r BERTRAM SMITHS BOOK STORE ie PACIFIC AVENWB BEALH CAL.9&- tf|* aVutftor of this Volume. "A DIPLOMAT'S DIARY." i2mo. Extra Cloth. $x.oo. " One of its best qualities is the dear, incisive style, full of nervous strength, and indicating a remarkably energetic force in the imagination of the writer." New York Tribune. " The words are apt, the sentences short, the characters alive." The University Magazine. " We don't remember a finer bit of drawing than the character of Miss Acton." Morning Telegraph, New London. " The writer understands the social life of to- day in all its complexity, has lived in it, been of it." New York World. For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent, post- paid, on receipt of price. J. B. UPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA. SUCCESSFUL MAN BY JULIEN GORDON AUTHOR OF "A DIPLOMAT'S DIAKT," ETC. PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1891 Copyright, 1890, by THE COSMOPOLITAN PUBLISHING COMPANY. Copyright, 1890, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPAST. I DEDICATE THIS STORY TO TITUS MUNSON COAN, WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT OF MY LITERARY EFFORTS I THUS GBATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE. 2061837 A SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER I. THE homestead stood under the hill close to the main road which led into the town. It could hot be termed a pretty house, nor was it even solid or imposing. It was big and mere- tricious, in that pretentious villa style which was the rage forty years ago, when the colo- nial architecture had gone out of fashion and Queen Anne had not yet been awakened; there were wood turrets which were meaning- less, verandas which looked out on nothing in particular, and porches which led nowhere. Hundreds of such houses disfigure nature all over the United States. Where, through fidelity or economy, their owners have not tampered with them, they are hopeless ; they are hideous when they are embellished. One 7 8 A SUCCESSFUL MAN thing, indeed, can be said in their favor : they have usually high ceilings, wide doors, and generous windows admitting plenty of light and air, and their rooms are often large and sweetly cool. Queen Anne evidently laid no stress on " stuffiness ;" she was not accustomed to America in August. Of this particular structure it might be said that the inside was pleasant enough ; not ex- actly elegant or even cosey, but fresh, whole- some, and, on the whole, comfortable. The grounds which environed it and where the children played there were about twenty acres counting the adjacent meadow were really quite charming. There was soft mossy turf, plenty of shade, a variety of fine thrifty old trees, and a general aspect of careful gar- dening. The fences were excellent, and the orchard which lay behind the house was full of fruit. A profusion of flowers bloomed on each side of the garden-paths. There was nothing so picturesque as a barn-yard, al- though invisible hens proclaimed themselves and three Holsteins browsed in the pasture lot. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 9 The stables were more modern than the house and not less unsightly, and there was more than a suspicion of new paint about them. The trees, however, cast over them a mantle of charitable shade, and the four well- fed horses had enough room. All was cheer- ful and respectable, with a look of middle- class affluence and entirely well-to-do. The house was an object of interest to every passer-by, and the hackmen who carried stran- gers up Harbor Hill to see the view always pulled up a minute and showed the place with pride, for it was the habitation of the " great man" of the town. Some predicted that he would become the great man of the State, perhaps one day of the nation ; who could tell ? The hack-driver who was possessed of more imagination than his colleagues enlarged upon his theme, and called the great man a great orator, usually pronouncing the word " oh-ra'tor." At the early hour when my story opens, the great man's wife was standing in one of the upper rooms, which was suffused with 10 A SUCCESSFUL MAN summer sunshine. It was a very nice room indeed, so she thought, when her hushand brought her to their home twenty years before and she selected the room for her own. Here she had slept and worked, suffered and en- joyed, laughed and cried ; here she had borne and brought up her children, six in number. Her domestic life had known but few inter- missions. Twice six months in Europe and one trip to the West, with an occasional visit to friends in the country, were the sum of her holidays ; and these last had become more and more rare with the multiplying ties of mater- nity, and of late they had almost entirely ceased. Mrs. Lawton had never been fond of trav- elling ; even in Europe she had not been quite happy. To be sure, her husband had on both occasions been forced by business claims to return without her, and she had been left with young children on her hands to amuse her- self as best she might. Her talents in this direction were not great. She would have preferred to return with him, but, being a A SUCCESSFUL MAN H poor sailor, she thought it better for her health to take a few more weeks before these trying voyages. She looked back to these tours with sufficient pleasure, as we do on our early edu- cation, for she was intelligent enough to rel- ish a mild form of sight-seeing; but she had never got at the heart of life over there, and had no imperative longing to repeat the experiment. To return to the upper chamber. Mrs. Lawton was engaged at this particular mo- ment in combing out her eldest girl's hair. Very lovely hair it was. Long, fine, light, it almost swept the floor as the mother wound it lovingly in and out and across her fingers. "How nice and dry it is!" she said. "Light hair is always fluffier than black. Your papa's used to be like this. It is a pity he has grown so gray." " Impending cares of state," said the girl. " I suppose we must hope so," sighed Mrs. Lawton, " but it is very upsetting." " Cheer up, mammy. You know you will cry your eyes out if he is defeated." 12 A SUCCESSFUL MAN "I don't know anything of the kind. Your mamma is not very ambitious." " Well, papa is, then ; enough for the whole family. Kow, dear, that will do. I just love to have you brush my hair. You have such a sweet, cunning little way. When I have a headache it is a sure cure." So saying, Clemence shook her mane and rose from the contemplation of herself in her mother's dressing-table mirror. She was a fair miss of sixteen, well-made, healthy, and excessively pretty, with that in- describable sort of prettiness that is made up of complexion, beautiful hair, and. youth. She was a head taller than her mother, who was herself not undersized. Between them, how- ever, there was little or no resemblance. The mother was of medium height, in- clined to plumpness, with agreeable dark eyes and regular features. She looked like a very well-preserved woman of forty, and was so well preserved in fact that one wondered why she should not be taken to be younger. There were very few if any wrinkles upon A SUCCESSFUL MAN 13 her face. Her teeth were intact, her hair was abundant, and her voice retained some of its girlish inflections. There had, however, been something about her for many years which people, for lack of a better term, called " set- tled." It is difficult to say whether in her case it was in the figure or in the expression. Her hips were a little accentuated, to be sure, but she was not heavy in either form or gait. She wore, on the other hand, that look of placid resignation one sees so frequently on the faces of the entirely domestic women, who years before have renounced all coquetry. Is the look a tribute to what they have missed ? It would be hard to determine. It did not express discontent. Mrs. Lawton would have told you, and with candor, that her existence had been an excep- tionally happy one. No tragedies had touched it; hardly such common sorrows as fall to the lot of most of us. Her greatest chagrin had been when her husband had entered the political arena, for this she thought might 14 A SUCCESSFUL MAN separate him more from her and the children ; and she had lost a sister to whom she was attached. Her parents were still living, and not very old; she had married the man she wanted ; she had never lost a child ; and her husband's political career had been more suc- cessful than their most sanguine imaginings. Of course Daniel had been sure to succeed. She had hardly looked for disaster. He al- ways did. He had ability, pluck and luck, so people said ; and of his ability his wife had no shadow of a doubt. She thought him a re- markable man, and remembered that old Mr. Cairns, who was the wiseacre of the city, had always prophesied that Dan Lawton, who was then still very young and obscure, would " make himself felt." Those had been his words. As Miss Clem tossed up her plentiful locks, the door opened, and her father stood on the threshold ; his wife went up and kissed him. " I hoped, papa, you were still asleep, you were up so late." " I can't sleep until this infernal convention is over." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 15 Mrs. Lawton's eyes rested on her husband's with trusting affection ; his moved good- humoredly from her to his daughter, but seemed to be looking over the women at something beyond them. A curly head was thrust in just now at the other door, which led down a long passage to the nursery. " I say, pop, when am I going to have my kite ?" " Is that you, you young rascal ?" said Mr. Lawton, raising the lovely boy under the arm- pits and swinging him as if he had been a featherweight on to his broad shoulder. " You will have your kite when you learn to say the multiplication-table and to spell hippo- potamus backward." " Please, pop," said the little fellow, whis- pering into the ear which was close by his mouth now and prying it open with his thumb and finger, " please, pop, say ' up to five' and let the hiporotamus go." " Breakfast is ready, madam," announced a handsome maid in cap and apron. 16 A SUCCESSFUL MAN The dining-room was cheerful, and the table was plainly but neatly set; the linen was snowy, the silver bright, and there was plenty of excellent food, rather indifferently cooked, it must be confessed. The children were all at the table. Master Fred came down late, in a velveteen jacket and a collar which notched the ends of his ear-lobes. He complained of everything; and, when Clem said the biscuits were " real hot" and good enough for boys, he repeated, " Real -hot! Gad, what English!" and rolled his eyes up until they disappeared. By and by he said, " Mother, you had better send Clem to Miss SewelPs school. Blake's sister was there to finish, and has come back what a girl ought to be." Clem shouted out a peal of boisterous, mocking laughter. Fred put his hands up to his ears. " Clem, for heaven's sake, learn to modulate your voice. You don't know what bad form it is to scream and yell like that." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 17 " There, children, stop squabbling. You disturb your papa. And, Clem, I don't know but what your brother is right. It may be a good notion for you to go to Europe to finish, but I don't see now how we could manage it." Eighteen-year-old Fred, a junior in a great college, his mother's pet, was apt to get her upon his side. Miss Clem laughed again, but lower this time, and gave forth with a snap two words, " Xot much." In the mean while Daniel Lawton was eating a poached egg, sipping his coffee, and gradu- ally breaking the seals of a pile of letters. and documents of all sizes and colors which had been laid near his plate. A waste-basket had been drawn close to his seat, and as he drew out the letters one by one to open and peruse them, such as were of no consequence were quickly disposed of and thrown aside. One of the secrets of this man's success had always been that he possessed the rare gift of rejecting the unimportant. Goethe tells us this is a characteristic of the master-mind, b 2* 18 A SUCCESSFUL MAN As the morning light played upon his fore- head and his hair, it was impossible not to be struck with the man's extraordinary good looks. He appeared to be in the prime and full vigor of a life which, if it had been in- tensely, had been so far wisely lived. Such marks as the years had left upon him were honorable and honest. His was one of those heads at which, when men met him in the thoroughfare, they would turn to gaze back, saying to each other, "Look, this must be some distinguished man." He sometimes overheard them and smiled, for, while he was not entirely unaffected by flattery, he was not vain. His hair silky, fine as a woman's, now almost entirely gray, worn rather long was thrown back in waves from his broad forehead. His eyes were of a burning blue, piercing, attentive, often amused, sometimes implacable, yet capable of a tender light. His nose was straight, forcible, shapely, with sensitive nostrils; it was full of character; and the mouth was singularly beautiful. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 19 Little Dan, between mouthrals of milk toast, looked up and across at his big brother. " Fred's got a mash on the Blake girl. I'll tell Nettie Andrews," he sung out. His mother shook her head at him reprov- ingly, but Fred, superb and ignoring, ad- dressed his father rather pompously, thinking probably it was as well that further personal allusions should be instantly crushed. " We took a vote in the class the other day, sir." " Well ?" Mr. Lawton's eyes had their most merry twinkle in them. " They stood ten to one against Me Airy, sir, the regular voters, but the independents cut up rather rough." " They did, did they ? The young idiots !" Fred had been an independent himself and a rather loud one a year ago, until one day, having proclaimed his opinions at the dinner- table amid stupefied silence, his father had looked at him in a way which somehow had been " deuced uncomfortable," as he confided afterwards to one of his female admirers., the 20 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN same long-suffering Nettie Andrews whose name his young brother had so irreverently tampered with. He remembered just such a look on his father's face the day he had taken Tim, the obstreperous under-man, by the shirt- collar and sent him spinning half-way across the road. " What nonsense is this ?" his fond parent had sternly asked. "Don't make a donkey of yourself, sir. Don't talk this infernal jar- gon at my table when I sit at it. When you want to air that sort of cheap cynicism, let me know." The last words had been spoken with loud emphasis, and Mr. Lawton had glared terri- bly. Fred had squirmed. It is never pleasant to be sat upon, particularly before the women. Now, to his women, like all true and good Americans who hope to win at least standing- room in heaven, Daniel Lawton was ever scrupulously courteous, keeping such asperi- ties of character as he might possess for the rougher contact with his own sex. His sons were kindly dealt with, no doubt, but not in- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 21 dulged; they had a little wholesome fear of the "governor," somewhere hidden in the re- cesses of their happy hearts, a vague sense that he could not only claim but enforce obe- dience. Since then Fred's political convictions had undergone some modifications, and he even deigned to take a considerable, although never too eager, interest in his father's career. All forms of eagerness or enthusiasm were part and parcel of those numberless emotions whose expression was vulgar and superfluous, and stamped a man at once as "fresh," than which no word in the English language could carry a more mortal stigma. In his secret soul he thought his father rather " fresh," as, indeed, he was. He, how- ever, pardoned him indulgently, as belonging to a generation when such things ware not looked upon with as much disfavor, and did not at once stamp a man as entirely unfit for all social uses. Then the better side of the boy's nature, which was pure and sweet enough, flared up 22 A SUCCESSFUL MAN occasionally, and gave a flash, from under the pale ashes beneath which he concealed it, and acknowledged itself proud of the head of the family. Once, in a moment of weak- ness, Fred had even been heard to declare that the " pater" was " immense." To the father the son's temperament was peculiarly unsympathetic, the entire absence of any glaring vices having to be accepted as a sort of negative consolation for the absence of all great virtues. Mrs. Lawton, who adored her son, always said, "He is only a bit extravagant on his clothes; he has no bad habits;" and she was surprised that her husband's appreciation of this great "blessing," as she would have called it, was rather cold. Once, indeed, he had replied, a trifle impa- tiently. "But has he any temptations?" at which his wife had opened her eyes very widely. "Why, at his age," he continued, " I was just overflowing, irrepressible." " You were good enough when I met you, Dan." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 23 " Ah ! That was five years later. Let me see. I was twenty-two, was I not, then ? The 'uses of adversity' had already sobered and made a man of me. But I often think," he added, gallantly, " if I hadn't married you, my dear, so early, I should probably have gone to the devil." 24 A SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER IL CONSTANCE lay at fall length stretched out upon her bed. Her tumbled locks were on the pillow, making a dim aureole about her fair face. Her two arms lay out upon the fine silk counterpane, with the lace ruffles of her night-dress falling half over her long hands. She looked up at the bedhangings, with their canopy of antique carvings and their pathetic tone of color, and she sighed. She was laughter-loving enough, and drank deeply every day of life and of love. But which of us has not sighed when the dawn awakes us from its paradise of early dreams ? She was a woman of fashion, and this means to a certain extent a slave; and, although she strained at the chain of cus- tom so as to stretch it to its utmost limits, nay, people said almost to snap its subtle links, she was too wise or was it too indo- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 25 lent? to break the leash altogether and es- .cape into the uncertain outside world. She had noticed that the wanderers who strayed into it returned with bedraggled garments and eyes that shrank from meeting other eyes. It must be confessed that she envied them a little at their first plunge, but she had re- marked that they soon grew weary of their emancipation and had been fain to creep back as beggars where they had once been sovereigns. She felt that she would have been too proud to do this. Being a person of observation and good judgment, she had re- flected and pondered over these things, and she realized that it is only women of very superior intellect and men whose angel wings are already growing who can be contented outside the pale of social conventions. To-day she sighed. Yet it was a sunlit world she looked out at from under the cur- tains which shrouded her so discreetly from glare and draft. The light streamed in at the half-opened window, into which rich vines flower-laden were tossing to and fro in the 26 -A SUCCESSFUL MAN gentle wind. Their faint smell, moist and acrid, was wafted to her on the breeze, and she drew in her breath to drink of their fragrance. Odors had a peculiar effect upon her, and wherever she went herself she left a vague perfume which was the despair of her rivals. No pharmacy seemed able to supply the essence. Who knows ; perhaps it was only the essence of health and of a generous blood ! The great room was as splendid and deli- cate as were the flowers that waved outside. It was all hung in pale soft silks. White furs lay here and there on the inlaid floor. There were cushioned lounges, insidiously sugges- tive of sensuous delights or of a beauty's dream of conquest; tall, stiff, carved chairs, for devotional reading or serious contempla- tion; deep, low ottomans, for summer slum- bers, leisure, and listless revery. The artistic Louis XVI. clock ticked majestically on the mantel-shelf, where were amassed a thousand and one ornaments, photographs, forgotten fans, and useless knick-knacks which seem a part of an elegant woman's existence. Fine bits A SUCCESSFUL MAN 27 of porcelain were hidden in old carved wood cupboards or displayed on gilded etaghes. The dressing-table was fairly laden with its sumptuous brushes and combs, powder- boxes, ring-stands, mirrors, vinaigrettes, all of wrought gold with jewelled monograms. Among them a bouquet lay face downward fast fading, a half-soiled glove with its twenty buttons, and a note torn across in its envelope. In one corner a table was almost covered with books and magazines, piled up close under a tall lamp demurely draped in its creamy lace-trimmed shade, showing that the outfit of the mondaine could not be complete without a tribute to mental needs, for the bed- room may have its hour when reflection must be banished or sleep wooed. The books were a motley assortment : some Russian novels lay close to ^schylus, Ouida's latest upon a work on political economy, Leo- pardi's poetry, and George Meredith's prose ; a German scientific treatise and Guy de Mau- passant's last story ; Henry James's " London Life" and Tolstoi's " De la Vie." 28 A SUCCESSFUL MAN The sigh heaved upon the awakening day brought a step across the threshold. " Madame est evtittee ?" The Frenchwoman came and stood at the foot of the bed. She was not pretty and was plainly dressed, with dark coiled hair. But, when her mistress threw her a " Bon jour," she smiled and displayed two rows of even, pretty white teeth which made her look charming. All the men in the house had tried to win that smile, until at last at the altar the English butler had fixed it definitely upon himself. Since then it was still wooed, but more respectfully and, as it were, without hope. Constance had taken some interest in the marriage. The maid opened the shutters, and let in a flood of warmth from the sunny side of the house. She then busied herself about the porcelain tub, filling it from a great water-can and piling up towels beside it on a chair. A knock at the door she answered directly, and received into her outstretched hands a tray on which were tea, toast, a bunch of A SUCCESSFUL MAN 29 grapes, some violets, and a bundle of letters. The tray was concealed with embroidered linen, and the china service was of rare fabric. Constance sat up and caught her tangled curls up into their comb; her maid helped her to slip on her peach-blossom jacket lined with satin; and, taking the light tray upon her knees, " I am awfully hungry," she said. " Would madame like a boiled egg ?" "Ko." Before, however, providing for her hunger- pangs, she looked hurriedly at her letters. She threw three or four on a table near the bed where were a candle and an open book. The others she pushed under the tray, all but one, which she opened and read immediately. It was very short, but it seemed eminently satisfactory. It read thus : " MY DEAR MRS. GRESHAM, "How could you be so cruel last night? Promise me that cotillon to-morrow, or I shall a* 30 -A- SUCCESSFUL MAN leave by the boat this afternoon, and you will hear of me no more forever. "Let me know what you will wear, that my roses may suit your gown. Say yes. " Yours, T. P." This was all, but it was carefully perused twice. It is never unpleasant to be sure of leading a cotillon with the most desired of partners; and, although such things had become a matter of course to Constance, she was not yet heroically indifferent to them. There was a good bit of youth and humanity in her still. She bent forward to smell the light-brown stream of the tea as it poured itself into the cup, and inspired its steam with a pant as she had the scent of the vines. "It is sweeter than flowers. Oh, how I like my tea !" " Madame has the same sentiment I have for my cafe, au lait in the morning. Without it I could not exist." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 31 " Coffee ! Nasty. Don't you like tea, Leontine ?" "I would as lief drink soap-and-water, madame." " Very well ; you shall have some soap-and- water for your breakfast to-morrow." "Madame jokes." " Never." " What will madame wear this morning ?" " My mauve foulard." " Madame is not then going to visit or to the Casino?" "Why not?" "So simple?" " Would you have me always covered with lace and jewelry? It is rococo and stupid." " As madame desires." " Give me my looking-glass." Leontine tripped lightly to the dressing- table, and disentangled the hand-glass from the long pink ribbon of the bouquet. She brought it to her mistress, and then went back quickly and lifted the flowers, carried them to the window, sprinkled and loosened 32 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN them, and put them in a great white jar full of fresh water where they would catch the breeze. " Such a pity !" she muttered with a Frenchwoman's love of flowers and natural thrift. In the mean while the mistress was gazing at herself in the glass. What do women see in these long contemplations? What hopes, what fears, are reflected within this narrow margin of metal and of quicksilver? mean- ingless to the child, full of promise to the girl, often of warning to the woman. Constance was rarely satisfied with the sur- vey. She had never admired her own style. She would have liked to he imposing and very pale. She could be the former, although not from any especial fitness of her features. The latter had so far been unattainable. She made a grimace at herself, opened her mouth, looked at her teeth and her fresh pink gums, pushed back her hair which grew very low, turned her profile sideways as far as she could, only succeeding in seeing the tip end of her nose, and then, throwing the mirror A SUCCESSFUL MAN 33 away, sprang from the bed on to the white bearskin. Her feet sank gratefully into its animal warmth. She donned a long dressing- gown, slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules, and, taking her letters in one hand and hold- ing her laces with the other where they were somewhat unfastened across her breast, she walked energetically to a seat near a window, her heels resounding on the polished floor, and began to peruse the rest of her mail. Shall we look over her shoulder ? The first letter that she opened was from a tradesman : " MRS. GRESHAM : "MADAM, Will you kindly let us know when you can fit your habit, as it is impos- sible to do the cover coat any justice unless fitted once more before it is sent home ? "Very respectfully, awaiting further com- mands, "PEEL & WEARS, " Tailors to her Majesty the Queen of England, the Em- press of Austria, the Empress of Eussia, H. K. H. the Princess of Wales. " London, Paris, Vienna, New York and St. Petersburg." c 34 A SUCCESSFUL MAN The second letter was on common paper -and written in pencil : "DEAR LADY, " I have been down with the malaryal fever for three weeks. I was very sick ; there was nothing that would lie on my stomak. I prayed to hear from you. I knew you would write. I knew you would send me something. I had no money left. I thought lemons and ice would save my life, or I should burn up and die for a cold drink. I think I went mad when your letter came. When it was given me, I cryed for joy. I didn't know what to do. I should have kiled myself if the old man hadn't restrained me. I made some chicken soup and got ice and lemonade, and every day I got better, thanks to you, God's angel that you are. Oh, we get so tired here in the woods with never a book or paper. I shall be very thankful for anything to read. Those papers were splendid you sent. It was wonderful how that letter and that money came to me. I was wicked, yet God was A SUCCESSFUL MAN 35 helping me and I didn't know it. No more at present. I am so nervous I can hardly write. I keep your letter under my pillow. Well, I will close, so good-by from " CHARLEY HURRY." Poor wretch! Constance was touched by this letter. We are always touched by any genuine appreciation of our virtues. "Poor miserable being!" Once, when in mourning and low spirits, less at the be- reavement, which was not a bitter one, than at the enforced retirement, at which her vig- orous senses chafed (she detested the world's hypocrisies), she had, in an excess of impulsive energy, taken to a sort of amateur philan- thropy. It had left her with a number of helpless " ne'er-do-weels" on her hands, whose only recommendation was that they were poor devils who never could get on and that no- body else would assist. She had shouldered them and carried them valiantly enough long after her hospital visits and society meetings had been abandoned, saying, with her low, 36 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN sweet laugh, that the unworthy poor seemed to be her especial province. The next was a woman's hurried note : " DEAREST CON, * " I am in an awful scrape. Didn't you say we should make up a party and go over to the convention in Ralph's yacht? Well, I am crazy to do it, and I told Mrs. Leo I found I had made a mistake and must back out of her dinner, as I had promised myself to you for this expedition ten days ago. She is perfectly furious. I am in terror lest she should see you, and .you should tell her our yacht trip was impromptu. Please, dear, sustain me in my lie ! It is a pretty huge one. " They say that man Lampson, or Lawton, or Dawton, or whoever he is, will speak, you know who I mean, and that he is quite won- derful ; that really everybody is talking about him, and it is stupid of us never to have seen him. I am so ignorant of such matters. And then the yacht ! We can sup on board, Ralph says. It will all be over by eleven. Such a A SUCCESSFUL MAN 37 lovely moon! It will be amusing quite a spree ! so odd and different ! Don't fail. And above all if you see Mrs. Leo say I was engaged to you. You are so clever and have so much tact. " Yours, " MAT. "P.S. If you see the Turkish minister, why not ask him? I rather like Mm, and Ralph is heavy, entre nous." " Characteristic I" ejaculated Constance. She leaned back smiling, adding, " and compli- mentary to Lawton." She called him thus by his surname without any prefix as we do a casual celebrity, the President of the United States or an Italian tenor. She had herself never seen him, and her curiosity to do so was languid, but she had read the newspapers. The excursion across the bay and the incur- sion into the party conclave were only a new mode of passing a moonlit night. As her friend had expressed it, it was " odd and dif- ferent." As such, the plan commended itself exceptionally to Mrs. Gresham's favor. 38 A SUCCESSFUL MAN There was only one more letter to be pe- rused, except, indeed, those rejected ones, evidently unpaid bills or undesirable invita- tions, which lay neglected on the little table over by the bedside waiting to intrude them- selves at some fitter moment. Mrs. Gresham turned it over, and the color which she deprecated deepened On her cheek. "Faugh!" she said. "We will not give it here. It was a letter of senseless reproaches, burning with passion- ate love and hate ; such a letter as it scorches a man's soul to write, and should sear the woman's heart at which it is aimed, if indeed a heart which inspires such bitterness has not grown callous to such wounds. It was as foolish and fierce as are the reproofs that ten- der and faithful people heap on the unfaithful and unloving, and ... as impotent. It ended with these words : " Is it possible that that to which you have brought me is for nothing ? Speak, speak, Constance ! tell me the truth, that I may know if you are a woman or a fiend !" A SUCCESSFUL MAN 39 An angry light gleamed for a moment in the young woman's eyes, and she set her lips together and clinched her teeth. She crushed the letter in her hands, which she struck to- gether two or three times, with the sheet be- tween them, as if mastered for a moment by an overpowering agitation. The letter did in fact give her a peculiar physical suffering at the heart, as if a hand of ice were arresting its pulsations. " It is intolerable," she said. " If he had a spark of manliness or of pride, he would have seen long ago that I loathed him. My God ! what I am made to pay for an hour's co- quetry ! What was it ? What was it ? A smile, two or three foolish letters, a moment's discouragement, an acknowledgment that I was not happy : I remember just what I said : and now this senseless passion pursuing me, haunting me, filling me with dread and hor- ror. I hate him! I despise him! but I am afraid to be too unkind. He makes me afraid. I am blameless." Was she? We have so many sophistries 40 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN with which to palliate our own weaknesses. She tore the poor cry of a man's folly into fragments and threw them into the empty grate with a lighted match among them. As she rose, a yellow envelope fell to the floor. She had overlooked it. It contained a telegram, and, stooping to pick it up, " Tims!" she said. It ran thus : " Have killed lots of big game. Shall stop another ten days. Capital sport. Tell Barnes to express my winter ulster and more shirts. Martin knows where to find them. Tele- graph if you are quite well. " JACK." "From the tragic to the conjugal," she thought, and she could not help laughing. As I said before, she was laughter-loving, and the atmosphere, which had for a moment been leaden, grew lighter. Like all impres- aionable, highly-strung women who are never- theless healthy and sane, she passed through A SUCCESSFUL MAN 41 a hundred moods in an hour, and this made her a joy to those who had breadth of vision, and a torment to the narrow. She herself, while she fretted and revolted at narrowness, pitied it, realizing all that it misses and suf- fers, for, as her friend May had said, she was very clever. After the foulard had been draped upon her and the violets adjusted in her belt, she put on a hat of startling dimensions, and, leaving her room in the hands of the maids, came down the wide stairs of her domain. A footman and Kichard the Buttons were gossiping in the hall. They were talking about the lately disbanded house party, which, it must be confessed, had sailed a little close to the wind, had been merry almost to bois- terousness, and even more than usually troub- lesome. One unmarried lady, who had been invited solely because of her gift at buffoonery and her talent for comic songs, she herself called them ribald, had sat up late with the gentlemen when others had gone to bed, and behaved in the eyes of Mr. Barnes, the butler, 4* 42 A SUCCESSFUL MAN altogether more like a "play hactress" than a well-born woman. Her tips too had been insignificant, and her wit had failed to amuse the valets. She was being discussed when the mistress appeared. The men separated in haste, each bent on proving himself over- whelmed with matutinal duties. Her ser- vants respected Mrs. Gresham, however they might sometimes disapprove of her guests. They even loved her and thought her a very fine lady, as inferiors do those who are at once exacting and kind. Constance walked across the hall, whose magnificent proportions and elegant furnish- ings were the admiration and envy of all her friends and enemies, and stepped out on the stone terrace which overhung the sea. Here was a low marble table in the centre, where breakfast was often served on propitious mornings, and scattered about were stone, china, and cane seats. It was shaded with bright-colored awnings which threw a red glow over the whole, while the east side had been converted into a veritable arbor of exot- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 43 ics. She leaned over the parapet, letting the soft, pungent breeze blow her hair about. How still and delicious it was at this early hour, for it was early in this idle place, where the lazy modish butterflies slept late on their luxurious couches, and the stir of gayety hardly began before twelve o'clock. The house rose, pale, gray, and chaste, right from the sea, resting like some great bird upon its rock ; of pure Elizabethan style, it fronted upon the closely-clipped green lawns which swept in unbroken lines to the rose-gardens, while this side hung over the ocean, mute, serene, and silent, with the breakers tossing themselves and moaning at its base on the reefs below. Some buildings have an essential power of impressing one with repose. This resi- dence, which had been closely copied alas ! that our genius goes no further upon a Eu- ropean model, and on which all that wealth and taste could procure had been lavishly expended, had this peculiar quality. " It rests the eyes," Constance had said to 44 A SUCCESSFUL MAN her husband, when it had at last emerged entire as if by magic from the moist earth, and it had continued to rest her eyes. She had another home away in the great city, but Sea Mew was her delight. She was as glad as the servants that the people were all gone and that she was free. It was so pleasant to do as one liked. She tired of the restraint of the houseful, and was secretly pleased that even Jack would stay away another ten days or so, since he was well and amused. The sight of the water always filled her imagination when she was thus solitary and had the time for contemplation, and she dis- missed the remembrance of the letter which had so annoyed her, and gave herself up to revery. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 45 CHAPTER III. THE opera-house was strained to its utmost capacity to accommodate the swaying multi- tude which filled it from floor to ceiling. McAffy's crowd McAffy was Lawton's only dangerous rival arrived early at the evening session, wearing blue badges on their bosoms and with a brass band in full accompaniment. When that genial Irishman appeared for a moment on the hotel balcony opposite, there was a great uproar and " whooping up." The convention was called to order by Albert Garrett, a short, deep-chested gentle- man with a giant's voice. A prayer was offered by the Reverend Doctor Huffie, pastor of the First Congregational Church of the town. He admonished the Almighty to be on hand, as it were, on this occasion, and to see that matters were properly conducted, to 46 A SUCCESSFUL MAN allay all tendency to inflation or pride in the hearts of the rival candidates, and to keep them from arrogance and self-seeking and finally to adjust things peacefully. A gruff voice from the gallery shouted twice during this invocation, " Louder, old man, louder !" Lohengrin Potts, a young county lawyer, who was much flushed and somewhat terri- fied, was escorted to the platform and an- nounced as the temporary chairman. People were good-natured and gave Lohengrin a round of cheers. He delivered himself of a speech, in which the only intelligible words were the names of the President and Vice- President of the United States and those of Lincoln and George Washington ; but apropos of what these last two were invoked it would be hard to determine. He assured his audi- ence that he for his part would yield to no dictation and would never allow his party to be swayed at the beck of any individual or corporation. Here he looked about him rather savagely. When he named the two aspirants to the gubernatorial chair of the A SUCCESSFUL MAN 47 State, the constituents of each one shouted themselves hoarse. After a short recess the permanent chair- man, an ex-judge, was selected, and also a secretary, whose name was Love. The com- mittee on rules then stated that a candidate would be chosen before the platform was read. There was some wrangling at this, and a vote was cast. The ayes being in the ascen- dency, business was resumed. A man, a colo- nel somebody, came out in the pit and told all he knew about Daniel Lawton. He had had two horses shot under him at Resaca, and he had won his colonel's epaulets on the battle- field; but he was so modest that he had always remained plain Dan Lawton to his friends ; he was a man of untarnished moral- ity, an honest financier, an experienced states- man, a true American, a Chesterfield in man- ner, a scholar and a gentleman. The man who was running against him, Marcus M. Curley, he prophesied if elected would prove false to every trust. He was a scoundrel, a liar, grossly immoral, a low person, and alto- 48 A SUCCESSFUL MAN gether unfit for a place of responsibility. (It may be said here that Mr. Curley was in fact a very decent fellow.) He insisted that the national honor was at stake, and, while he had nothing to say against Mr. McAffy, who was, he knew, an honorable gentleman, he felt nay, he knew that Daniel Lawton was the choice of the party at large and the only man sure of victory. " His record is clean ; he stands upon it," he cried, and he sat down amid vociferous applause. Then a long-winded and less happy orator got upon his legs, and dwelt upon McAffy's eminent virtues and untarnished fame. Mc- Affy hats were thrown wildly into the air, and his adherents' lungs seemed to be noisier than Lawton's. The delegates of the northern counties went solid for Daniel Lawton, except one, who presented the name of Alexander Hamilton Busk. Everybody knew this was only done to stave off Lawton's immediate success, and the name was silently dropped. One or two more names were advanced. After this the A SUCCESSFUL MAN 49 balloting commenced. It was spirited, but the McAffys felt almost immediately that their game was up. At the last count the totals were Lawton 385, McAffy 105, Busk 57, and a few others out of sight. Then it was moved by the unsuccessful to make Lawton's nomina- tion unanimous. This was done amid tremen- dous enthusiasm. The delegates all stood up afterwards and sang " Marching through Georgia," while Me Airy stepped across the platform and shook hands, with such cordiality as he could muster, with Mr. Lawton. The latter had only just entered the con- vention. He was at once called upon for a speech. He stepped forward and said a few words. His effort did not overlast fifteen minutes. To the occupants of the proscenium boxes in one of which were Mrs. Gresham and her friends, in the other Fred and Clem- ence Lawton and a few leaders of their father's party it seemed a very short speech indeed. Brilliant it certainly was. With heart beating high and a voice somewhat tremulous, he ut- tered his thanks in a pithy, manful, graceful c d . 5 50 A SUCCESSFUL MAN way, pledging himself to do his duty boldly and not to disappoint his friends. He had a special gift at unprepared utterance; he was clear, sonorous, even eloquent. His English was flowing, terse, and forcible, with just a suggestion here and there of poetic sentiment, and never an instant's lapse into sentimen- tality or affectation. Clemence Lawton listened breathlessly to her father. Through all the early part of the evening her political fervor had been inter- fered with by her entranced observance of the party in the opposite box, her brother having told her that he had seen Mrs. Gresham be- fore when he was visiting his friend Blake on Long Island; that she was a lady of the highest fashion, and took five-barred fences with as much ease as she led the dance at the hunt balls afterwards. " I think she is just perfectly lovely," said Clemence. " She's no end of a swell." " Were you introduced ?" " Well no not exactly." Fred didn't like A SUCCESSFUL MAN 5J to admit that Blake himself was not acquainted with Mrs. Gresham, and only dared look at her from great and respectful distances. There were two ladies in the box with her and quite a crowd of gentlemen. The latter were in evening dress. They chattered a great deal among themselves, laughed once or twice rather disturbingly, and did not seem profoundly impressed with the convention. Mrs. Gresham, however, was an exception. She had leaned over and listened, apparently entirely absorbed in the row of faces before her, in the speeches, and in the voting, ob- livious of her companions. When Daniel Lawton rose she turned to hush them. " See," she said, " he is going to speak. I think it very exciting." The Turkish minister, who had been se- cured, screwed an eye-glass into a limpid, dark eye and pushed a little towards the front of the box. May Gerold also put up her enam- elled lorgnette and craned forward. " Is that Lawton ? Why, Con, the man's a perfect beauty !" 52 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN "He looks like some great poet or musi- cian, doesn't he ?" " A superb head !" The man's eloquence silenced everybody. The sigh of an infant would have seemed loud and profane. When he ceased, the hum of approval in the boxes was drowned by the delirium in the orchestra and family circle. "Would you like to know him?" The speaker was Tom Fane. " Why, of course. How will you manage it?" " I will have him here in two minutes ;" and he left the box. He stopped Mayor Healey, who was just descending from the platform, whom he knew very well, and told him that Mrs. Jack Gresham and some ladies wished to shake hands with the hero of the night The mayor had heard of the Jack Greshams : of course the great capitalist and his wife were not obscure people. In the mean while the Lawton children and the crowd were filing out into the aisles. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 53 When Daniel Lawton was ushered into Mrs. Gresham's presence, all the party were standing up in the box hunting for their wraps. His entrance caused a little disturb- ance. She looked up, and Tom Fane pre- sented him. They gazed at each other as strangers do, he indifferently, she with curi- osity. She was one of those women, however, at whom men do not look with impunity twice, and Lawson proved no exception. She said, "We will wait for a moment, until the crowd disperses. Will you stay with us a few minutes, or are you expected elsewhere to-night ?" " I am free for the present," he answered, " and will do myself the honor of escorting you to your carriage." What could have been more banal or com- monplace? Yet the next five minutes it was hardly more left a vivid impression on them both. She said some low, flattering words about his speech, that while she had often heard of his gifts, they had been to her the revelation of a great power. 5* 54 A. SUCCESSFUL MAN " I never," she said, " took my eyes from your lips for one moment; I was quite en- chained." She thought that he received her praise coldly. She had expected that he would at least tell her that he had noticed her face in the box, she had been so near him. He did not, however, and the delinquency gave her a movement of pique, almost of resentment, so accustomed was she to compliment. " I dare say he would be an oaf in the drawing-room," she said to herself. The others, who had gone out into the lob- bies, came back to look for her, and, leaning on Lawton's arm, picking their way down the stairs through the crowd which still blocked the door-way, they reached the sidewalk at last. "An oaf" he certainly was not to-night. Hats were lifted and voices raised in felicitation and greeting as he passed, and the elegant woman at his side felt as if her own brow was circled for a moment with half of his laurels. Her heart beat high under its imprisoning A SUCCESSFUL MAN 55 laces, and the hand which rested upon his broad- cloth sleeve trembled with agreeable nervous excitement. As they emerged into the moonlit square, the band struck up " Hail to the Chief." He, too, was just a little intoxicated, and the soft pressure of a woman's arm seemed a fit- ting accompaniment to his exaltation. He held her slender hand for a moment in his broad one at parting, and it gave him a queer sensation, such as he had not known for a very long time. He did not feel quite cer- tain whether it was the hand or the music or the moonshine. It was a touch of returning romance that had been dimmed by the years. She leaned out to him from the portiere. "If you ever come across the bay," she said, gravely, "we shall feel much honored if you will stop and see us. I am generally at home about five o'clock." She had never before asked a man to visit her upon such brief acquaintance, and the impulse remained unexplained. - Then the carriage had driven off with its burden to the 56 A SUCCESSFUL MAN quay, near which the yacht was pulling at her anchor. " Just like Con's luck," said Mrs. Gerold, " to go to her first political shindy and come out leading the only important magnate by the ear. She carried off all the cheers, and people took the rest of us for humble append- ages, useless hangers-on of greatness." "Are you sure it was luck?" said Fane. " Oh, well, a siren's luck if you like." The Turkish minister, who hadn't relished being unimportant, now laboriously explained to Mrs. Gerold, sitting up very stiffly in the front of the carriage, holding his hat between his knees, that Mr. Lawton, while undoubt- edly a very distinguished person, might not be elected after all. He had insisted that Tom Fane should state matters clearly to him all the way across in the boat, and was glad now to show the ladies that he was entirely aufait. " Oh, he'll be elected," she replied, stifling a yawn ; " but you may be sure, if he is or is not, I give him less than thirty-eight hours to A SUCCESSFUL MAN 57 be on Mrs. Gresham's back terrace sipping weak decoctions of tea, and wagging Ms tail when she deigns to throw him a bit of stale cake. Eh, Connie ?" But Constance remained silent. As she climbed up the side of the yacht, which looked like a phantom thing swinging under the stars, and stepped upon its deck, she felt like one embarking upon some pleasant -voyage of discovery whose outset is full of allure- ment. It had not occurred to Daniel Lawton to be surprised at his wife's absence. Her lack of any earnest participation in his political life had ceased to be, if indeed it ever had been, a source of regret to him. She had at least never put any palpable spokes in his wheel of good fortune, and he knew he owed much to her of that tranquillity of brain so important to those whose existence is spent in the rush and smoke of conflict. He was one of those men who are fond of mixing with his kind for discussion, debate, or argument, and of such society as fell to his lot; but he 58 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN was in no sense what one may call gregarious. Among men he had few close friendships and craved fewer, and among women he had none. He had never known a rich intimacy with a woman who was his equal. He would hardly have acknowledged to himself that his wife was not a companion to him, that his children were not necessities, or that when in the house his happiest and fullest hours were spent in his study. He had early in life con- tracted the habit of a certain solitariness at home, and his wife had respected his seclu- sion. Busy with pressing practical details from morning until eve, he wrested hard- earned night and evening hours from fireside chat or needed sleep, for study. He could do with very little sleep, for he had an iron con- stitution and great virility of mind and body. To give an example of the man's energy and courage : Unable to find a translation of an important German work on political economy which he wished to read, and irritated at his own disability, he set himself at work in the evenings to learn a very difficult language at A SUCCESSFUL MAN 59 a time when press of private business joined to official duties well-nigh overwhelmed him. In three months he had gone through the book with a dictionary. In six he could read German with ease. His wife looked on. She rarely talked to him on literary matters, being herself no reader and having a most modest opinion of her own powers as a critic. Of politics she had the vague jealousy which women who have no doubt of their husbands' or lovers' fidelity feel for his favorite pursuit or pastime. This lack of alacrity on her part might have vexed a more exacting husband, but left him indifferent. She did not notice this indifference, or she would have called it by another name. His cares and ambitions gave him no time for splitting straws, not even with his wife. All he asked of home was leisure and calm, and she accepted the situation, seeking no expla- nation of the lack of all depth in their inter- course. She was not analytical, and then he was so indulgent ! Their acquaintances thought her very infe- 60 A SUCCESSFUL MAN rior to her husband. Household questions, economies or expenditures, the children, their health, their education, their future, formed the basis of her communings with him. He had ceased to expect more of marriage, or indeed of women. He had a maiden sister who loved polemics, had advanced ideas, and wore spectacles. She was a shrewd, discursive person, of ready wit, whose conversation he enjoyed, and with whom once a year he had a little sharp-shooting on questions political, literary, or religious; but he considered her a man in petticoats. The relations between men and women were, he thought, simple enough. By his intellect he understood most things ; but the secrets of the passions baffle the keenest insight. He had mused, it is true, sometimes, over the vagaries of the sexual passion, its inconsequences and its follies, as he heard them whispered about him or read of them in his morning paper. He had shuddered, and felt glad that such irregularities and tragedies had never touched him or his, not in the least from any pharisai- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 61 cal spirit of superciliousness or because he fancied for a moment that they could not, but because he was naturally clean and whole- some. Such things filled him with unrest and uneasiness. "Who knows? Perhaps he sus- pected the existence, somewhere in the deeper recesses of his own being, of an animalism which must always exist in rounded tempera- ments, and that, given other circumstances, might have been a foe to his peace. Now he stopped to send his wife a telegram. He wrote it standing in the hotel corridor. " Nominated on the second ballot. Let no one sit up. I shall be kept in town very late. "D. L." On his way to join some friends who ex- pected him to eat oysters and drink cham- pagne with them, his thought was, curiously enough, less of his evening's triumph than of the sorry figure he had cut in Mrs. Gresham's box, or at least so it had seemed to him. He had felt extraordinarily diffident, and had re- 6 62 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN ceived her sweet flatteries without warmth or even common courtesy. " I declare," he thought, " we go out so lit- tle it is ridiculous ! I forget how to behave. That lovely lady must have thought me half a savage." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 63 CHAPTER IV. Two days later, Lawton was called upon to attend an evening meeting of his constituents at the city across the water. He took a mid- day boat, concluded it would be convenient to pass the night, and, registering at the princi- pal hotel, the Goshen House, where he wa8 well known and treated with marked consid- eration, be left his bag in his room and saun- tered out for a stroll. His path lay between the trimmed green lawns of splendid private places and the ocean. Here the public were allowed to flit past, skirting the cliffs which hugged the shores, if they would respect the laws of proprietorship, and not pause too long or injure shrubs and flower-beds ; and, on the whole, they were grateful for their privileges and discreet in their behavior. It was a sultry afternoon of the late sum- mer, and the twilight was drawing nigh. A 64 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN warm glow rested upon the laughing sea, which was to-night neither angry nor turbu- lent, but wooing as a capricious woman can be in her softer humor. The love of nature, as indeed of all beauty, was strong in Lawton. It was untutored, and hence all the more satisfying. After walking for a half-hour, enjoying every breath of the golden air, he came suddenly to a curve in the path and to a stand-still before a wonder- ful picture, Sea Mew rising up out of its rock right in front of him like an enchanted palace. " Is this Mr. Greshanr s place ?" he stopped and inquired of a woman, a maid who was sitting alone in a summer-house which jutted just here out over the rocky beach. " That is Monsieur Graysham's house," re- plied Leontine, with her pretty accent. " Thank you." He took off his hat to her as he moved on. " Qu'esl-ce que a pent $tre que ce monsieur ?" she thought. He looked different from the habitu&s. She felt some doubts concerning him, and com- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 55 mented, when she saw him hesitate a moment and then walk up following the path through the rose gardens, that he was some ecrivain or samnt, such as madame received occasionally. " II a une belle ieie tout de meme" she said to herself, as he disappeared in the shrubbery, " and he is very polite." Partly through idleness, and partly through curiosity to see a place whose glories were on every tongue, and more especially, shall it be said, to efface an impression of his own awk- wardness which had lingered disagreeably in his memory since his meeting with Mrs. Gresham, he impulsively determined to call upon her. " She invited me," he thought. When he rang the bell, however, he was half surprised at his own temerity, and found himself hoping that she would not be at home. She had seemed to him very fastidious and unap- proachable, and he felt a secret fear of her. The women he knew had never been in any way alarming to him. He was told that Mrs. Gresham was at e 6* 66 A SUCCESSFUL MAN home, however, _and he was conveyed across interminable vestibules and through several large drawing-rooms, whose heavy portieres were pushed back to let him pass by the two footmen who piloted him, until at last he reached the terrace. " Mr. Lawton," announced Barnes. The picture which here met his eyes was also very charming. What he saw was three or four women clad in light summer gar- ments, with slim, tightly-laced figures, carry- ing marvellous hats and parasols on and over their heads, sitting or reclining in various attitudes of ease, that ran through a pretty gamut of color, while a half-dozen men lounged about them, one dangling his feet from the marble centre-table. These also wore more or less picturesque attire. Some were still in morning-coats ; one in top-boots and breeches, just from the ride ; one in yacht- ing cap and flannels ; two in frock-coats, with gardenias in their button-holes, and canes and stiff hats held between their knees. He heard a woman's voice say, " The thirty- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 67 eight hours are not yet up ; am I a prophet or no ?"' Then a man's voice replied, "Fair Lady Con's new fad." Then somebody said " Hush !" and there was a sound of suppressed laughter, while he stepped down among them, and his hostess came quickly forward to receive him. " How exquisite she was and so different from the others !" he thought, as he watched her lithe grace, her energetic, harmonious movements, and listened to her caressing voice of welcome. He thought she made the others look empty, trivial, and awkward. He hardly formulated this impression, but was only conscious in looking at her of that sense of contentment which a man of discernment and imagination feels in what is complete and finished. She seemed to him the essence of that culture the world imparts. He was glad to see there were such women in America. She might have been an empress. Royal princes' with whom she had danced at foreign courts had told her this before. 68 A SUCCESSFUL MAN She shook hands with him, and there was in the firm rapid touch something of force and of character. She seemed to leave the impress of herself upon his palm. She named him only to one or two of the women who were near her, and to none of the men pres- ent. This seemed to him unusual, belonging himself to a world where introductions and hand-shakings were held of paramount impor- tance. Yet, on the whole, he thought it a relief. He also noticed that after a few light words about the lovely evening no particular effort was made for his entertainment. One young woman did indeed ask him, looking up at the awnings, what boat had brought him over, and if there were one every two hours, as she wished to visit some friends near his town ; but she did not wait for his answer and cut it short by asking him if he didn't think this terrace " a dear." The servants here brought in tea and bread-and-butter, and, while Mrs. Gresham busied herself among the cups, he had plenty of time for observation, and, being a careful A SUCCESSFUL MAN 69 student of humanity in its varied aspects, he was a good deal amused. These people all looked to him about the same age, he would have said varying anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five, and very much alike. They were evidently extremely intimate among themselves, having numberless jokes which he did not understand. Their intercourse indeed seemed to consist in peals of pointless merriment and an exchange of monosyllables which were to him generally unintelligible. There existed here evidently a freemasonry whose grip he had never been taught. It made him feel, however, somehow as if they were very clever and wide-awake and he very old and dull. They called each other by their Christian names or nicknames or by appella- tions even more informal. One six-footer, with a drooping blonde moustache and an eyeglass, was addressed by the women as " Baby." The " Baby" could not find a seat to his taste, and complained of this, affecting a child's whimper. "Come, 'Baby,' stop crying," said a girl 70 A SUCCESSFUL MAN in a sailor hat. " I will give you half of mine.''' " Why, you have it all filled with your own sails." " I will take in a reef. Come, I will show you ! Let me take your arm, so. If we go down together, we will just fit in." They did in fact " go down" together and fitted into the wide cane-bottomed seat which was made to do duty for both. The young lady was pretending to smoke a cigarette, and the man took it from between her lips and placed it in his own. Lawton wondered if the next move would be a masculine arm cast about the round waist which fashion had tortured into a compass of nineteen inches. He also wondered, in parenthesis, how the larger functions of life could go on within such a narrow limit. There was no especial appearance of ill- health, however, about the young woman, for she was dazzlingly fair and blooming. Her high aquiline features were encircled by a quantity of copper-colored hair. Her thin A SUCCESSFUL MAN 71 arms, tightly encased in the cloth of her yachting costume, were held somewhat away from her sides, so that one could appreciate a slenderness which leaned to angularity. She talked in a key which was apparently bor- rowed, not her own, with an affected intona- tion, and bore herself with an arrogance which seemed to assert, "I am a beauty, look!" She was called one. Leaning back in her chair, she exhibited a good deal of silk stock- ing, and one was more absorbed in surmises as to how her hose could so exactly match her hair, her gown, her gloves, and her para- sol, and in paying tribute to her artistic skill in this matter, than to any study of the shapely leg beneath them. It was soon borne in upon Mr. Lawton that he need have felt no anxiety as to the young lady's danger from her neighbor's ill-repressed ardor. They .con- tinued to sit next to each other for some- min- utes, to exchange cabalistic phrases, and enig- matic smiles, and yet Lawton saw that nothing in the world could have been. 'less suggestive 72 A SUCCESSFUL MAN of impropriety. He in his high shirt collar and she in her brilliant hardness resembled automatic puppets; sexless! one felt they might have sat there until doomsday and no one have been the better or worse off in this generation or the next. By and by Mrs. Gresham called out, " You know you are absolutely ridiculous, you two ! Geraldine, come and help me pour out the tea!" Thus admonished, Geraldine moved to the table, and he of the yellow eyelash stretched himself out complacently as if he greatly pre- ferred having the chair to himself. Mrs. Gresham now gave Lawton his cup and addressed him particularly, as if she fan- cied he was rather too much left out in the cold. She spoke of the convention and her keen interest in the coming canvass. " I am already hard at work for you," she said, " and have a promise of a dozen votes from those tiresome, discouraging indepen- dents." He sipped his tea with the breath of her A SUCCESSFUL MAN 73 close to him, her garments almost sweeping his feet, and he found himself wishing these superfluous other people would cease their idle prattle and go away and leave them alone. By and by she seemed to divine his thoughts. " Come, now, my dears," she said, " you must all of you clear away and be gone. There is a pernicious damp coming, and you feminines have to crimp your hair and get your com- plexions in order for the ball to-night ; and as for you, my lazy gentlemen, it is high time you got yourselves out of your morning-coats. I, too, must soon be arraying myself in my dinner-gown." There was a cry of protest and a momentary strife of tongues, but they did all admit at last that it was later than they had thought. One of the men, whom they called Fane, and who wore a frock-coat, insisted that he was faultlessly dressed, that he was perfectly com- fortable, and that he intended remaining where he was until his bones bleached upon the terrace; but the women protested and D 7 74 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN dragged him away, and gradually, in parties of twos and threes, they dispersed. Lawton arose and apologized for so long an intrusion. "I only wanted to be rid of them," she said, when they were alone. " I have hours before dinner. By the way, can't you dine here ? I expect only a few guests." " Thanks. I must dine at half-past six, as my meeting is before eight." "Ah ! and I dine at eight. Well, it will be another time. In the mean while, don't leave me yet !" She said the last words as a spoiled child would implore a favor, letting his eyes meet and rest upon her own. " I want to show you another view ; come !" So saying, she led her too willing captive down the terrace steps on to a ledge of the weedy rocks. They stood side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder, speechless, looking out at the placid waters. The draperies of her long tea-gown fluttered against him with a soft swish. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 75 " What a divine night ! And you see this expanse at every hour ? How I envy you !" "Ah ! that is the misfortune of all acquisi- tions," she said, smiling. "Envy! Others tried to purchase this point, but Mr. Gresham was too quick for them. They feel towards us a good deal as McAfly does towards you." "And don't people envy you other things besides the place ?" She recognized the ring of flattery in his tone, but, woman-like, was determined to make him more explicit. " What, for instance ?" "Your loveliness, your grace, and, above all, your individuality," he said, enthusiasti- cally. She blushed with pleasure. " He is really very nice," she thought. He hardly knew himself. Some one else seemed speaking in him. "My individuality?" she said. " Yes, just that. It impressed me the very first moment. It must be a constant stum- 76 A SUCCESSFUL MAN bling-block of offence to others. It is never pardoned," he said, smiling. " You speak from your own experience ?" " Well, possibly, a little." " Why, of course, if one gains anything, any prestige even, it is only by displacing some one else. If one rises in the least, one must do so at the expense of another. What one grasps another fails to attain. Where one succeeds another goes to the wall. It is the law of competition which is so cruel after all. The little people not tall enough to seize the fruit which hangs from the highest bough are never pleased ; they never can be fair to the long-legged creatures who reach and grasp." " Individuality," he continued, dreamingly, " is the torture of the inquisition to mediocre minds. They hate it." "And yet how character imposes. Doc- trines and ideas are less seductive than they used to be. There is no faith now, but one involuntarily admires any force, even when it is applied to evil. It seems to promise guidance. We are weak; we want to obey, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 77 to follow. I read somewhere the other day 'Man is the born serf of any strong will which passes near him.' ' " Do you think of such serious things ?" " Why not ?" " I don't know. It is unusual. Women like you have rarely the time," he said, simply. He was looking down at her from his great height, with an expression that was at once puzzled and deeply interested. She was a new experience to him, and fascinating. Her spirit rose with its insatiate love of power, for she knew this expression in the eyes of men. " I have nothing to do, nothing that you would consider of the slightest consequence. I think about everything." She moved a few steps away from him on the rocks ; he followed her quickly and seized her elbow almost roughly. " Look ! look !" he said. To his amazement, she shook his hand off haughtily. " Oh !" she thought, " if he is going to be familiar;" but in a moment she recognized 7* 78 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN that he had touched her arm in ignorance, not in impertinence. " I wanted you to see that ship in the sun's last rays, but it is too late now, it has slipped into the gray. I beg your pardon. Did I offend you ?" He could not imagine why, but it was evi- dent she was annoyed. " Oh, it was nothing. I saw perfectly." Then, feeling that it would be a kindness to give him a lesson at once, " I dislike," she said, " to be touched." He remembered the scene in the arm-chair on the terrace which Mrs. Gresham had looked at so complacently, and confessed to himself that he had not then thought her a prude. He, however, only repeated, "I beg your pardon," twirling his hat in his hands much disconcerted. The dejected mien of the great man and his attitude as of a reproved school-boy filled Mrs. Gresham's heart with a sudden sense of pleas- ure and of compunction; she tried to bring healing balm to his wound. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 79 " Oh, the ships, they pass like that all day. They are very pretty," she said, lightly. " I have intruded too long upon you," he answered stiffly. " I was passing, and thought I would stop for a moment. I came over only for this committee to-night. I leave to-morrow." "I did not imagine that you swam the Hellespont for my beaux yeux" she said, smiling, but her smile was forced. His can- dor, which in some moods would have been a refreshment to her, seemed now out of place and somewhat jarring. To this he replied not at all. It was unfortunate, for his silence went into the balance against him of that strict account which women keep for and against the men who occupy them. A hopelessly discordant note had been sounded between them, and they parted mutually dissatisfied. He had seemed less to her than on the first evening, naturally enough, for he was less in tune with his surroundings and she remained to him an enigma he could not solve. "He has not the usages," she said to her- 80 A SUCCESSFUL MAN self, as she tripped up the stairs to her bed- room ; and oh how she wished a voice might be raised to combat this assertion. She was dying to talk him over, discuss him. She was soon to be gratified, for some one else was dying with curiosity to know what and who he might be. " Did the monsieur who was walking on the cliffs find madame ?" asked Leontine. ""What monsieur?" Mrs. Gresham knew perfectly well to whom her maid referred. " I did not know him, madame. He was very large and very polite," she added, after a moment's reflection. "Polite?" " Yes, he spoke so amiably and took off his hat to me. Is it not strange, madame, how much there is in a manner ?" " And did you think him handsome, too ?" asked her mistress, while the Frenchwoman unloosed her hair. " Oh, very, madame ! Quite the type d'hommt ctttbre. Not exactly like what one expects every day." A SUCCESSFUL MAN gl " "Well, lie is celebrated." Leontine pricked up her ears. " Un ecri- vain f" This vague epithet covered for her a recognition of all greatness which titles and wealth did not bestow. "ISTo, un homme politique." " Ah !" Then, after a pause, "It will amuse madame to receive him ! It will be a change." Then, in a moment of weakness, Mrs. Gresham said to her maid, rather low and tentatively, "Yes, but 'these men have not our ideas." " I should think," said the shrewd domestic, "that that would make them more interest- ing. They must be tout de meme, very intel- ligent. I am sure that this gentleman has beaucoup de talent." WTien Mrs. Gresham was ready for her guests, her spirits, which had been dampened, had risen again. 82 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER V. HE came again three days later. He mumbled something about another meeting at the village two miles away, which he was expected to address in the late afternoon. But he did not enlarge upon the urgency of this claim, and Mrs. Gresham asked no ques- tions. It was in the morning this time, and the cliffs were flooded with the summer sunshine. He found the lady he sought standing on the lawn, apparently costumed for a walk. She was all in white, with a little close toque set over her dusky brown hair and a wide white lace umbrella shadowing her face. There was a sweet seriousness upon her lips. He thought he had never seen her looking so handsome. Hers was an elusive sort of beauty ; it did not invite analysis, and there were people who A SUCCESSFUL MAN 83 had questioned its details. Those on whom she deigned to cast her glamour, however, had no doubt. She was, at any rate, one of those women who never pass unnoticed in the world, and have a fatal power of relegating their sisters to the background. If it be but a trick, after all, it is one which awakens in inimical hearts tumults of impotent rivalry; in the friendly, emulation and an effort at imitation. It is probably to its possessor a misfortune. She hesitated a moment when he accosted her, as if to turn back with him to the house, and then said, " How would you like to walk with me ? I am thirsting for exercise and air." "I should enjoy it above all things." They descended the path and were soon skirting the sea. " How lucky I am. Five minutes later and I should have missed you." "I try to take my constitutional early, or a ride when I have time. The latter, how- ever, is more complicated. It necessitates a 84 A SUCCESSFUL MAN change of clothes and the tub afterwards, and, really, to-day I could not lose all of my morn- ing." "You must have known how much I wanted to see you again." " I knew no such thing, and am inclined to think you politicians are adept silver-tongued deceitful diplomats, too." He laughed. "I have generally been ac- cused of being too honest." After a moment he asked her if she were still alone. He longed to make her talk of herself, of her life. "Yes," she said; "my lord is hunting in the Aroostook country far away up in the north, and I am rid of all guests until the end of the month." " Do guests weary you ?" "Oh, I don't trouble much about them. Now and then there are unpleasant complica- tions. The last time two women arrived twenty-four hours before the rest of the party and I found they had quarrelled' and were not on speaking terms." " I don't doubt you were equal to the occa- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 5 eion. You strike me as a person who would be mistress of almost any situation." "I would courtesy to you if I were not afraid of tumbling over the cliffs. Thanks! Why, the next day I just had a headache and stayed in bed, and sent them word I was not coming down, and that they must amuse themselves together. When I met them at eight o'clock, they had made up, and were chattering like seventy magpies." "I wish political antagonisms could be as easily adjusted," he said, laughing. " I shall get you to teach me youf Machiavellian methods." " Oh, you do not require any lessons." He remembered the scene on the rocks of the other evening, and looked a little mis- chievously at her through the laces of her parasol. "You give pretty severe and efficacious ones sometimes when you think people are too bold." She felt herself blushing under his gaze, and, to disguise her embarrassment, suggested 8 86 A SUCCESSFUL MAN they should descend nearer to the water. It was possible to do so here ; there were natural steps in the rocks. He followed her with alacrity, as she skipped from ledge to ledge. She was secretly amused to find that, while he kept very close to her as if to assure her safety, he proffered her no assist- ance, not even the offer of conventional finger- tips. The lesson had sunk deep. It was absurd. By and by, panting a little, she let herself rest on a stone which formed a seat in the upheaved boulders, pulling her garments down with one hand over her long, narrow, daintily-shod feet. He sank to her side, but not too near. A ledge of the rocks overhung them, making, as it were, a back and a shelter over their heads. " What a poem this is !" " Yes, I often come here alone." " Are you really fond of solitude, then ?" he asked, incredulously. " Perhaps not, perhaps it is all pose," she said, with a little fine point of irony in her voice. A SUCCESSFUL MAN g7 "But you fine ladies owe yourselves to others." " For Heaven's sake don't call me that !" " What shall I call you then, a goddess ?" " Yes, much better." They talked together for a half-hour, sitting under the hot noon sunshine. "What do people say to -each other on such occasions, such people as were here ? They were both clever, full of vitality, of blood, of life. It is prob- able their conversation was not commonplace. It must be confessed that its burden fell princi- pally upon Mrs. Gresham. Mutually drawn to study each other, knowing nothing one of the other, they craved to unravel the mystery, to gain that knowledge which might prove pain. They were an incongruous pair enough : she in her exquisite gown, with that distinc- tive air of ease and repose the world gives to its votaries; he in his careless, ill-fitting clothes, intimidated, fearful of displeasing her, with his earnest, honest, beautiful face. He found no such eloquence in the presence of 88 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN her tranquility as surged so readily within him in the heated forum, where eager faces and coarse hands were held up to welcome and applaud him. Perhaps to the sated woman of fashion this silence was all the sweeter. She may have fathomed its secret homage. It was " differ- ent." Certain it is that she lingered. When she did at last ask him the hour, she was startled to find it so late. " I too am a laggard to-day," he said, " and have wasted too much of your time, and intruded myself, I fear, at the wrong mo- ment." " Is it being a laggard to lie on a rock at a lady's feet? I thought it was quite the re- verse." ""Well, it is not the kind of laggard we dread in a political campaign, surely," he answered, smiling ; " those whose eyes have to be rubbed open for them, who have to be carted to the polls and told whom to vote for. I know well enough what I want myself, and go for it with a directness which may be selfish." A SUCCESSFUL MAN gg "It is all the fault of this lazy languid morning," she cried, "and not yours, that Mrs. Gerold has been kept waiting a half- hour. We were to go Casinoward together. This sounds frivolous to you, no doubt, with all your important cares and occupations. Shall I he making you frivolous too ?" She asked the question with an instinct of what seemed to him the divinest coquetry. " You have already, if it he frivolous to he terribly happy !" They both remained dumb. The uttered words loomed up portentous, a landmark in the roadway of their fate. She was conscious of a swift emotion which flashed like light- ning through her being, leaving behind it the glow of some strange delight. Gratified vanity is probably the most perfect form of human enjoyment; I will not say the highest. Through the affections there is suf- fering ; and whatever joy the love of the Deity may bestow, its human prototype is always burdened with fear. A high authority tells us that " fear hath torment." 8* 90 A SUCCESSFUL MAN After this they exchanged but a few insig- nificant phrases until they reached the gate and she gave him her hand. "Good-by! good-by." " The next time," she called out after him from among her roses, greeting at the same time the dogs that came rushing to meet her, "Ah, Jock ! down Saxe ! the next time you must dine." He waved an assent to her and was out of sight. Still under the influence of a pleasurable sensation which made her step unusually buoyant, Constance came in from the heat into the cool, dim drawing-room. " Oh, May, I am so sorry !" "Well, my dear, I wondered just how long it would last, and now I know !" " How long what would last?" " Why, your tete-a-$te under the cliff with your governor philandering." " Where were you, pray ?" " Spying over at you for quite a while. It gave me a stiff neck. Oh, don't be alarmed, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 91 I didn't borrow the Gaskells' telescope. What the naked eye divulged was quite sufficient." " What a goosey you are !" " The saddest part of it is ugh ! how my hair-pins do stick into my cranium !" And Mrs. Gerold walked to the mirror and began unloosening her veil. " The worst of it is that the poor thing takes you seriously." "Why shouldn't he?" " Constance Gresham, don't gerrymander that way with me ! I am in deadly earnest, and I think it simply brutal !" As she spoke she drew out rapidly one or two long pins that fastened in her hat. "Dio mio, what a relief!" she said, readjust- ing her voilette and smoothing it down over her rather long, sallow cheeks. " Brutal ?" " Yes ! What do you do with them, Con ? How far do you go ? Where do you leave them ? I have often asked myself; wondered how good and how bad you were ! What shall you do with him ? He is tragic." 92 A SUCCESSFUL MAN Mrs. Gresham had not decided what she would do with him, or even considered the question before, but, being a woman of quick resources, replied, laughing, "Why, make him the fashion !" " Don't you know that you would be ruining him politically, and that there is a fierce light on him just now, and that you may scorch your own pretty little fingers ?" "I accept the kindly warning, which is of course the direst nonsense, Madam May. I have seen him exactly three times." " Twice" too often for his comfort, poor wretch !" "What did you think of him the other afternoon ? How did he impress you ?" Constance's curiosity pushed her to this imprudent questioning. She thought her friend shrewd, and wanted to gauge her opinion. "To tell you the truth, I was so engaged in wondering how we impressed him I had hardly time for a detailed study." "Ah ! did we shock his majesty ?" A SUCCESSFUL MAN 93 "Well, Constance, you must admit we're pretty bad !" " You mean Geraldine ? I did myself feel provoked with her." " Oh, Geraldine ! Yes, and those men so rude. I could see he was watching us and thought us a pack of silly, senseless snobs." " Was I uncivil ?" "You? !N"o. I admired you immensely. You managed it all so nicely. You are always a lady, Constance. You could not be vulgar. Why, if you did a vulgar thing, it would straightway look becoming." " Much obliged. The compliment is equiv- ocal, but I take anything that is offered." " You know perfectly what I mean. Those fellows that hang about you are not worthy to touch your shoestrings." " They are harmless." " That is just it, and just where you differ from the rest of us." " So I am not harmless ?" " Not exactly. Why, Constance, what could Geraldine breathe into a man, do you sup- 94 A SUCCESSFUL MAN pose ? Any deed of prowess ? Any inspira- tion of ambition? Eh? Any fortitude, or even a crime or two? We women forgive men who are wary in gallantry; but you , know, Connie, we want them reckless in love, don't we ? See how eloquent I grow ! Ger- aldine ! What a terror she is, to be sure. They play with her because she is chic. Oh, I will not deny that ! But what a doll ! Very hard, but not even hard enough to be pic- turesquely cruel and unscrupulous like the wicked woman in the plays. Just nothing! You! . . . Well," continued Mrs. Gerold, impulsively, " if a man cared for you, Con- stance, I can imagine it would be an in- ferno !" " My dear, after this you must need some refreshment. Shall I ring for a lemonade ?" " Oh, laugh at me if you will ! I knew that man thought us idiots; I see things." "That is evident, but you won't tell me what you thought of him." "I thought him shockingly dressed and very interesting." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 95 " This, at last, is direct." "I confess, Connie, I can imagine the be- ginning might be original. The second or silent stage, my dear, is always the same. No matter what or who the man may be, he loses all conversational power and becomes a hope- less bore. As for the third stage, the cross, grumpy condition, when they want Heaven only knows what, it is simply unendurable." "Mr. Lawton and I are not entering into any 'stages.' Do not be frightened." "Pshaw! Do you expect me to swallow that ? "Why make him unhappy, Constance ?" she continued. " What is the use of making people unhappy ? I know it is generally the result of being unhappy one's self. He seems a good man." Mrs. Gerold paused, and then continued, with a sort of muffled hopelessness in her usually sharp-keyed voice, and Constance did not interrupt her. " Oh, I am not going to probe into your life, my dear. I know your reserve ; I think it very delicate. I never believed you a happy 96 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN woman, with a mind or heart at peace, but I have respected you because you gave no sign. Look at me ! I went marivauding about, pub- lishing my marital infelicities while they lasted telling my woes to all who would listen and people listen it amuses them it was a sorry spectacle ! and, when I asked poor Wilbur's pardon, he was already past words of mine, beyond reach." "You were sorely tried, May," said Con- stance, gently, " and very young." " Bah ! I might at least have tried to cover up his faults. I was not too young for that. I need not have been alarmed ; they were per- ceptible without lenses," she continued, with a sort of grim humor ; " but I need not have lent mine to the community. Why, we do as much for our servants, say a good word for them! It would have been more decent. Don't you suppose I worried him ? Ask my sweet mother-in-law !" " Every one said she was much to blame, that she made difficulties for you." " Oh, I dare say. I tried her severely A SUCCESSFUL MAN 97 enough, and she was not one of the indulgent kind. I was not an angel. Connie, do you know I ask Wilbur every night to forgive me before I go to sleep, out loud in the dark? You didn't believe that of me, did you ? Do you suppose he hears ?" And she laughed. But her eyes met Mrs. Gresham's, and the two women contemplated each other across the waves of that icy sea of conventionality which keeps souls barred, locked from each other and apart forever. They gazed immov- able as if mutually hypnotized. The harsh laugh expired upon Mrs. Gerold's lips; then even the ghost of a wan smile died. Gradually a curious change came over her face, a tremor, a cloud. The mouth was convulsed and the glittering dark eyes filled. She did not cry out or weep, but her pale face was distorted in an anguish which shook Con- stance with a poignant pity. She ran across the floor and threw her arms about her friend's neck. ""We are all weak and erring," she whis- = g 9 98 A SUCCESSFUL MAN pered, under her breath, and then burst into tears. They remained thus for a while clasped in each other's arms. Constance offered no fur- ther word of consolation ; she knew it would be ill-timed. "Warm, rough natures inflict such upon us in their kindly unwisdom, but Mrs. Gresham's taste was unerring in these things, even had her feelings not been deeply stirred. . Mrs. Gerold was the first to speak. She had shed no tears, and began to wipe away Constance's with her fine handkerchief. " Forgive me, dear ! Come, let us go into the other room. Let me cheer you up a bit. Have you seen the papers to-day ? They are full of horrors, as usual." Constance swabbed her eyes and face and shook her head wofully. "Do you remember that little red-haired thing who came here last summer, that Mrs. Christopher somebody, I can never remem- ber the creature's name, whom every one felt called upon to snub and ill-use ? A SUCCESSFUL MAN 99 She has been 'imprudent,' as the reporters delicately express it, and in a fit of repentance confessed everything to her husband." " "Well ?" Constance tried to be interested, still dabbing at her eyes. "Well, he shot the other gentleman, the lover, and now the husband is in prison. It is quite gruesome." "Which proves what I have always said," and Constance looked up through her tears, " that fools ought never to misbehave." " I think it is generally the clever people who do the silly things." "Yes, that is true enough, but their wit is a wedge with which they can at least disen- tangle and extricate themselves." " Ah ! sometimes Mesdames Clotho, Lach- esis, and Atropos step in and huddle them along and cut the thread before they have time. There is another most edifying account in the papers to-day of a man in Paris carry- ing off an American girl." " Mercy ! what for ? Is it any one we know?" 100 A SUCCESSFUL MAN " Ko, I think not. They were stopped at the station by her pursuing parent, and she was brought over to Cincinnati, where she now resides." " Fancy !" " One of these days she will marry some re- spectable little dry-goods clerk, and oh, when she is settled and blissful, how she will pine for and regret her foreigner !" " May," said Constance, laughing half hys- terically, " you are incorrigible." " Ma chdre, it is written : She will think, as she trundles and trots the poor clerk's babies, * and darns his shirt-fronts, and pins his paper collars on from behind, that she was once madly loved, a heroine. She will dream dreams, and what dreams! She will be lenient to the memory of the bold, base ad- venturer, and think her excellent husband does not ' understand her.' His methods will be too simple. Voila lesfemmes! Adieu, dear Con! Take care of yourself." And Mrs. Gerold tripped off, giving a backward push to her narrow skirts. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 1Q1 Constance stood at the window watching her. "And to think that in her heart is a passionate remorse !" At a dinner-party that night she was taken in by the host. She usually had the seat of honor, and on her left was a man who was uncongenial to her. She found her host equally so, however, and the party generally ill-assorted, and in her weariness she turned to this neighbor. He was a man prominent in finance, in society, and of some political in- fluence. She began to lay traps for him to mention a certain name. Few of her world knew Lawton personally, but this man, she felt sure, must have met him. At last he did speak of him. " I saw Dan Lawton yesterday," he said. " He and his heelers are on the stump. An unscrupulous lot they are." This was certainly not encouraging. Having delivered himself thus far, he relapsed into con- temptuous silence. His manner, even more than his words, was a covert attack. Mrs. Gresham drew away from him. She 9* 102 A SUCCESSFUL MAN did not know he had secretly coveted the nomination Daniel Lawton had secured, and had plotted and wheedled for it and had failed. She turned the subject quickly, re- membering Emerson's warning that it is our own idle curiosity which gives others the power to wound us. She instinctively felt that this man knew nothing of Daniel Law- ton, yet was his enemy. She could have struck him gladly across his unpleasant pursed- up lips, yet etiquette forced her to civility and smiles for the next hour. She left early, with a heart of lead, her nerves unstrung and out of tune. As she drove home she thought how unjustly we weigh and judge each other. How mean and petty are the jealousies of the world, and what tragedy lies underneath ! She remembered that her set had praised her warmly for her devotion to her mother in the latter's last illness. The barbarians of Uganda, the Dinka, Bari, and Dango tribes, throw their dying parents into the desert, and expose to the cruel blasts of heaven the breasts from which they have sucked in life. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 1Q3 Had they expected her, because she was the child of luxury and of pleasure, to do no better than these savages ? The commendation had wounded and angered her, and she had even resented it once with scourging sarcasm, for her honeyed tongue could also scathe. After- wards she had been loudly blamed for not wearing her mourning long enough, and had thus struck the balance. Now, leaning back among the cushions of her open carriage, looking up at the calm, cold stars, wishing that her unquiet spirit might drink in of their peace, she thought of these things, and of others, of her own wasted energies, of the man whose letter she had read so lately throwing away his youth because she had been vain and idle. She looked at herself less leniently to-night. "May is right," she thought. "I can at least let him alone." 104 A SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER VI. WHEN Daniel Lawton disembarked the next morning at Ms pier, lie found his buggy and man waiting for him. The latter handed him half a dozen letters and telegrams, which he read on his way through the town. Whirling along the street, he chanced to look up as he passed the sign of a new tailor who advertised himself as being a branch of a celebrated Lon- don firm. " I don't take time to get myself clothes, or to have my hair cut, hardly. I have a great mind to stop and look in here. I think Fred told me it was a good place." He was never vacillating, but prompt of action, and in a moment he had thrown the reins to his servant and was in the store. A clerk with very red cheeks and a waxed moustache approached him languidly. He A SUCCESSFUL MAN 1Q5 looked narrowly, almost impertinently, at the new customer, the, general cut of whose jib did not suggest extravagance. " How can I serve you, sir ?" Mr. Lawton had for years patronized a little Hebrew tailor, who continued to turn out his clothes from the same mould with praise- worthy constancy. He felt some compunc- tion at this infidelity, and hoped the poor old Jew would never know. "Measure me for a suit," he said. He ordered himself two and finally three, one a rough light gray for morning wear. " You wish the latest style, sir, I suppose ?" asked the highly-colored clerk, eying Mr. Lawton's black broadcloth coat with ill-con- cealed scorn. "Yes, yes, I suppose so." He laughed a little nervously and shamefacedly. " Make them in the fashion. I am not much on dress, as you see, but I'll go the whole figure this time." " Will you give me your name, sir ?" asked the man ; he whipped out a note-book and a 106 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN pencil, which he held suspended between his thumb and index ; " and I will fix the hour for trying on early next week, sir." " Mr. Lawton, Daniel Lawton ; perhaps you know my offices." The heads of the English master of the establishment and his book-keeper jerked up suddenly from their desks. The former stepped out briskly. "Pray be seated, Mr. Lawton! Pray be seated ! Hi 'ope you will be pleased with us, sir ! We will do our hutmost ! Hi think, sir, we have made some things for your son, sir ! No one would hever himagine, to look at you, sir, you could 'ave a son that hage. A fine young gentleman, sir, with a helegant figure!" "He takes after his father," said Mr. Law- ton ptre, much amused. "Narrower in the chest, sir," murmured the clerk, who had become more flushed. "We will be ready for you Tuesday at eleven." " Make it ten, and I will get around early. I am very busy." A SUCCESSFUL MAN 107 " Yes, of course, sir, of course ! any hour you wish." x " Would you like to look at some light cloth for an overcoat, sir ? We make them up in all styles for twelve pounds sixty dollars, I mean, sir ! !N~o ? not to-day ? This way, sir ! Would you like a match ? Here, Hawser ! quick ! a light !" Three clerks darted out simultaneously from behind their counters. They all wanted to have a nearer view of Mr. Lawton, and took a long stare. He found great difficulty in making his escape, but did finally, after having lighted a cigar, get himself into the street. He was pay- ing the penalty of his greatness. Later, when he reached home, he found his wife standing outside on the porch, much disturbed and ex- cited. Fred was dawdling about with his hands in his pockets, waiting for the trap which was to convey him to the station. He was going off with his chum Blake for a week's gunning, and there was an endless array of gun-cases and cartridge-boxes piled up on the piazza steps. 108 A SUCCESSFUL MAN "Did the expressman give you back the dollar and a half change, Kate ?" Mrs. Lawton was saying, hardly taking time to greet her husband. " No, ma'am," said Kate, who was engaged in fastening a recalcitrant strap. "He .gave me back a dollar and a half's worth of impu- dence." "It is perfectly abominable the way that company steals," said Mrs. Lawton. " They are simply robbers. I do hope, Daniel, when you are governor, you will put a stop to such things." "Oh, mother, don't bother!" said Fred, loftily, as if from heights where dollar bills were plentiful and unimportant. Mrs. Lawton was clad in a cambric wrap- per, such as hang, in the late summer, at re- duced prices, out on sidewalks in front of large dry-goods establishments. It may be said, however, that she had purchased it in the season and at its original value. Seeing it with other gaudier ones, she had thought the color pale until it had come home. It A SUCCESSFUL MAN 109 was, in fact, of a brilliant saffron pink, and was distinctly unbecoming. " Why, Mollie !" said her husband, " you look like a flamingo." "Yes, I know; I hate the thing; but I wanted to see Fred off comfortably, and I have not had time to dress." " The way you mollycoddle that boy is absurd," he said, a little dryly, and went into the house. At the dinner she asked him about his meetings over the bay and spoke of the prob- abilities of a successful election; but Fred's departure, and the fear lest he was riot provided with sufficiently warm flannels, and, above all, the expressman's guilt, were with her still, and she threw no eagerness into her questionings. He had somehow failed to speak to her of his first visit to Mrs. Gresham ; he did not now mention the second. "Why ? Perhaps it was due to a naturally reticent nature. On that first evening he had casually told her of his introduction ; but he was introduced to so many* people and obliged to shake so many 10 HO A SUCCESSFUL MAN hands, male and female, that it made small impression upon his wife. It had always bored him ; she thought it would continue to do so to the end. Immediately after dinner he made his escape to his study. He looked over some political attacks upon himself in the journals of his antagonists. They were very mild, and they failed to an- noy. It was difficult to pick flaws in him. He then wrote a few important letters, after which he tried to think what he should say on the morrow at a meeting of workingmen that he was to address, hut somehow his brain refused to work. It did not matter much. He was never at a loss when the moment came. He felt now a mental lassitude that was not common to him, and thought he would find the aliment he required upon his book-shelves. He craved, as it were, to rest his spirit upon some lofty ideals, but even his favorite authors failed this evening to arrest his attention. He threw aside the books and began to think, and his revery was one of despondency. He asked himself what, after A SUCCESSFUL MAN HI all, was this struggle and effort for ? "What had his successes brought him ? How ephem- eral their joy, how insufficient their attain- ment ! He was no pessimist, no sentimentalist, but we all touch these moments of disillusion and discouragement. Now, he thought to himself, life was half over. Youth, ah ! bold, brave youth ! Even that was gone youth, which women adore ! His heart contracted in sadness. Then, suddenly, as he sat there musing over the worthlessness of earth's best prizes, a thought rushed past him and touched him with its wing : a thought of rapture, for which all else might well be jeopardized, near which all others paled. He shuddered from head to foot. He had been through all his past a man of energetic principle and forceful, even ag- gressive, will. He dismissed the dizzy vision, instantly pushed it from him, compressed it way down in the darkness of his being where no one might suspect and he himself not dwell upon it one moment more. It left him at peace for an hour. 112 A SUCCESSFUL MAN But what are will and energy, nay, prin- ciple, in the first travail of an awakened pas- sion ? Let men cavil as they may. The river flows smoothly enough. See how gently it glides between its flowery banks ! But dare to dam it up, and then, even after years, loosen only a tiny stone, make but an inch's rift in the soil, and behold, through the flood- gates the long-pent waters, wild, exultant, escape; broken, torn, with the wreck of a continent upon its bosom ! People prattle of truth, " The loving Truth," they say. Artists paint her in her splendors, crowned with majesty, bearing aloft in undraped chastity her lamp of pure fires, searching the hearts of guilty men to ransom and redeem them. But truth is ugly enough, and as I see her now her lamp is turned down, her garments bedraggled, and the bright picture I would fain show you is marred with smoke and seared and soiled. The thought, the dream, came back to Daniel Lawton later as he lay upon his couch ; came back, and this time he did not A SUCCESSFUL MAN H3 shrink at its approach. He welcomed, hugged, gloated over it, the sweet delirium of it, the poison and the pleasure ! He held it close to himself, warming himself at its glow, linger- ingly now in wilful dalliance, until Truth, weeping, put out her torch ! 10* 114 A SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER VII. SHE had said she would make him the fashion; he became the lion of the hour. His family scattered, about this time, for a trip into the mountains, and he was left to his own devices. Frequent short journeys were necessary in this interim for the exigencies of his canvass. His home was unsettled. He concluded to run over to the Goshen house and make that his head-quarters for a brief season. It would be a sort of holiday, a respite and rest he greatly required, so, at least, he said to him- self, since Truth had veiled her face from him. And thus it came to pass that he was, in vulgar parlance, "taken up." "We hear the significant expression, and must accept it without explanation. Mrs. Langton fancied him. She invited him to her Saturday evenings. She was a dried-up little old woman who made the A SUCCESSFUL MAN H5 sunshine and the rain in the coterie over which she reigned. People said she was amazingly clever, and she certainly had a wicked tongue. She expressed herself as much honored by Mr. Lawton's willingness to appear at her soirees. She never gave her guests anything but ices, tea, and conversa- tion, and liked to catch distinguished odds and ends, specimens of eccentric or foreign humanity, as a form of inducement. Tom Fane, who kept bachelor's hall, gave Mr. Lawton a reception, and all the " smart" people turned out, as they were wont to do for his entertainments. He was invited to five dinners a night; to coaching parties and yachting parties; to luncheons, garden fetes, picnics, and teas. And he accepted every- thing, or nearly everything, where he felt sure he should meet her. Of course he knew, and everybody else knew, it was Mrs. Gresham who had launched him, and people smiled and said, " Isn't it funny ?" Men put him up at their clubs or took him off for a day's fishing. Fair women asked him for his 116 A SUCCESSFUL MAN portrait, almost for his autograph. Once in a while he said or did something that was unexpected, but it was overlooked and ex- cused. The word "provincial" was never applied after the first ten days of the furore. One caviller insisted that he said "lady" where "woman" would have sufficed, and, after a heated discussion one night at a dinner where he had held the people spell- bound for fifteen minutes with his eloquence, he suddenly apologized and said, " I have talked too long ; I must ' quit.' ' A young woman tittered and whispered to her neigh- bor she thought the expression countrified. Her neighbor replied, vaguely, it was probably " western." An erudite old gentleman who overheard the remark, who was an authority on language but at the same time snobbish, and who always kept abreast of the suc- cessful swimmer, thought the expression was admissible, and, on the whole, quaint and picturesque. A woman who hated Con- stance, because Jack Gresham had flirted with her desperately before his marriage, A SUCCESSFUL MAN H7 and then had taken himself and his ducats to another shrine, intimated that Daniel Lawton said " Yes, ma'am," when he ad- dressed a girl of twenty. Then a tender fem- inine voice which was always raised in the defence and never in the attack, asserted un- hesitatingly that this accusation was an atro- cious libel, but that, even if the charge were true, it was only a trifle old-fashioned ; one who had so surpassed others might well be forgiven if he were behind them in so insig- nificant a manner. " Every one," she said, " said * Yes, ma'am' a hundred years ago, and even now one has to use the words as an accompaniment to one's courtesy when presented to Queen Victoria or her daughters, if spoken to by these royal ladies." So the ripple of talk ran to and fro, up and down, and Mr. Lawton's social bark was car- ried safely over these little eddies upon which so many are doomed to instantaneous wreck. He was at oace too modest and too self- respecting even to suspect their existence, and, 118 A SUCCESSFUL MAN more, he was too absorbed ; for the temptation he had at first repudiated and then courted had become an obsession of every hour. Every moment he could spare from his politi- cal duties, he would soon have to start on another pilgrimage; there were important principles of his platform he must explain to his more distant constituents, every moment, I say, was spent with her. People laughed, thinking the intimacy extraordinary, and it was so. All they knew was that they were happy together. Of each other's past, its associations and its experiences, they never spoke. Of course she knew vaguely that he was a married man, the father of children; but she instinctively asked him no questions, and he was silent. Of her he hardly thought as of a wedded wife. Mr. Gresham's hunting expedition seemed to have extended itself indefinitely, for he did not return, and the husband remained a myth whose reality Lawton tried to forget. The husband, the worm at the heart of the rose ! He who should one day return, with claims A SUCCESSFUL MAN H9 and tyrannies! It was well to banish him, blot him from the memory. With a childish simplicity Lawton avoided looking at the photographs upon Mrs. Gresh- am's drawing-room tables, at the portraits upon her walls, lest he should some day meet the eyes that he dreaded. In the mean while, nothing could be more charming than their walks, their talks, their communings. She was surprised to find he had read everything, and that even the works of contemporaneous fiction which interested her were not unr known to him. His comments upon them tallied with her own views, but had some- thing fresh and vigorous in them, and, how- ever different their traditions might have been, they met here upon the same ground. Of art, too, she was amazed to find him an incisive critic, possessed of a naturally correct taste. She knew that he could hardly have had the time, in the stress of his active life, to cultivate aesthetics, yet his artistic perceptions seemed to her of no mean order. Constance was sitting one morning under a 120 & SUCCESSFUL MAN tree on her lawn picking at a banjo (I regret that I can use no more impressing verb). She was a good musician, a pianist of some origi- nality and sentiment ; but it is only in novels that women reach the F above the line at the first trial and dance admirably without pre- paratory instruction. " Art is long," and Constance drew more discords than harmo- nies from the instrument upon which she had only lately begun to experiment, and which fills so many modern drawing-rooms with anxiety and gloom. Fortunately, her audi- ence, an Austrian attache and a French first secretary of legation, did not seem harsh cen- sors of her poor performance, and applauded her effort with fervor. It is hardly to be mar- velled at. These stringed instruments have the advantage that they may be carried into the sunlight, and furnish a lovely woman an opportunity of posing under green boughs in graceful positions and picturesque hats, and with pretty arms bared to the elbow. Mrs. Gresham did not play in private theat- ricals; her contempt for the public had not A SUCCESSFUL MAN reached this climax. She must therefore be pardoned if her dramatic instincts found a more innocent vent. Suddenly, as she sat listening to the chorus of praise sung by her two foreign visitors and was yawning behind her hand at their inanities, her lips parted, her eyes shone, and her cheeks flushed. A thought had struck her. She cast aside her banjo, and fell to dreaming of another instrument from which she drew no discords and on which she played with con- summate address. Practice makes perfect, and it is also an advantage to have genius. She bethought herself now of a great heart which she held palpitating in her palm. She could feel its wild throbs, almost listen to its pulses under her fingers ; upon its strings she liked to play. From its keys Constance could draw rapturous melody, for she was a skilled artist. With a woman's keen insight she had guessed long since that it was hers, and the desire to play upon it at this very minute grew into a positive longing. She became so distraite that the quick-witted v 11 122 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN strangers saw they were importunate, and in a few moments had taken their leave. On winged feet she flew to her secretary and had in less than a quarter of an hour despatched a note to Daniel Lawton. For it may as well be said here with sorrow that the good re- solves which Mrs. Gresham had so lately made to the stars had melted, like them, into the dawn, and that when Truth veiled her face from Daniel Lawton, her own Recording Angel covered its eyes and wept. This written message was one of those three-cornered ones that smell good and may mean so much or so little. To Daniel Lawton it meant exactly that he was to dine with her that night, and for the first time alone. The fumes of it were in his brain through all of the summer's day. When he presented himself at eight o'clock his hostess was not in her boudoir. He waited for her patiently, for expectancy, which can be the most terrible of ills, can also be the sweetest of human joys. At last the gray portibre with its border of roses was lifted, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 123 and Mrs. Gresham crossed the threshold. He mastered his agitation with difficulty, but her own tranquil greeting had soon somewhat calmed his heart-beats and put him at his ease. They had only time to exchange a few words before dinner was announced. He gave her his arm across the numerous drawing- rooms, and their progress was, to the man at least, a beatitude. The dining-room was almost in darkness, except the table, whose gold-embroidered cloth, strewn with flowers, chased silver, rare porcelains, fruits, and bon-bons, was radiantly illumed by numerous wax-lights. Peering into the frowning gloom, Lawton thought it almost a pity the splendid apartment should be kept so dim. He himself liked a room to be very light. He expressed this opinion, and she laughed low, and told him he was a Phil- istine with old-fashioned ideas, but that in fact Mr. Gresham was.just the same ; all men were alike, afraid of the dark, like children, and when her husband was at home an extra chandelier was always lighted for his benefit. 124 A SUCCESSFUL MAN " I am making the most," she added, " of my liberty. I like it this way best." She spoke quite naturally and as a matter of course, and seemed 'surprised that her remark was met with an awkward pause. They returned to the boudoir for their coffee. She offered him a cigarette, but he declined it, and the agitation which had possessed him earlier came back upon him with redoubled force. She, on the contrary, was gay and ap- parently undisturbed. She rallied and chaffed him about his new r6le as a man of fashion ; upon his social success and his conquests. But he answered her in monosyllables, and grew at last absolutely taciturn. The seriousness of his attitude gained upon her in a peculiar way. As his spirits seemed to dampen, hers rose, until at last she became merry and even a little wild. She bantered him with unmer- ciful raillery, laying particular stress upon his attentions to a maiden of thirty summers and large fortune, who had showered him with courtesies, and evidently entertained a roman- tic admiration of his person. As he grew A SUCCESSFUL MAN 125 more and more gloomy, she grew more and more light. She was probably intoxicated with the sense of her own charm. She felt that every movement of her lips, every shrug of her shoulders, every quiver of her eyelids, every intonation of her voice, with all its joyous and pathetic cadences, every curve of her hand and wrist as she raised them or they lay upon her lap, were eagerly marked nay, devoured by the silent man who sat beside her; and she was secretly filled with pleasure that she could thus beguile him. Judge her not too harshly ! Women who have no turn at philanthropy, are not pos- sessed of genius, and who love power, have but this arena. Had he been bolder, she might have been more prudent, but his re- spectful homage awakened in her a childish temerity. He did not even venture to ap- proach her, sitting at some distance across the shaded room, with only that sombre fire grow- ing in his eyes. She felt so sure of him now ; he was such a gentleman. Ah! they might say what they would, he was that. 11* 126 A SUCCESSFUL MAN I think that his Satanic Majesty himself sends a special messenger sometimes to pre- side over a woman's toilet, to peep and hide and beckon in the plait of a dress, in the curve of a girdle, on the end of a shoe, in a coil of hair. Had the bold imp some hand in arraying Constance for this hour ? She wore a gown cut very low, as was the fashion of the moment, displaying her beau- tiful arms and glowing bosom. It fell in rich folds of golden satin close to her long rounded limbs, making her every motion a rhythm of charm. The dress became her, toning down her rich color, and casting up strange lurid reflections into her eyes. A woman's talk is more brilliant when she is conscious of look- ing her best. As time sped on, however, she could not have told why, her own spirits began to flag and falter. A certain restlessness of his con- tinued quietness, a sense of uneasiness and of danger in an atmosphere which seemed to grow a little stifling. Perhaps she, who was never maladroit, had teased him long enough ; A SUCCESSFUL MAN 127 perhaps she had gone too far and wounded him. She disliked the thought. At last, glad of any change, she made an excuse to rise and ring for a glass of 'water, but, as she did so, he also sprang to his feet. It was too late for her to shrink from him. All the pent-up fierceness of the years was raging in him now. If she had wished to rouse him, she had suc- ceeded. She had only time to take a step or two backward in her newly-awakened fear when he had her by the wrists. He held them as if in a clasp of iron, and, as he did so, he looked down upon her as a keeper does at the creature he will tame. Constance knew she had met her master, and had neither the will nor the power to struggle or to stir. After holding her thus in his grasp of steel for a moment, speechless, he drew her to him with indescribable violence, and stooped as if to seek the warm, soft lips of the temptress ; but suddenly, and with an exclamation of terror, he threw her from him, and, picking up his hat, which lay at hand, almost ran from her presence. She tottered 128 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN and would have fallen, had she not clutched a neighboring chair, but her high heels were no't made for such exercises, and in her un- steadiness her head rolled against the wall. She sat down, with her hands over her heart, trying to quell its tumults. Her blood ran riot in her veins, and the thought uppermost in her was, " I have never known such joy !" It is not every lover that throws one against the wall. She was fastidious, refined for, after all, she was a haughty woman, or rather was pos- sessed of that form of pride which gives the illusion of force ; yet she who had so resented the first touch of his hand upon her arm when she had stood on the rocks, and thought him guilty of familiarity, was neither shocked nor angered now. "Women prefer brutality to coldness ; and all great feeling dominates. A famous Russian writer tells us that so enormous is the power of a genuine passion that a woman who hated the man who so loved her, and knew her visit to him would mean death, yet went, drawn to A SUCCESSFUL MAN 129 him by some incomprehensible fascination, to meet it at his hands. Up in the mountains the next day, Mrs. Lawton and Clemence were sunning them- selves on the piazza of the hotel. " I have letters from Fred and from your papa, Clem," said Mrs. Lawton. "Well, I hope they are having a better time than I am ; that is all I can say." Miss Clem's tone was disconsolate. She had not yet taken her elder brother's advice as to modulating it. " Why, papa is quite gay, going out a great deal ; and do you know, Clem, he has been to the Greshams', to that Mrs. Gresham's you are always chattering about." It had been easy enough to write of it casu- ally. Of course Mrs. Lawton had heard of " Sea Mew." The papers were full of its beauties, the purity of its architecture, the correctness of its landscape gardening. Young America is still dazzled at her own prowess. She puffs herself, and struts and swaggers and advertises. 130 4 SUCCESSFUL MAN " Oh, dear ! I wish it was me," said Clem- ence. "Nonsense, child! Do you suppose Mrs. Gresham would trouble herself with a little school-girl like you ?" "Hurry up and call me that, mammy; it won't last much longer." " No, it won't," and Mrs. Lawton sighed. " Why do you sigh, ma ?" " Oh, because I loved my babies, and they will soon all be men and women. Well, I am glad your papa's resting. He needed it; he looked worn out." " So he knows that Mrs. Gresham ? Well, I have always noticed the good things hap- pened to people who didn't care a picayune about them." "You seem to think Mrs. Gresham quite wonderful. What do you know about her ?" said Mrs. Lawton, smiling. "Well, she is wonderful. I hope to be exactly like her some day. Who knows? When papa's governor, perhaps I shall marry a swell !" A SUCCESSFUL MAN " Clem !" said her mother, frowning, " I don't like that kind of talk. I don't want your head running on beaux. You must think of your studies." Miss Clem made a wry face. ""Well, mammy, it is the truth that old people get all the fun and don't care a bit about it. They enjoy things in such a tiresome, dull sort of way." "I suppose you think me and your father very old, but we don't feel so, and you won't when you are our age." " I think you are just sweet, mammy, and you don't look old, and you cannot look cross, even if you try ever so hard." Mrs. Lawton shook her head. "When papa's governor you will have to go out in society more, won't you, ma? Can I have a low-necked dress, please, please ?" " We will see. He must be elected first." " Oh, it's a walk-over ; everybody says so," said Miss Clem, sententiously. She had infinite confidence in her father's lucky star. " Why, Marcus M.'s just trembling in his shoes !" 132 A SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER VIII. LEAVING a letter for Mrs. Gresham, Lawton had departed. It is the fashion of the day to laugh at all romance and to say that love is out of date. Yet we know that there are rugged soils in which it still may nourish; that, while in a heart like Constance's, which has wasted its strength in futile coquetries, the flame may at its best hum but fitfully, Law- ton's was still capable of all its height of sacrifice, all its depth of tragic despair. His letter moved her to tears. With the intense humility of all deep natures, his poor heart floundered hopelessly in the throes of this new-born sentiment. He implored her pardon for having looked a moment up from the flatness and dreariness of his own exist- ence to the poetry and beauty of her own. He poured out at her feet all the richness of A SUCCESSFUL MAN 133 an idolatry that expected nothing and asked for less. She carried the missive about with her for two days, in her dress, close to her bosom. There are hymns of worship which women find it hard to destroy. On his distant round of political speech- making his audiences were more than ever persuaded of his rare gifts. The topics he was obliged to present to them were practical and hard enough, but it may be that a ray of the martyrdom that he suffered for he had sworn to conquer himself pierced through even their unpromising dryness. He was never more scathing in denouncing corrupt, dishonorable, and crooked methods; his in- vective was never more scorching, keen, and withering ; his exhortations to courage, man- fulness, and vigilance -more noble. People trembled under the magnetism of his eye and voice, and came out and looked at one another, and said, "This is genius;" for there was something in the man that impressed them strangely, with a hint as of some dark fore- boding. Later this was remembered and 12 134 A SUCCESSFUL MAN commented upon by his friends, those party leaders whose enthusiasm for him had known no bounds, and some of whom had accompa- nied him. Two weeks had passed, and Mrs. Gresham was resting on the terrace one afternoon after her horseback ride, when her friend May Gerold was announced. " Where in the world have you kept your- self all this time, Madame May? "We have had never a sight of your beloved visage. Dear me ! what a smart gown !" " I am grateful that you notice my absence and glad you admire my frock. I have been across the water, stopping at the Ramseys'. I came back an hour ago, and only wonder I lived to come back at all." "So bored?" " To extinction ! The most tiresome lot of men, perfect jackasses, and the women not much better. Even Geraldine was a comfort. She is at least larky enough to keep one awake. What have you been about over here ?" " Oh, the everlasting treadmill ; the same A SUCCESSFUL MAN 135 old round ! But this is the end ; the season is over. I too have been bored unto death." Constance said the last words fervently. "Jack returns to-morrow, and Wednesday I am expecting a house-party of fourteen. Mrs. Langton gives a ball on Tuesday, the Days' musicale is on Monday ; et voila !" " A ball ? How extraordinary ! So late in the season." " Mrs. Langton thinks she will have fewer undesirable people." " And where is Mr. Lawton ?" To her question Mrs. Gresham replied, in- differently, "How should I know?" and gazed at the view as if Daniel Lawton was a wraith who had vanished into the ambient ether. Mrs. Gerold had not enjoyed her trip, and had grave doubts of the Turkish minister's fidelity during her absence. She felt rather cross. ""Well, I know, then, for I saw him this morning." Mrs. Gresham's heart gave a leap, but she managed to conceal her perturbation, and 136 A SUCCESSFUL MAN only inquired, calmly, "Ah, really! What was he about ?" " Kissing his wife." " That must have been an edifying spectacle in public," forcing a smile, which, it must be confessed, was rather a feeble effort. " I thought myself that the time and place were ill-chosen, but there they were, kissing each other, according to their lights. He was in the railway-station, and she and a lot of children were getting out of the cars. I sup- pose he had come to meet them." " What dress shall you wear to Mrs. Lang- ton's, May ?" asked Mrs. Gresham, abruptly. " My swagger gown, my mauve and silver." " I wouldn't advise you to," said her friend, dryly. " It is not becoming." " Not becoming ! Well, that is a crusher ! Why, I thought myself simply angelic in mauve." " My dear," and Mrs. Gresham shook her head decidedly and laughed a little discord- antly, " that is an illusion which had better be dispelled at once. You are too brune for A SUCCESSFUL MAN 137 those light lilac shades. I should strongly recommend you to keep to your black." " I do think, Constance," Mrs. Gerold was almost crying, "this is the most unkind thing I ever heard you say. Why, it was you yourself who insisted on my ordering that gown, which has nearly ruined me, and that every one admires." " I have not the slightest recollection of the fact," said Mrs. Gresham, leaning back lan- guidly with half-shut eyes; "but, if I did, je vous ai mis dedans, that is all I can say. As to people they do tell such lies." "You are disagreeable to-day, Connie. I think I had better leave you." Mrs. Gerold rose stiffly. Mrs. Gresham entered no protest. " I do verily believe," continued the young widow, lingering, "that you are angry at what I said about Mr. Lawton." " What has Mr. Lawton to do with your gown ?" asked Constance, with some asperity. "A good deal, I fancy. Before I depart, Connie, don't you want to hear what his 12* 138 A SUCCESSFUL MAN frau looks like?" Mrs. Gerold went on, pro- vokingly. " Certainly, if it amuses you, but I cannot be expected to take the same interest in men's harems that you do." Mrs. Gerold winced. The thrust was ungen- erous, and Constance was ashamed of herself. The surgeon will tell you that if you but touch upon certain nerves the most heroic patient must writhe and scream ; and a young warrior of my acquaintance, who had faced bullets upon the field of battle, once was known, in the tortures of the dentist's chair, to seize the innocent author of his sufferings by the throat and inflict upon him corporeal punishment of such severity that the poor little doctor cried out for mercy. " Let me see !" Mrs. Gerold screwed a sin- gle eye-glass into her left eye and gave her friend an exhaustive stare. " She is taller than you are, Connie, nearly twice your height. I should say a regular stunner, a regular beauty ; a high stepper, like that sor- rel mare you wanted Jack to get you last A SUCCESSFUL MAN 139 year. She has Circassian eyebrows and Ori- ental eyelashes, a Grecian nose and an Egyp- tian chin, a slender waist, a full bust, and the voice and gestures of a houri. I tell you what, my dear, the possessor of such charms is a lucky fellow ! Ta-ta !" Constance's sense of humor, which was or- dinarily keen, found, unfortunately, no food in this comprehensive description. When Mrs. Gerold's brougham crunched away upon the gravel, she gave an audible sigh of relief and of contemptuous displeas- ure. Yet ridicule is so paralyzing a weapon that the measure of her vexation hardly reached the height of what her late tormentor would have called " a fit of the tragics." She slowly unfastened two buttons of her summer riding-dress and drew a letter from her breast. She held it hesitatingly for a moment in her hands, turned it this way and that, and then, angrily murmuring, " Bah ! so much for love and for friendship !" tore it into a hundred pieces. " I wonder," she thought, bitterly, " if any 140 A SUCCESSFUL MAN other soul is as lonely as mine. Ever since early childhood I have felt the isolation. What is the matter with me ? I seem inca- pable of single, simple emotions. Those I love offend my taste, and where I have hated I have always pitied. Is it the fault of my own temperament ? Am I too fastidious, and are not such subtleties weaknesses ? We chatter of sympathy: what is it? To suffer together? Who truly suffers with us?" She should have known that a high civilization is never obtained without a cor- responding loss of robustness. A sense of mortification and wounded vanity lingered with her through the day, mingled with a sentiment which was at once more poignant and less unworthy. Mrs. Gerold in the mean while laughed heartily but not very good-naturedly at the picture she had drawn. The quiet, plump matron she had seen descending from the drawing-room car and claiming a perfunc- tory conjugal greeting was so unlike her portrait ! A SUCCESSFUL MAN Twelve hours before, while returning from his own wanderings, Lawton's eyes had chanced to rest on the pages of a weekly journal which he had hardly ever before opened. A young woman who had occupied in the train the half of his seat, and had perused its contents with a feverish avidity, had, on alighting at her station, left it behind her. He had, indeed, heard the paper spoken of as a social sheet which battened like a parasite on the wounds which it inflicted. Its politics were hazy and vari- able, following the evil humors of its editor. Its literary criticisms were probably bought. As he flicked over its pages carelessly, pages filled with cruel personal allusions, low in- nuendoes, and obscene jests, he wondered what attraction it could have had to the sweet-faced girl who had sat beside him. You see, he was a simple-minded person, and he associated maidenhood with a love for the poetic and the beautiful. This gross materialism held his attention with a mix- ture of curiosity and disgust. 142 A SUCCESSFUL MAN Suddenly, as Mr. Lawton was about to throw the paper aside, his eyes became arrested by a heading in larger type than the rest: "Mrs. Slack Dresham's New Lap- dog." He read it from beginning to end. Under the name of Dawton he was made to dance for the public. And what a dance it was ! Everything that the most venomous political rivalry might have inspired, every- thing that the most petty personal rancor and spite could have invented, was heaped upon him in coarse freedom, and under the faintly disguised names hardly a detail of his late social experiences escaped or failed to be held up to merciless ridicule. His political creeds and methods, his dress, his appearance, but, above all, his social triumphs, were minutely recorded, and be- came the target for a hundred poisoned arrows. His vanity and self-love were not inordi- nate, and he could have laughed in scorn but for the dragging in of Her. He was malignantly called the new lapdog, whom A SUCCESSFUL MAN 143 she had cajoled and petted; had made absurd at the moment of all others when the world's eyes were upon him. That which had heen to him of ineffable sweet- ness, an experience at once refined and profound, was made the subject of vulgar arid ribald jests. Of his wife it was kindly said that in the new role of man of fashion he bad forgotten the partner of his early obscurity, the village girl who had once been good enough for him, but whom he had now far surpassed. She had been left to darn her stockings in desolation by the desecrated hearth, while his head lay, like Samson's, on his new Delilah's knees. To people of true sensitiveness such things are terrible. That a creature like Constance should be held up, almost by name, to public opprobrium he knew that hundreds would read and understand filled him with a rage all the more violent that he knew it was impotent. His own part in the per- formance seemed to him both heinous and horrible. Whether rightly or wrongly, she 144 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN had embodied for him, in the brief summer days that were over, everything that a woman could of delicacy and of loveliness. He had perhaps overrated her. Who can say? He who has no such illusions is indeed poverty- stricken. Daniel Lawton had for the first time in his existence tasted of a draught which, if it be indeed poison, is of a flavor so exquisite that it would make death wel- come ; he had smelled for one moment of that sombre flower whose perfume leaves undying memories. During his drive homeward with his wife and daughter, whom he had gone to meet a few hours later, with his habitual courtesy, he told Mrs. Lawton he had an invition for a ball for her. " Oh, mamma, mamma, you must go !" cried Clem, clasping her hands. " I will dress you!" He had found a card from Mrs. Langton, and had immediately resolved to go to this ball, and take his wife with him. He had written and told the old lady that Mrs. Law- A SUCCESSFUL MAN 145 ton would be at home on the day mentioned, and she had by return mail, with effusive apologies, sent another card. He thought his wife a perfect lady, and he blamed himself for having given the world a chance to doubt it. He repented, I am sorry to add, of nothing else. He knew she was a woman to whom a low thought or coarse word would be impossible, a woman before \vhom they would expire upon lips fain to utter them. He remembered that some of the ladies of fashion he had met, and who might criticise her, he was not dull of per- ceptions, were less fastidious and might well emulate her in this. The invitation was accepted, Clemence having persuaded her mother that the coming glories of gubernatorial precedence would necessitate certain social efforts and conces- sions. Early the next morning Mrs. Lawton sought her husband's study, with anxious wrinkles upon her usually smooth forehead. " Do I disturb you, dear ?" He looked up wearily. " Not at all." He o k 13 146 A SUCCESSFUL MAN had been perusing all the morning a discur- sive treatise on the tariff laws. " I want to ask your advice ; you will think it unimportant." Mrs. Lawton was depre- cating. " Daniel, do the ladies wear very fine clothes at the Goshen house ? Are they very dressy ?" "I didn't see any la any women at the hotel excepting in very plain things, my dear; travelling gowns mostly. All the so- ciety, you know, is outside at the villas and cottages, and they are very fine indeed," he explained. She sighed. " Oh, yes, of course ; I knew that. I didn't suppose," she continued, tenta- tively, "that my brown satin would do. Clem says the waist is too high. Do they wear low waists to everything?" " Pretty low, it struck me," said Mr. Law- ton, laughing, and at the same time some recollection made the blood rise suddenly up under his hair, and he fidgeted a little ner- vously in his chair. " You see," she continued, " I have so little A SUCCESSFUL MAN 147 time. But," she added, smiling at him, "I don't want to disgrace you, dear." He winced. " By all means," he said, hur- riedly, and rather huskily, " get a new dress, and at once." Something which he gulped down would come up in his throat. "You can have all the money you want. Fix your- self up handsomely, Mollie ; don't stint your- self in the expense." He spoke as cheerily and kindly as possible, and the thought passed through her mind how different he was from many husbands. He, too, so clever and wonderful. The flush had left him and his face was pale." ""Well," she said, "I will order the car- riage, and Clem and I will drive into town, to Madame Elise's. She must be made to get me up something in three days." She thought it was rather a pity to discard the brown satin, which was very handsome, and had a train, and was trimmed with real lace ; but Clem had positively insisted that it was not full dress. 148 A SUCCESSFUL MAN "I will put it in the trunk, in case we stay several days, or are asked to dine out," she thought. " Oh, by the way, Daniel," she put her head into the door again, " I wish you would step to the stable and see the new mare. They have put her into the box stall. She'll do splendidly for the buggy. The man says she is very fast in single harness. She is spirited, he says, but gentle, and I think you will find her convenient in the mornings." The autumn had declared itself rainy. The weather was lowering. It had poured steadily for nearly a week, and the tides were extraor- dinarily high. Madame Elise, as she measured Mrs. Law- ton, asked if Madame had heard that the old dock under Harbor hill, where people went of a Sunday afternoon, had been swept away, and that even the cliffs were more or less undermined. Then they chattered of ribbons and embroideries, and storms and tides were alike forgotten. When the new gown came home, Mrs. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 149 Lawton tried it on, with two neighbors who had .dropped in, Clemence, and Kate the housemaid in attendance. It was voted " very becoming" and a great success. It was indeed suitable and rich. It was a heavy violet silk relieved with white lace, somewhat cut away about the shoulders, and with sleeves which met the long gloves, which had been pro- vided for the occasion, a little above the elbow. The ingenious Frenchwoman had combined all the requirements of fashion and of her conservative customer. Clemence was wildly excited. No debutante at her first party could have had a " send-off" of more promise than this mother of a family. A handsome white lace fan was produced. There were pretty slippers, and even violet hose ; and Clem exclaimed, " Well, ma, you are just complete !" while Kate, at the door- way, emphasized her admiration by repeated exclamations that " Mrs. Lawton would be the beautifulest belle at the ball." Alas for human prophecies and their mea- gre fulfilments ! 18* 150 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN CHAPTER IX. the night of the ball arrived, the storm was raging with a fury that made the gas-lights in front of the hotel flare and blink like the eyes of old age. The torrents of rain lashed against the window-panes of Mrs. Law- ton's whitewashed bedroom until their sashes shook and moaned under the stress. If Clemence had only come with her mother, all might have been different; but the foolish Irish girl had alone accompanied her mistress, and dropped early in the evening the comment " that very few probably would venture out on such a night, and that the new dress would undoubtedly be ruined." People who go to their first party after twenty years of seclusion require discreet and tactful handling. Mrs. Lawton's vacillating courage sank. When the skirt was half over A SUCCESSFUL MAN her emerging head, she suddenly lurched out of it with unusual alertness. "Kate, take the horrid thing away! I should look like a fool in it ! I simply can't put it on. Give me my brown satin!" she said, in desperation. Kate, frightened at her own influence, en- tered now a feeble protest, murmuring that " Miss Clem would be very angry," but she knew from the start that it was all up with the violet silk and white lace magnificence. When Mrs. Lawton surveyed herself in the high-necked, long-sleeved dark gown, only brightened at the neck by a few diamonds, which did service on all grand occasions, she felt relieved and almost consoled. She had pictured herself sitting in unblushing effront- ery amid a bevy of wiser dames, who would naturally, on this frightful night, have con- sulted the dictates of wisdom and sobriety. Of course a few flighty young misses would still wear their white frocks, but she felt sure the older married women, at least, would be less foolish. Her own foolishness will appear 152 A SUCCESSFUL MAN incomprehensible to the mondaine who slips into the nudity of her ball corsage with as much ease as she does into her satin shoe, but Puritanically-bred " provincials" of modest and retiring dispositions will more fully understand. Mrs. Lawton felt some trepidation at ac- knowledging her cowardice to her husband. She wished to explain to him that it was a sense of unfitness and not economy which had prompted her to the change of toilet, but, when they were at last ensconced in the car- riage, he seemed so distrait in manner that she imagined he must be composing an oration, and she only casually mentioned to him that she had donned the high-necked gown. " I dare say it will look very nice, but what will Clem say ?" He spoke absently, as if in a dream, and she could only hope when he saw her he would approve. He was in a fever of unrest at the thought of once more meeting Constance. She had not replied to his letter, and there had been no sign between them since that evening when he had so completely lost himself. He A SUCCESSFUL MAN 153 wondered if she were forever offended, and felt that now when she saw him with his wife the abyss he had himself put between them could never again be spanned. The impulses which had prompted him to bring Mrs. Law- ton were too complicated for analysis. The reader who is no novice in the intricacies of human motive will require no explanation, while to the unimaginative and inexperienced even the inscriptions on guide-posts are indis- tinct. Probably a form of pride which is akin to humility was the strongest motor. Almost immediately after they entered the room, Mrs. Langton separated them. " Mr. Fane has something particular to ask you," she whispered in Mr. Lawton's ear. " Something political, I think, about your party organization here." Mrs. Langton liked to be considered au fait about everything. "He is looking all over the place for you. Go, like a dear, and find him, and I will take charge of your wife." Mrs. Lawton had indeed hardly time to 154 -A SUCCESSFUL MAN realise that, with the exception of a very old lady in an ermine tippet, she had on the only high-necked gown in the rooms, when four or five men were introduced to her in rapid suc- cession. Whether it was an overwhelming conviction of her mistake in not having worn the violet silk, or a natural inaptitude at con- versation with unknown gentlemen, certain it is that she found herself quite unable to enter- tain them, After having expressed her ad- miration of the really brilliant scene, having commented upon its animation, upon the warmth of the atmosphere inside and the dis- malness of the storm outside, she had nothing left to say to them. She noticed that by and by they one by one became restive, and finally, in the increasing rush and crush .of new arri- vals, made hurried excuses of other claims upon them and gradually fell away from her. She was left at last standing quite alone in a door-way, rather glad to be rid of her cava- liers, and yet hardly knowing where to place herself. She espied an empty chair in an embrasure, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 155 half hidden by the voluminous skirts of two middle-aged ladies, resplendent in " shimmer of satin and glimmer of pearls," with a profu- sion of vari-colored feathers upon their heads. They were women at the very least ten years older than herself. They looked well and fresh enough, however, and she gazed with wonder at their bared necks and rather envied them their pluck. One was in pale rose, the other in a deep sapphire-colored satin. There was no doubt of it ; she herself had made a fatal blunder. At the mere idea of telling Clemence she grew alarmed. The child would be so disappointed. She had been so proud of that other gown. Almost unobserved, Mrs. Lawton managed to ensconce herself behind these showy dowagers. Not being accustomed to belledom, or to any homage from men except such as was prompted by the merest friendliness, she felt somewhat lonely, to be sure, but not mortified, and, on the whole, interested and rather amused. Soon, probably, Mrs. Langton or her husband would come up. 156 A SUCCESSFUL MAN Her neighbors were engaged in an animated conversation. They spoke in an audible whis- per, and indulged now and then in low, well- bred laughter. Sometimes she caught the thread of their disjointed talk, and then lost it again in the general hum, the blare of the band, and the tread of the dancers in the ad- joining ballroom. When" they, however, men- tioned Mr. Lawton's name, she would have been more than human had she not listened. " Which is he ? I was away when he was here. Do show him to me !" " There over there ! Don't you see ! He is putting his hand up to his head; leaning against the portiere. The man with the gray hair." " What, that young-looking man ?" said the first speaker, putting up a long gold eye-glass. " Why, he is certainly very striking. A fine head." " Do you think he looks so young ? He is gray." " I should say from forty to forty-five. It is a splendid face. I am quite surprised. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 157 They say there is no doubt he will be gov- ernor." " Oh, my husband is such a partisan ! He of course believes it, thinks that he is a very remarkable man; but then there are those who doubt. One can never be sure. Each side is carried away by its own party hue and cry." Mrs. Lawton listened and was edified. " These men whose lives are full of serious interests really live longer and look younger than the idlers. It is what we don't do that wears upon us. So, at least, I tell my son, who is, I regret to say, a, flaneur." " Very cleverly put. Has he a family ?" . " Who ? Mr. Lawton ? I think there is a wife. I fancied somebody said she was to be here to-night." " I don't see her with him." "I wonder what Connie Gresham will say?" " Oh, by the way ! yes, I hear it is quite a flirtation !" " She is such an incorrigible coquette. I must confess I think the young married 14 158 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN women are carrying that sort of thing too far." "Ah, well! Mrs. Jack is very attractive, and men will burn their fingers." " I wonder her husband allows it." " Oh, my dear, it is the fate of the hus- bands of pretty women to be a little neglected." " Connie is certainly fascinating and clever, and the house is admirably ordered. I like her, but I think her foolish about some things. Now, this man " Then others came up, and the subject changed. Mrs. Lawton too came out of her window- seat. She wanted air, she was stifling. She didn't believe what she had heard, not a word of it. Daniel would not lend himself to such a thing. It was impossible ; he was above it. Nevertheless, as she pushed through the crowd into the next room, her limbs were trembling in a strange fashion. Here she found the mothers of two or three disconsolate daughters huddled together in a corner. She sank into a seat beside them. One, who seemed com- municative, turned to her amiably. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 159 " My girl is so timid," she said. " I cannot get her to even stand up and show herself." The girl in question, who had very thin shoulder-blades, jerked them, and emitted a little groan. " She has such a lovely gown," said the mother. "It is so silly not to go into the ball- room and show it and dance." " I might stand there all night and nobody ask me," said the girl, snappishly. "Not a soul, and you know it." " Well, it is all your fault. Other girls get on who have not had half the advantages." " My daughter is just the same," said an- other mother, sympathetically, who was seated just behind a young lady in scarlet tulle. " She is too particular. Young Bolton asked her for the cotillon, but she refused him flatly, and says his shoes always smell of blacking. It is perfectly ridiculous, I tell her. Debutantes cannot afford to put on airs." " I haven't got anybody to put on airs with," said the snappish girl, tartly. "No one ever comes near me." 160 A SUCCESSFUL MAN " You are too modest, my dear," said the second mother, secretly enchanted at her own daughter's greater success. Mrs. Lawton noticed that the first mother put her foot out under the cross girl's chair and gave her a little kick. The dull pain she had felt was passing off somewhat, and she was thanking God that her Clemence was not here, but safely at home and asleep. That was some comfort. Happiness and fame and honor seemed to be away in the glittering pale-blue distance where swinging lamps and fragrant flowers and splendid jewels and ra- diant women were moving in a panorama of warmth and light. Here were congregated the bitterness of discontent and failure. It was just then that Mrs. Gresham crossed the room upon her husband's arm. " Why, there is Mrs. Jack Gresham ! And Mr. Gresham is with her !" " They say that Mr. Lawton, who is running for governor, is a great friend of hers." " The more fool he. She will lead him a dance !" A SUCCESSFUL MAN " Is it for the dance, I wonder, lie has put on those laveader gloves, that are a mile too large for him, poor thing ? I saw him pass a few moments ago." " There was an abominable squib about them in the weekly ." And the first mother mentioned the paper Daniel Lawton had read with such anger. - " Oh, pshaw ! Who cares ? Not Mrs. Jack, I am sure. All she thinks of is her own amusement. She won't mind." " She is just perfectly exquisite," exclaimed in concert the girl in scarlet and the snappish girl, gazing after Mrs. Gresham's retiring form. " The gentlemen certainly admire her," said the mothers in unison, but without heat. Then the first mother added, " Is her color her own, do you think ?" May Gerold now passed through on the Turk's arm ; it is to be supposed he was still in the " first stage." She had taken Mrs. Gresham's advice and wore black. She looked extremely distinguished, with her i ', 14* 162 A SUCCESSFUL MAN straight, slim figure, her pallor, and her near- sighted eyes under their black brows. One of the gentlemen who had been pre- sented to Mrs. Lawton early in the evening, conscious of his shortcomings and at the instigation of the hostess, who was still de- tained at the door, now came forward and, offering his arm gallantly, asked if she would like to see the dancing. She remembered that she took it. She talked to him mechanically on various topics. While she did so she saw her husband ap- proach Mrs. Gresham, look at and speak to her ; and then she knew. Those cruel women need not have enlightened her. There are instincts more unerring than the sense of hearing. She saw their eyes meet and mingle. She had never seen this expression in her husband's before. All the truth flashed upon her sick soul. Dramatic people, who express more than they feel, can probably form no conception of what emotion means to slowly-stirred, com- monplace, placid natures. The latter have no A SUCCESSFUL MAN 163 eloquence with which to voice their woe to- day, no facile pen that shall dilate on it to-morrow. Tongue and pen will be alike unavailable, but the agony is there all the same. It is commonly said that a jealous woman can do no justice to her rival. This is untrue. The passions have quickened perceptions of their own which are more generally correct than false, and their illuminations are often clearer in such minds as are ordinarily obtuse. Constance was dressed with great simplicity, but Mrs.. Lawton did not make the mistake of imagining her to be simple. She recog- nized at once that her repose and the gra- ciousness of her cold smile were of the high- est art. She wore soft white crepe de Chine, with some pearls at her throat. There were lilies of the valley in her girdle and a great loose bunch of the same flowers in her hand. Sometimes her arm hung by her side, and sometimes she raised the bouquet and buried her face in its blossoms. Mrs. Lawton noted too that her color was genuine; and that, 164 A SUCCESSFUL MAN if she was a coquette and a flirt, she was also something more ; she made the women about her look tawdry, loud, and overdressed. The barn-yard fowl that cackles over its brood is a peaceful bird enough, but let some common enemy hover near, and with ruffled wings and threatening beak and talons it may become a dangerous antagonist. Pussy lies before the hearth and licks her furry paws, purring and calm as a slumbering infant, yet, in a moment, if her rival Ponto should show his face at the drawing-room door, you have the tiger-cat, fierce and furious, with glit- tering eyeball, quivering tail, and foaming mouth, ready to spring. Even the toothless old lion of whose docility the keeper has boasted will, if that keeper deprive him for but one hour of his food, turn upon him in frenzy, and tear and mangle and suck the blood of the hand it fawned upon. The wild beast only sleeps ; it can still get up, shake itself, growl, prowl, kill. Mrs. Lawton saw her husband approach Mrs. Gresham. She saw the young woman's A SUCCESSFUL MAN 165 nonchalant manner change to one of eager pleasure, for Constance had passed through many moods since we left her, and to-night they had all culminated in an intense hunger to see him again. It did not escape Mrs. Lawton's strained attention that the counte- nance which had been so indifferent became almost tender, as the expression of one across whose smiling flits an idea of pathos. She also noticed that Mrs. Greshain's pres- tige was shared by the man beside her, and that they two seemed to be courted and petted in an atmosphere of equal homage by the group which surrounded them. She glanced down at herself, and felt herself to be not only dingy and dowdy, but insignifi- cant, old, and hideous, and, with a sudden revelation of her husband's physical attrac- tions, which was as penetrating as a desire of the senses, she became the prey of an acute jealousy of his beauty as well as of her rival's. She hated them both. So in this gentle woman's breast awoke the savage in- stinct the animal with its appeal to her sex 166 A SUCCESSFUL MAN and to her vanity. She would have liked to tear the pearls from Mrs. Gresham's throat, to spit at and strike her, to trample upon her flowers, to insult and mar her loveliness. Her reason must have tottered for a mo- ment, for she went so far as to imagine that they were speaking of her together; that Mrs. Gresham asked who she was, and that her husband repudiated her; that they were ridiculing her together. They had, in fact, not even seen her, being mutually absorbed. Of course, in a saner moment she would have known he was incapable of such baseness. Her sufferings became so insupportable that she determined to end them, and, suddenly turning, asked the man who was with her for a glass of water. The instant he had left her, she accosted a servant who was passing with a tray of empty glasses : "I am feeling ill," she said to him, hurriedly; "please help me to my carriage ; and do you see that gen- tleman over there speaking to the lady in white ? In about fifteen minutes, mind you, not sooner, tell him his wife went home ; A SUCCESSFUL MAN 167 had a little headache; nothing serious, and he must on no account hurry, he must stay. Now, promise to do this for me, and come." The servant, an old man with stooping shoulders, who had been in the family for years, stared at her with his sunken, tired eyes. " Certainly, ma'am, certainly ! I will tell the gentleman. Shall I call Mrs. Lang- ton ? Would you like a maid ?" His sympathetic voice and kindly manner so unnerved her that she feared she could not repress the tears, but she made a superhuman effort. " No, nothing, only come !" she said, so decidedly that he deposited his tray and fol- lowed her. He helped her into her fur cloak and went out to tell the footman. This smart English lackey called out for the carriage, which Mrs. Lawton had prudently ordered very early. . It was one from a livery-stable ; respectable, but not elegant; and he helped the modestly- attired lone person into it with civility, but without enthusiasm. She was thankful the 168 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN drive was not too short ; she could give way to her despair. On his part, Daniel Lawjon's evening had not been without incident, for he had at last seen . . . the husband, and, as is the case in real life, where nothing happens but the un- expected, it had passed without complications of any sort. Mrs. Gresham had introduced the rosy, jovial, round-faced fellow to him, and he had been forced to admit to himself that he seemed manly and frank. In fact, Jack Gresham had few enemies, and the worst these could say of him was that he was not overburdened with brains, and that he grew sometimes a trifle heated over his wine. The two men had shaken hands and talked for a few minutes about hunting. He had heard him address her as " Con," and had looked in vain in her eyes for an expression of fear or of dislike. Shall I add that she had even been amicable in her manner, had called him "Jack," and had asked him to bring her a cup of bouillon, and that when he did so she nodded her thanks to him pleasantly ? A SUCCESSFUL MAN The conviction was unwillingly borne in upon Lawton, who studied their minutest actions with the keenest anxiety, that Mrs. Gresham did not shrink from her husband with loathing, and that their relations, what- ever they might be, were at least friendly. It was indeed difficult to imagine one's self de- testing Jack Gresham, he was so very good- natured. Lawton, himself, to his immense regret, found it impossible to do so not yet, not at once, at least well, then no matter. Even if the plane were a lower one, one hour of life, one hour ! He was starving, and she was here beside him! The pure breath of her mouth fanned his cheek, the touch of her hand was upon his arm. Oh, the ecstasy of it! And Constance for women are proverbially indulgent to the men who love them leaned to him, speaking low, sweet words, filled with that happiness which his adoration and his presence always gave her. Probably she did not even notice that his gloves were too large for him. The marked improvement in the H 15 170 A SUCCESSFUL MAN matter of his costume of late she had accepted as the most delicate incense of flattery to her- self. She had reached that stage of sentiment where such discrepancies as might still exist struck her as pathetic, and, as such, endearing. At any rate, this thing had been " different;" of this she had felt sure from the beginning. To him she was an elixir of strong wine, re- newing, stimulating to the utmost every faculty of heart and brain, rousing him to fresh ambitions. He told himself this was growth. While she felt with him like a tired chaser of shadows who grasps at last the real. There was something broad and sweet in the man. He had dwarfed her own world. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 171 CHAPTER X. THE domestic delivered his message faith- fully: fidelity was his strong point. He did so just as Lawton was about to seek his wife. He was too upright and honorable a man to bring her here, a stranger, to a house where he felt at home, and to wound her by any dis- respect or neglect. He was, as I say, about to look for her and present to her some of his acquaintances. He had even thought it prob- able that she and Mrs. Gresham would meet, and, although not enough a man of the world to face this ordeal with entire composure, he would rather have died than seem to shun it, and had, in fact, determined to let things take their course. Tow for an instant he thought, with a qualm of conscience, of following her, but, man-like, he was provoked that she had not 172 -4 SUCCESSFUL MAN waited for him. He told himself that her impatience was childish in the extreme, and the more he thought of it the more annoyed and irritated with her he became. How would she ever meet the exigencies of her impending position if she were so easily haffled by her first social effort ? So, when Constance's eyes bade him stay, he lingered. Socrates himself must have had his hours of recklessness. When he reached his rooms two hours later and stopped at his wife's door, all was silent and dark. He turned the handle and found it locked. He therefore concluded she was asleep. But Mrs. Lawton was not asleep. After he had gone to his bed she crept up noiselessly and leaned against his door. She listened to his lightest movement, to his breathing, as if they would betray to her his secrets. It is a great shock to find the heart you have rested on in peace filled with tumults of which you know nothing. Lawton had never been a demonstrative man, and Mrs. Lawton, albeit loving, was of a calm temperament ; " her demands upon his A SUCCESSFUL MAN 173 affectionateness had at no times been great. Now, standing shivering with bare feet on the cold floor of her dreary hotel room, she re- membered all of the past, and marvelled that she had been so easily satisfied. Lately he had been even less warm than usual, and she, in her silly security, had attributed it to the cares and anxieties of his campaign. She had, of course, known that the world was full of folly, of untruth, and of sin, but she had never believed that these things could touch herself. She read of them, heard of them daily, and had fancied that she alone wore a magic armor, was safe. What an idiot she had been ! Now she felt sure that he had never loved her. A woman's faith, which has burned steadily for years, will waver at a breath. A man's, once accorded, is with difficulty shaken. She thought of Constance, and in her own humility asked herself what qualities she possessed to cope with such a sorceress, and she said to herself, "None." She had been engrossed with her household, with bringing up the children, and 15* 174 A SUCCESSFUL MAN she had shared none of her husband's pur- suits, none of his literary activities. Even his political career she had borne with, rather than encouraged. How could she fill the manifold requirements of such a mind as his ! He had made strides and left her behind. All was clear to her now as the day. As she stood there in her wretchedness she longed to cry out to him, to touch his hand, to creep into his arms and be comforted ; but the anger and pride of her offended woman- hood rose up and checked her, and she gave no sign. When he met her the next morning, he found her and Kate booted and spurred and packed for an early boat. She murmured something about being worried; that little Dan had a cold, and that she had decided not to remain another night. She bade him fare- well quite cheerfully. He was obliged to re- main until the evening, to be present at an important committee meeting. It would be one of the last, for the elections were drawing nigh. A SUCCESSFUL MAN 175 A week later the great day had arrived. The incessant rain had at last ceased. The storm seemed to have blown itself out, and the wind-swept valley was at rest. A bright sunshine shone upon the scene, and lighted up alike the banners of Marcus M. Curley, which flaunted in the fresh north wind with an impudent assurance, and those which waved across the street a hideous effigy of Lawton's fine face. Curley's supporters were loud in their braggings, as people are who lead a forlorn hope and are really wading knee-deep in despondency. The voting was brisk, and the streets were full of men. There were crowds about and at the polls. They said it would be one of the largest votes that had ever been cast ; but everything was well-ordered and quiet. Party feeling ran high, but there was no disturbance. The police, who patrolled the town, were on the alert, but had hardly more onerous duties than usual to fulfil. A few warrants had been issued to the deputy marshals for the arrest of persons accused of illegal registration. A 176 A SUCCESSFUL MAN few men charged with " impersonation" were seized at the instigation of the inspectors and held for future examination. A certain number of jubilant Irishmeii who had celebrated the day early by copious liba- tions, and who were a trifle noisy, were col- lared and hustled off to the station-houses. Among the vehement supporters of the two opponents the Independents crept about sul- lenly, maintaining as to their own intentions a sphinx-like reserve. They seemed to be coquetting between the rival factions, who, in their turn, felt the pulse of this agitating minority which resists, protests, and warns, caressing and making them overtures. One could never know until the ballots were counted how an extra vote or two might turn the scale. Lawton remembered after his mid-day meal, of which he partook at his office, that, besides being election-day, this Tuesday was one of some significance in his private annals. It was the anniversary of his engagement. He had forgotten it in the morning. It had been A SUCCESSFUL MAN 177 their wont his and his wife's always to cel- ebrate, the afternoon with a tete-h-iete drive into the country, unless indeed, which had rarely happened, business or illness interfered. He now remembered it with compunction. He had noticed that his wife's manner was marked in its coldness since the fatal ball, but he had pretended not to remark the change, as people do who live in fear of explanations and their consequences. All deceit and trick- ery were hateful to him, and he hoped there was nothing. It was at any rate safer to ignore. It is easier, however, to say " what is beyond remedy should be beyond concern" than to put this sound philosophy into execu- tion. To-day, it must be confessed, he rather dreaded the ttte-ci-tete, but it was not in his character to shrink from unpleasant contin- gencies. He reminded himself of her many virtues, of her unselfishness, of her devotion to his children ; and his conscience smote him. He would not appear negligent. He tele- graphed to her that she must not forget what 178 A SUCCESSFUL MAN day of the month it was ; that he would be out at three to drive her to Harbor Hill, and begged her to have the new mare put into the light wagon. In an hour he received her answer. It was short : " I will be ready." At a few minutes past three they started. He found his hands were full with the young horse, and for the first half-hour little else- was spoken of between them except of her merits and demerits, her possibilities and peculiari- ties. She seemed somewhat skittish, and chafed on the bit, but Lawton was an experi- enced driver, having learned in his boyhood to break in colts on his father's farm, and man- aged her admirably. His wife had implicit confidence in his skill, and was not by nature timorous. They then spoke of the elections, and he expressed himself as glad to escape for a couple of hours from the heated excitement of the town and the importunities of ofiicious friends into the freshness of the quiet fields. The raindrops still fell from the trees above them, and the mud flew up high under the wheels. When they reached Harbor Hill, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 179 these topics, however, were exhausted, and there . arose a certain chill and embarrassment between them. Wedged so closely into the narrow wagon, bound together so mightily by the ties of custom, by years of mutual in- terests and mutual sacrifices, these two people felt themselves in that moment immeasurably far apart. They sat shoulder to shoulder, now and then pushed up together by the jolts of the springs on the uneven road ; yet they were ill at ease, and would have given worlds if they might have done with this drive, which was such a mockery, and be once more asunder. But Mrs. Lawton had come with a purpose, and that purpose was to be accom- plished. She tried two or three times to say what she had come to say, but her mouth was so dry she could not speak. At last she did muster up sufficient courage. " Dan," she said, " Dan, I want to speak to you." " Yes, my dear ?" touching the mare's neck gently with the whip, but somehow his heart stood still. 180 A SUCCESSFUL MAN " When I left that party the other night, it was not the headache that drove me away ; it was the heartache, Daniel." There was something so solemn in her tone that he found no word to say to her. " Listen," she continued, " and I will tell you all. I cannot tell you what I heard. It is useless. Those fashionable folks have tongues in their heads that are as bitter as the adder's. No matter what I heard, though they talked of you, Daniel, and and of that woman, till I felt I ought to scream out to you and force you to listen to me and be warned ! No, it was not that ! I am no gossip myself, and I don't lay too much stress on what tattlers say. No ; but I saw you go up to her, and I saw you look at her as you never looked at me, and I seemed to to to have lost you !" She gasped for breath, and he remained speechless. " I understand now perfectly, Daniel, that I have been a fool ; I have been too busy over the house and the children. When I saw those women, I felt I was nothing. I have A SUCCESSFUL MAN neglected myself. I cannot talk, and I cannot even dress. "When I thought of all that would be expected of me now that you will have such a big place, I felt like running and hiding, or asking you to let me go back to ma, for for for you never have loved me, Dan, I am sure of it ! And, do you know, when you hung over her I knew how it was. I hated her, I hated you ! I felt outraged, but I saw her power ! I do not think you have been wicked are those women up to that ?" she asked, with strange astuteness. "Don't they -care too much for themselves ? But if I tell you what I thought, will you forgive me, Dan? I thought she asked you who I was, and that you said you did not know; that you laughed at me to- gether! Daniel! Daniel!" and she clutched at his knee with one of her hands convul- sively, " say it was not true ! say it was not true ! You would not deny your little Dan's mother !" In her agitation she had grown half-wild again, and her eyes fixed his with an anguish of questioning. 16 182 ^ SUCCESSFUL MAN Then something in the man's being gave way. His head fell forward on his breast, and he broke forth into violent tears and sobbings. Her own tears flowed freely now at the sight of his unwonted emotion, and they fell upon her hands like a healing balm, for at least he was not of stone. At the sight of her pain he too suffered. There was another witness of this scene, to whom, if incomprehensible, it gave greater freedom. As Lawton raised one powerful hand to his face to wipe away the great drops which trickled through his fingers, the mare trembled, feeling the joy of the slackened rein. It is impossible for the chronicler to know why or at what she took fright. Some workmen were blasting rocks in a neighboring quarry. An explosion a little louder than the preceding ones was the first signal. In a moment Lawton was erect, with the reins tightly rolled about his wrists, his feet braced firmly against the dash-board. An instant later he cried to his wife, A SUCCESSFUL MAN 183 " Throw yourself out ! I cannot hold her !" and they were hurling towards the cliffs. Harbor Hill on its inward slope was a gentle declivity of grassy meadow, the land dropping to the valley. On the sea it was a high steep cliff of sand and loose boulders. As the mare made for and neared the preci- pice, Lawton repeated his command to his wife to cast herself to the ground, but she hesitated. A few yards from the edge he tried, with frantic energy, to turn the mare's head. The wagon swerved round with a jerk under them, and he felt the back wheels sink. The soil, undermined by the recent floods, had given way. The mare herself seemed to know that her last hour had come. As the earth caved in under her hind legs, she snorted with agony, and her eyeballs shot forth flame. Mrs. Lawton had just time to throw herself across her husband's breast, and so, clinging closer to each other than ever they had done in the first pure transports of their boy and 184 A SUCCESSFUL MAN girl affection, they were swept down together into the eternal silence. An hour later, in the neighboring towns and on the highways, the newsboys were running about shouting out their "Extras" announcing to the world that Daniel Lawton was elected governor of the State by an over- whelming majority. Through the still evening air Constance, leaning at her window, heard their distant cries. THE END. 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