University of Virginia Library

6. CHAPTER VI.
A VETERAN CLAIMANT.

One of Josephine Murray's first doings in
Washington was to look up an old acquaintance,
a certain Mrs. Frances Hooker Warden,
who, as she understood from report, had an
enviable experience in the claim industry.

To save time, she waived all ceremony of
card or message, and went unheralded to the
Warden residence. It was a plain, small
brick house of the old-fashioned Washington
type, with a rusty, painted front, which looked
high, because it was very narrow, and
with a steep stone stairway climbing up to
the shabby porch which sheltered its faded
door.

“I guess she hasn't got her money yet,”
said Josephine to herself, glancing at the
blistered blinds and other unkempt features
of the time-worn façade as she mounted
those penitential steps.

Presently thereafter she was in a scant,

sombre, musty parlor: a parlor carpeted
with threadbareness and curtained with
jaundice and furnished with rickets: such
a parlor as one is apt to find in the “furnished
houses” of cities which have a “season.”
In another minute or two Mrs. Hooker Warden
and her daughter, Belle Warden, were
rustling up to her with greetings.

“So this is Josie Umberfield!” cried Mrs.
Warden, who was a lively, muscular lady of
about forty-five, with a brown complexion,
unusually black and glittering eyes, and
luxuriant masses of black hair. She spoke,
by-the-way, with an eager smile, which had
been considered fascinating when she was
young, but which now had an air of having
been used too often, and got worn to transparent
thinness. “I am delighted to see
you as Mrs. Murray—delighted to see you
by any name,” she rattled on. “Are you to
stay some time in Washington? I am so
glad! Do you remember Belle?”

“How could I forget her!” exclaimed Josephine,
who could say nice things to women
as well as to men. “She was one of the good
girls at our school who were pretty.”

Belle Warden, a tall and Junonian blonde
of nineteen, with regular features and noticeably
clear, steady gray eyes, smiled hospitably,
but with a sort of statuesque calmness.

“You are very good to say that, Mrs. Murray,”
she replied, with that tone of sincerity
and gravity which seems to belong to contralto
voices. “I wish I could have gone
to your wedding. It was kind of you to invite
us.”

“I would have asked you to be bridesmaid,
if you had been old enough,” declared
Josephine. “You know I was immensely
your senior at school.”

“Three years' difference was a great deal
in those days. You were one of the grand
ladies of the first class, and I was your humble
admirer.”

“You are still, Belle,” smiled Mrs. Warden.
“Why didn't you say so? Belle is just like
a man, Mrs. Murray—or, rather, like a man
on his oath. She weighs every word solemnly,
and thinks twice over a compliment,
even when it is true.”

“Dear me, what obstacles to conversation!”
laughed Mrs. Murray. “If I weighed
my words, I should stutter dreadfully,
and end by turning dumb. But do have
the goodness, both of you, to call me Josie.
I want to bring back the pleasant old times
when I used to frolic at your house in New
York; besides, I want to be intimate. Do
you know I have no friends in Washington
except my venerable relatives by marriage,
the Murrays? I want friends, confidants,
advisers, helpers.”

“Why not take the venerable relatives?”
inquired Belle. “They are excellent people;
the old colonel is magnificent.”

“What a creature you are, Belle!” laughed
Mrs. Warden. “There is Mrs.—I mean
Josie — ready to jump into our arms; and
you suggest the Murrays. Don't you understand
that she wants to tell us something,
and wants sympathy?”

“The Murrays are too venerable and too
other-worldish,” explained Josie, as we will
mainly call her hereafter. “Yes, I want to
tell you something, and to have you encourage
me, and say, `How nice!' But don't let
us hurry about it.”

Then there was a talk concerning other
days, by which it appeared that Josie had
been a wild girl at school, and that Mrs.
Warden had led a gay social career in New
York, very much to her taste, except in the
matter of expense.

At last the conversation veered around
once more to the object of the visitor in
coming to Washington. With many misgivings
Josie unfolded that enchanted budget
of her claim, which sometimes seemed to
her to contain a fortune, and sometimes to
have nothing in it.

“And you must advise me,” she said, laying
her burden at the feet of Mrs. Warden
with the boundless faith of a novice in the
wisdom of that blundering veteran, Experience.
“You must tell me how these things
are pushed and carried.”

“Poor mamma!” commented Belle, in her
calm contralto, and with her grave and, so
to speak, manly smile. “She wishes she
knew.”

“Nonsense, Belle! I do know,” answered
Mrs. Warden, in a rather cattish, spitting
fashion. “I know as much about it as any
woman, or any body, in Washington. You
will admit it some day, when I bring you in
my money — and no thanks to you, either!
But it does take work and time, my dear,”
she confessed, turning to Josie. “Perhaps
I had better tell you all about my own claim,”
she continued, very naturally, that being a
subject on which she could not help talking
when chance offered. “You know I am a
great-granddaughter of the famous revolutionary
naval hero, Commodore John Saul
Hooker. I am the last stem of the race—I
mean Belle is. That is my claim.”

“Did the Government owe him any thing?”
asked Josie, her mind turning to barns, hayricks,
and the like.

“Owe him any thing! It owed him its
salvation, more than likely. How do we
know that our revolutionary sires would
ever have broken the yoke of England, if it
had not been for his exertions, his triumphs,
and his heroism? My view is, that, excepting
Washington, Greene, and one or two other
generals, the country owes more to John
Saul Hooker than to any other man who
ever lived.”

“To be sure,” assented Josie, conscious of
a momentary spasm in her throat as she conceded

to herself that Mrs. Warden's claim
was far more imposing than her own.

“Our stupid Congress,” continued Commodore
John Saul Hooker's great-granddaughter
with animation, “gave Signora
Ameriga Vespucci twenty thousand dollars
because she was the remote descendant of
the man who discovered this country. Now,
I say that it owes something more, a vast
deal more, to the near descendant of the
man who saved it.”

“But, you see, there was a great deal more
interest due on the Vespucci debt,” put in
Belle. “Two centuries more of interest.”

“Belle, do stop!” snapped Mrs. Warden,
making a face at her satirical daughter.
“I do think it is shabbily undutiful in you
to sneer at your great-great-grandfather's
services, and at your mother's labors; and
all my work is for you, too. And I don't
believe that woman was a bit of a Vespucci,
either; I believe she was nothing but an Italian
adventuress. It's an everlasting shame
to the Congressmen of that time to have been
so humbugged by such an impostor—that is,
if she was one. Twenty thousand dollars
to an I don't know what, because she called
herself Ameriga Vespucci, and dressed in solid
velvet! And here I, the near relative of
John Saul Hooker, with a perfectly made-out
genealogy and a position in our best American
society—I can't get an appropriation!”

“But you are going to get one,” added
Josie, willing to say something pleasant,
and eager to believe that appropriations
were attainable.

“Oh, yes, I am going to get one,” pugnaciously
declared Mrs. Warden, already given
over to the possession of the claim-hunting
spirit—a fiend as bewildering as the imps of
the gambling-table and the lottery-wheel.
“If I work at these stupid wretches twenty
years for it, I will have one. I mean that
justice shall be done in this one instance,
whatever it costs.”

“But if it should cost more than it comes
to?” sighed Josie, remembering her own
venture rather than Mrs. Warden's.

“That is worth saying, Mrs. Murray,” put
in Belle. “Keeping house and receiving are
very expensive in Washington; and when
you don't get your appropriation, after
all—”

“Oh, Belle!” broke in mamma, with a
sharp hitch of her shoulders, half tremulous
and half piteous. “You will break my spirits
and my heart some day. You are harder
to carry than forty claims.”

The daughter had the good sense and
self-command to refrain from a defense of
herself, and so to avoid a dialogue of recriminations.
Apparently, she had fought
many battles with her mother on this subject
of claim-hunting, and had learned to
confine her warfare to an occasional protest
or sareasm.

“I shall get enough to pay me well,” persisted
Mrs. Warden, petulantly. “I have
laid my claim at one hundred thousand dollars.
It is the least—don't you think so,
Josie?—that Congress can have the face to
allow me. And I shall get it — that is,
eventually, and pretty soon, too—I know I
shall. One gets used to figuring up chances
at last. Ha, ha!”

She did not look the confidence which she
uttered. She had an air of remembering
many disappointments, and of glancing forward
askance, unwillingly, to many more.
This brief talk concerning her claim seemed
to have worn upon her—to have sharpened
her features and blauched her color. She
was an older woman apparently than when
she had rustled buxomly into the room to
greet a visitor, whose mere name brought
back less anxious and more cheerful years.

As Josie gazed at this veteran of the
world, a brunette like herself, and reputed
to have been once a beauty, but now prematurely
faded and seamed with ill-rewarded
coquetry and fruitless intriguing, she had
an uneasy sense that she was surveying herself
grown older.

As she noted those eager, egotistic, unhappy
black eyes, that varnish of thin, cracked
gayety over a visible ground of disappointment
and dissatisfaction, that hysterical vivacity
of manner which so reminded you of
the tremor of one carrying a heavy load,
she asked herself rather woefully, Shall I
ever be like that? But this gloom was
only for a moment; the healthy and handsome
and youthful are not naturally prophets
of evil; and very rare indeed is it that
they foresee ultimate failure as their own
lot.

“But how do you do it?” she presently
asked, as if the great-granddaughter of
John Saul Hooker had done it. “Whom do
you go to? How do you put things to
them? What do you do and say? I want
to know every thing.”

“Oh, I can tell you every thing. I know
every thing,” affirmed Mrs. Warden, not a
little vain of her knowledge, though it had
brought her so little and cost her so much.
“During the last three years I have done
every thing, positively every thing, that a
lady can do.”

At this point Belle colored, as if aware
that her mother had done some things
which a lady should not do, not even in
Washington.

“The main thing is to work, work, work!”
continued Mrs. Warden, with happy compendiousness.
“Never give it up; stick to
it every day, and year after year; work,
work, work!”

The repetition of this word seemed to help
her, to console her for failures, to give her
courage and hope.

“But work how?” inquired Josie. “You

might as well tell me to reflect, or to cipher.”

“To be sure,” laughed Mrs. Warden, a
lively person and fond of a joke. “You are
the same Josie Umberfield. How you used
to amuse me in those New York days with
your sarcasms on the beaus! You can do it
yet, I see.”

“Oh, I don't sarcasm it any longer. It
doesn't pay. Men don't like to be sarcasmed.
You can get a great deal more out of
them with compliments; and, after all, you
have to go to them for almost every thing—
as, for instance, in claim-hunting.”

“I wish women could vote; then it
wouldn't be so. If I do fail in this demand
of mine for justice, I solemnly mean to turn
woman's rights woman, and go to agitating.
If we had a Congress of ladies—”

“Then you and I wouldn't get any money,”
interrupted Josie. “Pretty young gentlemen
would have it all. I think we had
better trust our affairs to male legislators.
But do tell me, Mrs. Warden, how you work
at them, as you call it, to make them nice.”

“Well, just as you work at men for other
things,” laughed the elder coquette. “Ask
them for what you want. Coax them. Pout
at them. Then coax them again.”

“For shame, mamma!” burst out Belle,
blushing with humiliation over the maternal
trickeries.

“For shame yourself, Belle, for throwing
it all on me!” retorted the mother. “If you
had only helped me the least bit, we should
have had our money long since, and almost
without trouble.”

“I will not degrade myself for any purpose,”
snapped this young lady, who was
certainly troubled with self-respect, and,
perhaps, with a temper.

“Oh, you chicken!” smiled Josie. “You
will learn better some day. Consider the
weakness of us poor women. When you get
married, you will have to coax your husband.”

“I will ask him for nothing which he is
not able to give and willing to give,” declared
the young idealist. “At all events,
he will be my husband, and not the husband
of somebody else; I shall have a right to go
to him for money. Excuse me if I seem to
be reproving you, Mrs. Murray. I don't
mean it. But I do want my mother to keep
away from such business as she talks of.
She is—I will say it—too old.”

It was a sharp blow, we must admit, and
no wonder Mrs. Warden flinched under it.

“Belle!” she gasped, her eyes sparkling
with anger and then filling with tears.
“How considerate and polite to your mother!
It seems to me you might find some
other fashion of expressing your regard for
me.”

“Let us talk of something else,” suggested
Josie, who saw that she had stepped into an
old quarrel between parent and child, and
found the situation embarrassing. “It is all
my fault. I had no business to—”

“No! we will talk of this,” insisted Mrs.
Warden, calling up her spunk and giving
Belle a repressive glance. “What was I
saying? Oh, I was telling you how to wake
up our lazy, addle-headed, obstinate members
of Congress,” she continued, turning
her indignation upon that imperfect body.
“Well, to begin with, it might be well for
you to give dinners and receptions.”

“I am not keeping house, you know,” interjected
Josie.

“But won't the Murrays help you? They
are rich and have influence, and might help
you just as well as not.”

“Colonel Murray and Rector Murray!”
exclaimed Belle. “My dear mamma, do you
consider what sort of people they are? Don't
you remember how fastidious the colonel is
about Government money?”

“No; I suppose they won't help me; not
in this business,” admitted Josie.

“I suppose they won't,” echoed Mrs. Warden.
“The colonel thinks a Government
sixpence is sacred, and nobody should have
it but the departments. He is a perfect old
fogy, and sometimes I hate him,” she declared,
quite honestly, though sometimes she
was far from hating him, and would have
been pleased at any time to have a right to
love him. “Well, if you can't receive, you
must be received. You must go to all the
parties, and be in society all the while. We
will go together. We will work together.
You shall help me, and I will help you. Is
it a bargain? Good! Then we will conquer.
As Belle has had the kindness to tell me,
I am too old to work alone. Congressmen
prefer to be petitioned by a younger lady.
But I can advise, and you can execute.
Well, you must pick out your man, and then
you must enchant and bewilder him, and
then you must put your case in his hands.
Of course, you know how to enchant and
bewilder. You always did know that.”

“I have picked out my man,” said Josie.
“Do you know a certain Honorable Mr. Hollowbread?”