Of course--a woman always looks well at night," she answered lightly.

"And you," she laughed again, her kindly, unconscious laugh; "you are looking--large."

He did not smile. "I have no doubt of it," he responded, and was silent.

Juliet Galt broke in with an affectionate protest. "Eugie is as great a tease as ever," she said. "She will be the death of my baby yet. I tell her to choose one of her own size, but she never does. She always plagues those smaller than herself--or larger."

But Eugenia had turned away to greet a stranger, and in a moment Nicholas drew back into a windowed embrasure where the lights were dim.

Suddenly a voice broke upon his ear addressing Juliet Galt--the vibrant tones of Dudley Webb. He had come in late and was standing in mock helplessness before Juliet and Carrie, his plump white hand vacillating between the two.

"I am at a loss!" he exclaimed with an appealing shrug of his shoulders.

"Which is the debutante?"

Juliet laughed, her cheeks mantling with a pleased blush.

"You're a sad flatterer, Dudley! Isn't he, Eugie?"

Eugenia turned with a questioning glance.

"Oh, it's just his way," she returned good-humouredly. "A kindly Providence has decreed that he should cover over my deficiencies."

Dudley protested affably, and ended by giving a hand to each. In the crowded rooms he had become at once the picturesque and popular figure.

His magnetism was immediately felt, and men and women surrounded him in small circles, while his pleasant words ran on smoothly, accompanied by the ring of his infectious laugh. The luminous pallor of his clear-cut, yet fleshy face, was accentuated by the sweep of his dark hair that clung closely to his forehead. He seemed to have brought with him into the heated rooms the spirit of humour and the zest of life.

From the deep embrasure Nicholas Burr watched curiously the flutter of women's skirts and the flicker of candle light on shining heads. Eugenia moved easily from group to group, the straight fall of her flaxen gown giving her an added height, the dark coil of hair on the nape of her long neck seeming to rise above the shoulders of other women. She was never silent--for one and all she had some ready words, and her manner was cordial, almost affectionate. It was as if she were in the midst of a great family party, held together by the ties of blood.

In a far corner Juliet Galt and Emma Carr, the prettiest women in the room, sat together upon a corn-coloured divan, and in front of them a file of men pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed slowly on their way to and from the dining-room, pausing to exchange brief remarks and drifting on aimlessly. Near them a fair, pale gentleman, robust and slightly bald, with protruding eyes and anaemic lips, had flung himself upon a gilded chair, a gla.s.s of punch in his hand. He had danced incessantly for hours in the adjoining room, and at last, wearied, winded, with a palpitating heart, he had found a punch bowl and a gilded chair.

Through the doorway floated music and the laughter of young girls intoxicated with the dance. In the hall, some had sought rest upon the stairway, and sat in radiant cl.u.s.ters, fanning themselves briskly as they talked. There was about them an absence of coquetry as of self-consciousness; they were frank, cordial-voiced, almost boyish.

The governor stepped suddenly from the embrasure and ran against Ben Galt, who caught his arm.

"I've been searching the house for you," he exclaimed, "after landing my twelfth matron in the dining-room." Then catching sight of the other's face, he inquired blandly:

"Bored?"

"I am."

Galt gave a comprehending wink.

"So am I. These things are death. I say, don't go! Come into the library and we'll lock the door and have supper shoved in through the window, while we talk business. I've a decanter of the finest Madeira you ever tasted behind the bookcase. Juliet will never know, and I don't care a continental if she does. I'm a desperate man!"

"I was just going," replied the governor. "I'm not up to parties; but lead off, if it's out of this."

VI

It was one o'clock when the governor left Galt's house, and turning into Grace Street strolled leisurely in the direction of the Capitol Square.

The night was sharp with frost and a rising wind drove the shadows on the pavement against darkened house-fronts, while behind a far-off church spire, a wizened moon shivered through a thin cloud. On the silence came the sound of fire bells ringing in the distance.

The bronze Washington in the deserted square shone silver beneath the moonlight, and down the frozen slopes the trees stretched out stiffened limbs. From the governor's house a broad light streamed, and quickening his pace he entered the iron gate, which closed after him with a rheumatic cough, and briskly ascended the stone steps. As he drew the latch-key from his pocket he was thinking of his library, where the firelight fell on cheerful walls and red leathern chairs, and with the closing of the door he crossed the hall and entered the first room on the left.

A red fire burned in the grate, and the furniture reflected the colour until the place seemed pervaded by a visible warmth. The desk in the centre of the room, the shining backs of law books, the crimson rugs, the engravings on the walls, the easy chair drawn up before the hearth, presented to him as he entered now the security of individual isolation.

He had felt the same sense of restfulness when he had ascended, after the day's work, to the little whitewashed attic of his father's house.

To-night he liked the glow because it suggested warmth, but he could not have told off-hand the colour of the carpet or the subjects of the engravings on the wall; and had he found a white pine chair in place of the red leathern one, he would have used it without an admission of discomfort. In the midnight hours he liked the empty house about him--the silence and the safeguard of his loneliness. The deserted reception-rooms at the end of the hall pleased him by their stillness and the cold of their fireless grates. Even the stiff, unyielding furniture, in its fancy dress of satin brocade, soothed him by its remoteness when he pa.s.sed it wrapped in thought.

He flung himself into the easy chair, raised the light by which he read, and unfolded a newspaper lying upon his desk. As he did so an article which concerned himself caught his eye, and he read it with curious intentness.

"THE MAN WITH THE CONSCIENCE.

REFUSES TO RECOMMEND THE PROPOSED RESTRICTION OF THE SUFFRAGE.

ATTACHES HIS SIGNATURE TO SEVERAL BILLS.--TO AMEND AND RE-ENACT THE CHARTER OF THE TOWN OF CULPEPER--TO ESTABLISH A FERRY ACROSS THE PIANKITANK."

He reread it abstractedly, pondering not the future of Culpeper or of the Piankitank River, but the t.i.tle by which he was beginning to be known: