Playing the mischief :: :: University of Virginia Library

While the two Congressmen roughed it
outside, the three ladies held an animated
and even excited discussion within, as to
whether they should jump out or wait a
while and walk out.

“There are ladies going out by the door,”
asserted Belle, a mature creature for nineteen,
and little given to pranks. “I would
rather stay here an hour than dance out of
a window. It is simply ridiculous!”

“But just think of those poor men standing
there in the cold!” urged Josie. “I sent

Mr. Hollowbread out to catch me, and I really
must keep faith with him.”

Then Mrs. Warden, who was naturally of
a harum-scarum disposition, and liked still
to do a youthful deed now and then, interfered
on Mrs. Murray's side.

“My dear, venerable daughter, you can
try it by the door with Mr. Clavers,” she
laughed. “We young people—Josie and I
—will jump. It will be worth telling of
some day.”

“I wish you wouldn't!” begged Belle,
ashamed of her mother's hoidenism, as she
frequently was. But her pleading went for
naught, and at last, in a downright, prim,
respectable pet, she took Clavers's arm and
sailed away.

Thus, when the two outside adventurers
arrived beneath that window-display of millinery
and haberdashery, they beheld in it
the lithe, light figure and giggling face of
Mrs. Murray, and behind it the dark visage,
also “laughter-stirred,” of Mrs. Warden.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Hollowbread!”
screamed Josie. “Are you ready? Can
you do it!”

She had the skirts of her dress twisted
about her dexterously and decorously, yet
nevertheless she exposed a line or two of
beauty which the old beau had never seen
before, and which he could not help judging
as very rare in their perfection. Under such
circumstances, how could a man of artistic
nature fail to stretch forth his hands and
declare that he could do it? Moreover, the
height was no great affair, after all; it did
not appear to him to be more than six feet.
So he elbowed his way through a group
which stood beneath the window, signed
aside a tall policeman who offered to relieve
him of his venture, stretched upward his
pulpy hands, and called, “Jump!”

With a scream which was half laughter
and half hysterical fright, Josie leaped out
like a little avalauche of draperies, and descended,
fluttering and spreading, full upon
the Congressional bosom. But she was not
so light as she looked; there was a good,
plumping nine stone or so of her; and, letting
herself drive in that way, she knocked
her gallant as flat as a flounder.

Of course Mr. Hollowbread, much as he
might have desired a collision of this romantic
sort, suffered a good deal by it. In the
first place, it beat out of him pretty nearly
all the breath that had been left in him by
his previous gymnastics in the way of wrestling
and running. In the second place, the
snow just about there had been trampled to
a damp sludge by many feet, so that, before
he could extricate himself from his lovely incubus,
at least a square enbit of his raiment
had been wet through. He felt very much
as if a giant had set him down violently in
a humid mixture prepared for freezing purposes.

Nevertheless, he strove to bear himself
bravely, and to treat the adventure as a good
joke. His first words—a quotation from
Daniel Webster's famous Rochester speech—
these heroic and would-be jovial first words
were:

“Two hundred feet direct fall!”

Before this noble sufferer could rise, Mrs.
Warden had alighted, throwing herself so
fairly as to be caught by the athletic Bradford
without an overthrow, and doing no
other damage than to dig her fan smartly
into the face of a passing negro.

“Hi! yah!” shouted the freedman. “'Pears
to me women's flyin' roun' yere mighty loose.”
Then turning to Mr. Hollowbread, he added:
“I say, boss, has you got any mo' of 'em to
cotch? If you has, I'll cotch em fur you fur
a quartah apiece.”

“Get out of the way, fellow!” responded
our public functionary, with pardonable petulance.
“Mrs. Murray, I hope you are not
hurt?”

“Not a bit,” answered Josie, taking his
arm. “But oh, how we did come down!”
she added, bursting into a scream of laughter,
pardonable because spasmodic and irrepressible.

Mr. Hollowbread looked at her with a
smile which had very little glee in it, like the
puckered grimace which one many observe on
the face of a very young baby. Conscious
of cold chills running down his back; aware
of a more than soggy spot in his vesture, and
saying to himself that he hoped it would not
freeze; possibly also a little shaken and confused
by his late thump; he could not at
once be heartily merry. It was not until
they had been pushed against each other two
or three times by other eager wayfarers that
he recovered his spirits.

“But oh, it was too bad to knock you
down,” she added, noting his silence, and fearing
that he was annoyed. “I was shamefully
clumsy. I am so sorry!”

“I am not sorry at all,” panted Mr. Hollowbread,
and he energetically meant it, notwithstanding
that plaster of dampness. “I
should like to be knocked down in that style
every day.”

“It would be the death of us, Mr. Hollowbread!”

“It would be a delightful death to me,
Mrs. Murray!”

“It couldn't go on more than a week
without producing a quarrel, Mr. Hollowbread.”

“Never on my part, Mrs. Murray.”

“Besides, people would talk about it, Mr.
Hollowbread.”

“We must despise a censorious world, Mrs.
Murray.”

“I must refer you to my uncle, Mr. Hollowbread.”

The Congressman burst out laughing, in
approval of her promptness and pertness.

Even in this sort of free-and-easy badinage
he had to admit that she was more than a
match for him, notwithstanding his large experience
in talk of that sort. She was his superior
in every thing; she was a wonderful
young woman; she was dazzling and she was
fascinating. Notwithstanding his laughter,
and notwithstanding his unpleasant consciousness
of that freezing and stiffening
poultice which clung to him, he was in a
seriously tender state of mind with regard
to this little lady.

He was, we must repeat, an old beau;
that is to say, he had had a great number of
flirtations and superficial love scrapes; but
it must be understood to his credit that he
had also had one or two heart affairs of an
almost tragical earnestness; in short, he was
one of those venerable coquettes who can
really fall in love. His passions and affections
had been hard used and even shamefully
abused, but it is none the less true that
they were honestly puissant.

Well, after a long search the Warden
vehicle was discovered; then Belle Warden
and Clavers appeared, having forced an exit
by way of the door; the ladies were seated
and Bradford offered the vacant place to
Hollowbread.

“No — a thousand thanks — but no such
injustice,” replied the latter, who would have
liked to go with Mrs. Murray, but dared not
ride without his overcoat. “The honor is
yours by right. Farewell, ladies.”

Accompanied by Clavers, he now made a
desperate assault upon the still swarming
portal of the Treasury, and pushed on
through a seemingly undiminished crowd to
the masculine cloak-room. All the way
they came upon lamentable cases of destitution
and suffering. One gentleman, as
respectably bald as the prophet Elijah, had
no other covering to his intellectual pate
than his wife's mite of a lace handkerchief,
which he held on with one hand while he
sustained his better half with the other.

Senator Pickens Rigdon was swearing his
way homeward in an overcoat so much too
small for him that he could only get it over
one arm and shoulder. Scarcely any body
could find his carriage; hundreds of ladies
were footing it through the snow in their
slippers; and only too many of them had
lost their furs and pelisses.

Honest John Vane, the popular member
from Slowburgh, was carrying his handsome,
full-sized wife in his arms, while his
friend and her admirer, Senator Ironman,
ran ahead of them bareheaded, bawling
vainly for his coachman. It seemed every
moment possible to meet Æneas bearing Anchises
on his pious back.

Inside there were similar cases of seriocomic
deprivation and misery. Ladies, worn
out with fatigue and afraid to face the winter
wind uncovered, had thrown themselves
on the uncharitable, bare floors, awaiting a
chance to find their wrappings.

In the gentlemen's cloak-room there were
a fearful jam, turmoil, uproar, and scuffling.
At least fifteen hundred male maniacs were
engaged in this riot. Every one of them
either had no hat and overcoat, or else had
somebody else's hat and overcoat, and was
raving about it. The checks were lost, the
servitors were clean confounded and demented,
and the floors were strewed with rejected
garments.

Not by any dint of shouting, gesturing,
and showing his number in all directions,
could Mr. Hollowbread obtain his proper
caparisons. Seeing Squire Nancy Appleyard
in the main hall, marching off with a
beaver sack-coat which looked to him like
his own, he rushed out and claimed it in
quite a hot argument. Squire Nancy eventually
“peeled,” exhibited her name on the
lining of the garment, and strode away in
triumph.

Then Mr. Hollowbread returned, grumbling,
to the pandemonium of confounded
wardrobes, and spent half an hour quite
uselessly in quarreling over his grievances.
Meantime many wiser gentlemen picked up
what they could find, and made off with it,
leaving a very poor choice for the fastidious,
the conscientious, and the otherwise unready.

It was fully two o'clock in the morning
when our veteran legislator walked home,
with his dyed hair blowing in the wind, and
with a seedy, old-fashioned, green surtout
on, which could not possibly be strained to
button in front, while the two buttons behind
were high up his broad loins, as if they
were bent on riding pickapack. Yet his
mind ran upon Mrs. Josephine Murray quite
as much as upon his own distresses and
perils.

“That little woman will be the death of
me,” he said to himself more than once; and
fully as often he added, “But isn't she prodigiously,
amazingly fascinating!”

He was already pretty thoroughly bewitched
with her. Her lively talk, her dazzling
and yet tender eyes, her trim figure
and graceful carriage, her adventurous and
yet cultivated manner, had all impressed
him deeply. Then such a revelation of
grace and statuesque beauty as she had been
when she stood in the window, with her
drapery twisted about her in that audacious,
Grecian way! But it was chiefly the
soft, irresistible thump of that flying collision
which had done the business for him.
How enchanting and intoxicating the recollection
of it was to the susceptible old flirt
and volage!

Once he actually halted for half a minute,
while the satirical wind played the mischief
with his law-giving sconce, to think
it all over. There he was, admiring her;

there she was, laughing, holding out her
hands, and calling “Catch me!” then down
she came like lightning, a little, solid, lovely,
capsizing blessing!

He sighed softly, shivered to the backbone,
cursed the overcoat that would not
button, and hastened onward.

Meantime Josie Murray, far from thinking
about him, was fast asleep. Reaching
home about one, she was let in by a smirking
mulatto handmaiden, who had been
slumbering for an hour or two on the rug in
front of the parlor-grate, and who was fully
repaid for her slight hardship by an inspection
of the fine raiment of the “little lady.”

“I am afraid I kept my aunt and uncle
up too long, Sarah,” said Josie, while she
shook herself out before a mirror.

“Oh, laws! Miss Murray, they's been abed
this three hours,” giggled Sarah. “They
don't set up for nobody nor nothin'. Ef
'twas gwine ter be the resurrection, they'd
go to bed all the same. You hain't worrited
'em to speak of. I'll make it all right with
the ole folks. I'll tell 'em somethin' or
'nother.”

“But, Sarah, there was really an awful
crowd, and I couldn't get home a minute
sooner. You must tell them so.”

“Of co'se, you couldn't git home no sooner,
an' hadn't oughter. Young folks has to
have some fun in life, I reckon. Don't you
be a bit skeered 'bout the patriarchs. I'll
fix 'em.”

When Josie met her relatives next morning,
they were so far from murmuring against
her late re-entry, that they congratulated
her on getting home at all.

“What a time you must have had!” exclaimed
Mrs. Murray. “Sarah says millions
of people walked the streets bareheaded till
daylight. Of course, when she says millions,
she means hundreds. But there must
have been a great many shut out.”

“Such a crowd!” said Josie. “I don't believe,
uncle, that there was ever any thing
like it, except when the animals went into
the ark,” she added, knowing that allusions
to Scripture pleased her reverend relative.

“It gives one a new idea of the tribulations
of Noah,” smiled the rector. “I thought
of bulls of Bashan, and beasts at Ephesus,
and the rabble of Vanity Fair.”

“Vanity Fair!” litanied Mrs. Murray.

“If we had been animals we should have
been better off.”

“Better off!” emphasized and nodded the
old lady.

“We, at least, shouldn't have trodden so
much on each other's toes.”

“Trodden on each other's toes,” giggled
his respondent.

“I never before felt a desire for hoofs, not
to mention horns.”

“Not to mention horns,” added the wife,
with excitement.

“There was a man behind me who put me
in mind of the beast in Revelation that butted
four ways, and knocked down the stars
of heaven. It seemed to me we were all doing
that.”

“Oh, now, Mr. Murray!” protested the old
lady, waking up to his meaning, and protesting
against it; “when you get agoing,
you are too severe. Society is society, and
of course it has its inconveniences, but we
must have it.”

“So I think, aunt,” said Josie. “The stars
of heaven are safe, even though we do go to
parties.”

“But wasn't it wonderful that we should
never be able even to set eyes on you after
we lost you!” cried the old lady, throwing
up her wrinkled hands over the surprising
fact.

“Wonderful!” innocently assented Josie.
“I would have given all my old shoes to find
you,” she added, without much exaggeration;
for she set small store by old things, and liked
new ones vastly better.

“Well, what did you see and hear?” asked
Mrs. Murray, greedy for something to keep
her mind awake, and to enter in her diary.

Thereupon our heroine rehearsed one of
her incomparable narratives, sketching with
wonderful minuteness and picturesqueness
and vivacity the events of the evening, and
making herself prodigiously interesting and
amusing, although she said nothing of her
flirtations.

Such a picture did she produce of her jump
from the window, and her flooring of that
full-bodied Hollowbread, that her aunt nearly
had a fit with laughing.

“Mr. Hollowbread!” she presently repeated,
easily recalling a name which she had
in her diary, “I have heard of Mr. Hollowbread
somewhere.”

“It's the same man, aunt, who came with
me from the station.”

“Oh, yes, I recollect,” hastily answered
Mrs. Murray, eager to hide the vagueness of
her memory. “Yes, it was Mr. Hollowbread.
But did he speak to you?” she asked, with
goggling eyes.

“He is a friend of the Wardens. We walked
together for a while.”

“A—friend—of—the—Wardens,” repeated
the rector, enunciating very slowly and
distinctly, the better to impress this new
fact on an understanding which was a little
hard of hearing.

“Oh, yes—a friend of the Wardens,” jerked
out the old lady, getting the matter in
hand. “Well, I dare say he is a very respectable
man.”

“I ventured to ask him to call, he has been
so polite to me, and suffered so much on my
account,” laughed Josie.

“You asked him to call?” I am glad of
it,” giggled Mrs. Murray. “I should like to
look at him.”

“Mr. Bradford is going to call, too. Mr.
Bradford is a distinguished Congressman,
and a very old friend of mine.”

“Mr. Bradford! Is he?”

And down went another name and fact
on the old lady's memory, to be transferred
to her diary.

“And Mr. Drummond will be here to-day.
Mr. Drummond is the member from our district;
and, of course, I had to be polite to
him.”

“Mr. Drummond?—the member for your
district? I thought you said Mr. Bradford
was—something or other.”

The torrent of facts was flowing quite too
rapidly to be contained by the decaying
dikes of this ancient intellect.

“Mr. Bradford is her old friend, but Mr.
Drummond is the member for her district,”
explained the everlastingly patient and affectionate
rector.

“Oh, I see now!” answered the old lady,
who seemed always to comprehend without
difficulty what was said to her by her husband,
so much did habit and love quicken
her spirit.

And so the morning passed very pleasantly
in the Murray family, notwithstanding
the hardships and grievances of the previous
evening.

On the whole, considering how many amatory
scalps Josie had taken at the reception,
how many Congressmen she had more
or less interested in her claim, and what a
favorite she had become with her respectable
relatives, it must be conceded that her
outlook in Washington was a promising one.