Playing the mischief :: :: University of Virginia Library

The man whom she best liked would not
propose marriage, would not do any thing
energetic or definite in the way of love-making,
and would not even show as much friendliness
and serviceableness as various less favored
cavaliers.

All this troubled her much more than
could easily have been guessed, either by
those who merely saw her butterflying about
society, or by those who knew her intimately.

Many times the thought of it brought tears
into those eyes which any one would have
judged beauteous enough never to plead or
grieve in vain. There were days when she
was by no means certain that she should not
fall sick, and perhaps die of a disappointment
in love.

But, thanks be to that Power which has
made women stronger than they seem to be,
her three or four fits of crying did not kill
her; and when it became obvious that Bradford
would not immediately take her to his
arms and mould her destiny, she went on
moulding it for herself.

To be sure, she came to no distinct decision,
and lived, so to speak, from hand to
mouth; but in spite of vacillations, and
through mere drifting, she tended mainly in
one direction: she held on to her claim, and
held on to Mr. Hollowbread.

We ought to state, out of mere simple justice
to her, that her prevalent purpose with
regard to this enamored statesman was to use
him to get “her money,” and then to throw
him away.

In order, however, to have many strings
to her bow, and so “make sicker” of hitting
some game or other, she kept all her men
about her. The Byronic and bumptious Bray
was encouraged to call often, to talk much
confiding fustian about General Bangs's lofty
soul and his own lofty soul, and to strut
away in a peacocky state of satisfaction, under
the impression that he was a favorite.

The Apollonian Beauman, who wanted to
be Minister to Portugal, and had no manner
of claim to the position except that four hundred
women in Washington thought him
“perfectly beautiful,” also dropped in frequently
to try his magnetism upon the fairest
lady of them all, and, mayhap, to receive
a shock or two himself.

Young Calhoun Clavers, too, was a constant
visitor. It was at this period that he
laid his twenty years, his cotton-planting descent,
his Southern simplicity, enthusiasm,
and truth, his fervent, boyish love, and his
slender prospects in life, at the feet of a guileless
widow two years his senior. From a
sentimental point of view the sacrifice was
a rich one, but it was of very little consequence
to Josie, and she kindly declined it.
The soft-hearted and not yet very hard-headed
youth did not know what a favor had
been done him, and retired from the interview
exceedingly sorrowful.

114

“I met a corpse descending your steps,
Mrs. Murray,” said Beauman, who entered a
moment later; “and I recognized the deadly
gashes of your dagger.”

“You recognized nothing of the sort,” replied
Josie, with that light-hearted laugh
of hers which was so deceiving, because it
seemed so utterly unconscious of grave emotions.
“You met Mr. Clavers with one of
his malarious headaches. He is subject to
them.”

It must be understood that she quite liked
Clavers; that she fully perceived what a
fund of faithful love there was in him; and
that, while perforce rejecting his impecunious
offer, she felt grateful for it. Moreover,
there was in her somewhat of that womanly
honor, or wisdom, which will not reveal one
man's heart-humiliation to another.

“And he was taken with his fit here?”
continued Beauman. “So many men are!
I think it would be imprudent for me to
stay.”

“As if I were a fever-and-ague district, Mr.
Beauman! I don't think any thing would
give you a headache, except failing to go to
Portugal.”

“Couldn't you lend me forty or fifty Congressmen
to save me from that calamity?
You could spare them?”

She laughed again, not a bit vexed with
his fling at her multitudinous flirting, and
satisfied at having drawn him off from the
subject of Clavers.

“It would be wisdom in us to combine our
forces,” she added. “Suppose you lend me
your forty or fifty Congresswomen.”

“Useless. No woman will work for another,”
retorted Beauman, who felt himself
to be the equal of any lady, and did not take
feminine chaffing meekly.

Then Sykes Drummond dropped in, for he
also had been lured again to the Murray
shrine, notwithstanding his fretfulness over
the loss of the Murray claim, and over the
Appleyard rencontre.

“What, Beauman! not sailed yet?” he
haw-hawed in his irritating fashion. “Well,
I suppose it is only a question of time.”

Beauman, who was accustomed to dominate
Congressmen by dint of godlike beauty
and lordly deportment, made no reply
further than to gaze at Drummond with an
impassive countenance, much as a Horse
Guards swell might gaze at a forward grocer.

“Of course it is only a question of time,”
interposed Josie, always eager to keep her
men on terms with each other. “Do you
suppose, Mr. Drummond, that you are the
only spoiled child of fortune? You might
as well say at once that you wish him a pleasant
voyage.”

“I wish him a thousand,” declared Drummond,
exceedingly wroth at Beauman's stare.
“But I fear it is of no use. You see, Beauman,
you haven't graduated; you haven't
been through the regular mill; that is your
weak point. Nobody gets a fancy office except
broken-down Congressmen and secretaries.”

“I believe the Executive and the Senate
decide these questions,” said the would-be
diplomat, calmly looking down upon the representative
of the Lower House.

“I have always understood so,” answered
Drummond, with a retaliative haw, haw!

Of course this sort of thing was too pleasant
to last, and Mr. Beauman presently departed,
with crushing dignity.

“What is the use of telling people the
truth?” demanded Josie of her remaining
admirer. “You only make enemies.”

“I can escape this one by going to Portugal,”
laughed Drummond. “He will never
be minister there, or anywhere else. Barring
some first-class selections, which must
be made in order to get our real work abroad
done, missions are for the General Hornblowers
and the honest John Vanes, when they
can't get elected any longer. Beauman is
simply a genteel fellow of good parts and
superior personal attractions. He never has
held an office nor done partisan pulling and
hauling. Any old political hack can beat him
out of sight on this track. Why shouldn't
I tell him so? It is a service to him and a
pleasure to me—haw, haw!”

“Ah, Mr. Drummond! you are very hard,”
commented Josie, studying him with an eye
which did not indicate unmixed commendation.

Yes, he was hard, he was boorish, he was
domineering, he was thoroughly selfish.
There was not, so far as she could judge, a
tender or a sympathetic or truly courteous
spot in his whole nature.

She could not want him as an advocate,
much less as a lover, and by no means as a
husband. Nor could she want the dilettante,
delicate-handed Beauman, nor, should she
want him, could she probably get him.

Clavers, too, so willing to give his all, but
whose all amounted to mere heart-beats, was
not a man to whom she could bind her destinies.

Against many others, whom she had
thought of as her possible Greathearts, there
were likewise objections, either as to devotion,
or desirableness, or ability. The world
was something like an army, very imposing
and magnificent when surveyed in mass, but
composed individually of commonplace, unattractive
hirelings.

In short, until Edgar Bradford could somehow
be secured, it seemed necessary to stick
to the faithful and useful Hollowbread. It
was the more necessary because there was
that additional evidence to be obtained in
support of the claim, and she knew of no
one else who would be likely to do it so well
and with so slight a prospect of reward.

So she clung to her eldest-born admirer,

115

and eventually went with him to Beulah
County, and did a very strange thing there.

We must do her the justice to repeat emphatically
that she was extremely averse to
this audacious pilgrimage in search of old
Drinkwater. She did not want to raid
about the world in the sole company of Mr.
Hollowbread, partly lest Dave Shorthand
should show her up again in the Newsmonger,
but mainly lest Edgar Bradford should
hear of it, and never call on her more.

She tried to coax her venerable advocate
to set off alone; but here she came in conflict
with his really puissant vis inertia. He
could not possibly be put in motion.

At last, having obtained a private interview
with General Bangs, and learned from
him that additional testimony must positively
be had to make her business hopeful,
she decided to risk the adventure.

Although the holidays were over and the
session had re-opened, Mr. Hollowbread was
only too glad to accompany her. He dropped
his inflation bill as if it were the most
mischievous of measures, which indeed it
was; he turned his back on the prayers of
office-seeking constituents, on the public
woe and weal, and on his own glory. With
Mrs. Murray's arm in his, he would have
quitted Paradise and eloped to the infernal
regions.

Josie meanwhile informed her relatives
that she was called to New York by a matter
of investment, explaining to her conscience
that New York meant New York
State, and that the investment was her
claim. When the colonel proposed to accompany
her, she would not hear to it, alleging
that it was midwinter, and her dear
uncle would surely catch cold.

As a security against tattle she left Washington
alone, and Hollowbread joined her at
the Baltimore station. Thenceforward they
made the trip in company, though with due
regard to speed and propriety, traveling by
sleeping-car, and meeting only in public.
It seemed to our love-lorn Congressman that
the lady to whom he had proposed marriage,
and whose decision he was even then humbly
awaiting, treated him with cruel strictness.

Josie herself felt inclined to relax her monastic
severity when she reached the small,
bleak, snow-bound village of Murray Hill.
In the first place, the hotel was a doleful
little tavern, cold, windy, comfortless, unkempt,
dirty, musty, and dispiriting, a lair
calculated to cow any woman with a sense
of isolation and helplessness, and to make
her espouse the first man who would offer to
carry her away. In the second place, old
Drinkwater, bearing with him all her hopes
of fortune, had departed into the unknown.

“Gone!” Josie gasped at the landlord, a
large, flabby, shabbily-dressed man, richly
scented with whisky and tobacco. “Gone
where? Not dead, I hope?”

“Well, no,” mine host opined, apparently
surprised at the suggestion, and even considering
it irrational, not to say injurious.
He didn't think old Drinkwater would do
any thing so hasty. He had lived to ninety-three,
and got through the worst of it.
What was the use of going back on himself
and dying now? Any body who knew him
would allow that he had prejudices against
dying. And he was a mighty obstinate
man — couldn't be shoved around by any
body. But he certainly wasn't in the village.
He had quit about a week before,
and never told where he was driving to.
Likely enough he was visiting some old crony
somewhere or other. He was a lonesome
sort of codger, of course, and knew ten
times as many people in the grave-yard as
out of it. Sometimes he would put off to
see some deaf and blind old chap that he
had been thick with seventy or eighty years
ago. Last spring he had dropped in on old
Squire Bunker, of Lockport, and challenged
him to run a race round the block. “Why,”
says the squire, “I couldn't walk it!” If
they wanted to find the old fellow, they had
better hunt up the greatest patriarch they
knew, somebody two or three hundred years
old, and ask for Drinkwater. But, if they
would stop long enough at Murray Hill,
they would be sure to see him. He had
been coming back to Murray Hill for the
last century, and wasn't going to forget his
way all of a sudden.

All this the landlord stated in the tone of
a humorist who keenly relishes his subject
and his own treatment of it. In narrating
the Lockport incident, he imitated with
startling energy both the stentorian bass of
Drinkwater and the piping utterance of the
decayed Bunker. Moreover, he went on to
chuckle at considerable length over the fine
preservation of the village Methuselah, the
vigor of his lungs, eyes, ears, and members,
and the unimpaired soundness of his noddle.
But he could not give so much as a guess as
to where he might be; nor would he, when
pressed, affirm positively that he was still in
the land of the living.

“Of course the old man might kick the
bucket,” he admitted, with rational candor.
“He an't much in the habit of it, and nobody
ever seen him do it once; but still he
might, on great provocation.”

From a great-grandson of Drinkwater's,
a young farmer of about twenty-five, they
learned nothing more positive.

“Great-grandfather had been talkin'about
Lockport,” he suggested. “But there's no
tellin' where he'll fetch up, nor when he'll
fetch round. When he's once out, he keeps
agoing till he's tired on't. He an't offen
gone 's long 's this, though. Dead? No,
guess not;” and he stared at the singular
surmise. “Some folks think he's out on the
Lakes. He follered the sea when he was a

116

boy—follered it for forty year or so—and
he's had a hankerin' lately to git aboard
ship once more. But I kinder reckon he
wouldn't voyage in the winter-time. Don't
think he's dead. And yit he might be.”

Then came news, brought by a horse-dealer
just returned from Buffalo, that old Jeremiah
Drinkwater had really taken a trip in
a lake schooner, and that there were fears
lest he had suffered shipwreck.

The report was a terrible shock to Josie;
her galleon of hopes had gone down in deep
waters. She pushed aside her cup of milk-and-water
tea, rose from the narrow, unsteady,
barren table of the hostelry, and went
to mope in the small, frowzy, scantily-furnished
parlor, half lighted by a single kerosene-lamp,
and half warmed by a swart, closecylinder
stove.

A doleful arena it was in which to combat
the tigers of dullness, loneliness, and disappointment.
It seemed to her that if there
had been a bright wood-fire in the room
she could have borne her sorrows with some
fortitude, whereas that sombre iron demon,
without a ray of cheering illumination, and
giving forth its chary heat with a morose
gloominess, only added blackness to her
darkness. To what or to whom could she
turn for sympathy and comforting but to Mr.
Hollowbread.

“Don't you wish to smoke?” she had
considerately asked, when they quitted that
frigid Sahara, the tea-table.

Now, but for her he would have fled to the
bar-room and consumed whisky-punches and
cigars until bed-time, though in the main little
given to such pastime. But the beloved
of his heart he must not and did not desire
to leave solitary, unless she plainly requested
it.

“If you have no objection, I would prefer
to remain with you, Mrs. Murray,” he said,
with that deference which he now always
accorded to her, the truly enamored old Lothario.

“Thank you. Do stay!” responded Josie,
gratefully, so low had she been brought by
discomfort and worry.

Then there was a long discussion over the
chances of the claim, the advocate distinctly
conceding that they were somewhat dubious,
and the claimant positively trembling under
the thought that they might be so.

At last Josie dropped into silence, brooding
over her suddenly darkened future, and
querying what she could do to brighten it.
It seemed to her, as it has probably seemed
at times to every fortuneless woman, that
fate drove her upon seeking a husband.

Well, here was one to her hand, respectable
in character, eminent in position,
wealthy, devoted, and only objectionable by
reason of being forty years her senior. She
glanced at him sidelong; the dim light of
the kerosene-lamp favored him; it did not
appear to her that he looked insupportable.
Portly he certainly was, and his visage had
a rather too sumptuous rubicund glory; but
sartorial cunning had done its best by his
figure, and his massive Roman features were
still comely. As for his age — well, there
was a dim, funereal encouragement in that,
too, inasmuch as whatever woman he married
might shortly be a widow, and would,
of course, have financial consolations. It
was an ugly train of thought for a young
lady to indulge in, and we will hope that
she did not dwell upon it long or quite consciously.
But the result of it was, that she
found his size and his years somewhat the
less distasteful.

Meanwhile, had she no recollection of Edgar
Bradford? Yes, certainly yes; but she
shut her eyes and bit her lips when his image
arose before her; she strove with petulant
energy to forget him. He had been unloving
and ungrateful and unkind; he had
not cherished her, nor even helped her, as
he ought to have done; he had actually responded
to her embrace by kissing her coldly,
and laying her aside promptly. It was
his fault that she was here alone with this
old man; and as she thought of it she once
more shut her lustrous eyes and bit her rosy
lips. We are not sure, indeed, that there was
not a dimness of tears in the one, and a faint
stain of blood on the other.

All this time she was sitting in front of
the grim stove, trying in vain to warm her
tired feet at it, her white skirt showing
across her delicate instep, her small hands
clasped plaintively over her knees, and her
Grecian head bent in sad meditation. She
was a lovely, a very lovely, object to look
upon, attractive enough to draw a long gaze
from any one, even from a perfect stranger.
Mr. Hollowbread glanced at her stealthily
from moment to moment, and thought that
he had never before seen her so beautiful, so
fascinating. He painted her profile on his
very heart; he so fixed it there that he never
afterward forgot its smallest line; never
forgot how she looked in that very moment.
It must be understood, also, that, excusing
his boldness by the chill of the room, he had
ventured to draw his chair up to the stove,
so that they sat very close together.

“Have we exhausted every subject?” she
at last said, turning a dejected smile upon
him.

“There is one subject of which I have
promised not to speak,” ventured Mr. Hollowbread,
fearing the while lest she should
request him to leave her merely for alluding
to it.

The poor, tired, lonely, desperate little
beauty gave him a quick glance, which was
not a glance of displeasure.

“May I speak of it. Mrs. Murray?” burst
forth the love-lorn, half-crazed man, his voice,
his veins, his limbs full of trembling, and his

117

mouth twitching with emotion. “May I say
to you that I have not changed—that I still
await your answer—that I live for you?”

It seemed to Josie that some irresistible
impulse seized her, causing her to do a thing
from which she had hitherto revolted, and
of which she was sure to repent the next
instant. Without answering by word, she
pushed her chair violently toward Mr. Hollowbread,
laid one young hand on his old
shoulder, and then laid her young head beside
it, softly crying.

“Is it possible?” he gasped, almost out of
his senses with joy. “Mrs. Murray—Josie
Murray—my dear one! Is it possible that
you accept me?”

“Yes,” whispered Josie. “Oh dear, I
don't know! Will you promise not to tell
till my claim is sure? Yes, I do accept
you.”

Grief, loneliness, longing for sympathy,
fear of consequences, egotism, revolt, and
still acquiescence all were mingled together,
and all were uttered. But Hollowbread
was conscious of but one thing—the unexpected,
the hungered-for, the priceless boon
of acceptance.

Then his mahogany face bowed over her
Grecian head, and his dyed mustache descended
upon her girlish cheek.