Playing the mischief :: :: University of Virginia Library

“She wanted it kept shady,” he added,
“and I, of course, told her she might rely
on me. You have to be roundabout with
women to get along with 'em and manage
'em,” he explained, putting on an air of having
been too much for his fair client, though
painfully conscious that she had driven a
very hard bargain with him. “But you
and I, Sykes, have wagoned it too much together
for me to do any thing underhanded
by you. When a man is a man's partner, he
ought to lead so as to let his partner know
what he's got in his hand.”

“Yes, there is such a thing as honor,”
guffawed Drummond, brutally relishing his
own irony, and even gazing at Mr. Pike
with undisguised contempt. “And, besides,
it pays in the long run to play fair with Congressmen,
doesn't it? And, besides, you will
want my help in this chore.”

“Undoubtedly,” admitted Pike, with a ceremonious
pronunciation and a glum countenance,
showing that he was not pleased with
this satire. “You seem to be rather irascible
about something to-day. I should like
to know if I haven't done the right and correct
and honest thing?”

“Confound that little shuffler!” broke out
Drummond, thus revealing the real cause of
his ill-humor. “So she wanted to count me
out? By George! I never saw the beat of
her for trickery. She is prodigious. I never
saw her equal.”

“Well, nor I neither,” agreed Jake Pike,
not without admiration for the trickster, so
fair-minded was he. “I call myself a middling
capable business man. You know,
Sykes, there an't more than a thousand or
two of my friends can euchre me in a bargain.
But she run me down from fifty per
cent. to ten per cent. before I knew where I
was sliding to.”

It was a painful, degrading confession,
and he had hated to come to it. It seemed
to him that he had shown small dickering
ability, and had been cheated in a manner
which made him ridiculous. Had a man
thus sheared the golden fleece of his profits
it would have annoyed him, but that a woman
should do it gave his vanity a very toothache
of humiliation. Now, however, that
Drummond acknowledged Mrs. Murray to
be prodigious and hard to beat, he could
find courage to confess how she had docked
his commissions.

“Ten per cent.!” laughed Sykes, uproariously.
“Well, you were lucky in getting
that,” he added, promptly, not wishing the
matter otherwise. “How did she manage
to shave you, old man? Make eyes at you?”

“Eyes! She made months at me, rather
than eyes. Argued me all about the room.
Threatened to work against me.”

Drummond burst into another roar of
laughter; it always pleased him to see any
one else beaten.

“We shall have to knock under,” he said.
“We shall have to give her her own way.”

“Well, yes. We shall have to let her
deal,” conceded Pike. “If I was never euchred
before, I am now. But where are
these papers?” he asked, not quite trusting
to Josie's statement concerning them.

“In the Spoliations. Under the wing of
the greatest of jobbers.”

“Oh, him!” said Pike, with a look of alarm.
“Why, he'll want twenty per cent. himself.”

“At the last minute it will be popped into
some other committee. I will tell you which
and when.”

“All right, Sykes,” yawned Mr. Pike, gaping
and stretching at his ease, as if all this
were the simplest and safest business possible.
“Covering up tracks. Bully for you!
Wake me early! But I thought old Hollowbread
held the cards?”

“He thinks he does, and I do. There,
that's enough. I have something else to
attend to. Go and train your watch-dogs
of the Treasury—haw, haw!”

The next day Drummond was to call on
Josie, and he did not fail to keep his appointment.
He walked rapidly, as determined
people are apt to do when angry, and
he fully intended to rush in upon the perfidious
one boldly, and to reprove her openly.
But when she met him with one of her
sweetest faces, rustling and swaying daintily
in one of her most becoming dresses, he
gave her a glance of admiration, and was as
civil as he could be.

“I am so glad you came!” she observed.
“You need not speak to that Mr. Pike about
my claim. I would rather you shouldn't.”

“What a pity! He would have been so
useful to you!” answered Drummond, unable
to help grinning as he said it.

Josie guessed at once that he had heard
of Pike's visit, and she changed her tactics
with bewildering rapidity.

“Because I have spoken to him myself,”
she added, laughing and making mock

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courtesies. “Oh, Mr. Drummond! oh, my
poor member! If you want any bargaining
done, do let me manage it for you. You
thought Mr. Pike would want twenty thousand
dollars, and he has agreed to take ten
thousand!”

“No!” exclaimed Sykes, in feigned astonishment.
“It is the cheapest thing of the
kind I ever heard of.”

“I thought I would try what I could do
with him. You see, I have been frank with
you.”

“Perfectly. I take it as a compliment.
Well, I am glad you have made such a bargain.”

“Don't say well. Mr. Jake Pike says well,
or, rather, wal. I suppose he thinks that
all's wal that ends wal. He repeats and
drawls the word abominably. It is enough
to break a nation of the habit. He is a
commonplace, plebeian creature, and he is
very ignorant and very stupid. I don't see
how you came to choose such an agent. I
don't see how he can accomplish any thing.”

“Work does it; pulling does it; impudence
does it. This man works and pulls
all day, and his impudence would armor a
ship of war. He believes every body on
earth can be bought, and consequently he
buys a great many. He is one of the most
successful members of the nether house.”

“It speaks poorly for the taste of the upper
houses.”

“I don't know that any body ever claimed
any taste for them. However, putting
all this trifling aside, you have done a clever
thing. Jake and I will draw famously
together in your harness.”

“He shall hire the votes, and you shall
make the oration, and Mr. Hollowbread shall
pull the committees.”

“An excellent plan, leaving Hollowbread
out—haw, haw! But I suppose a lady must
let her betrothed help her, or make believe
help her.”

“Oh, I will tell him what committees to
pull, and you shall tell me. All the wires
shall be secretly in your hands. Won't that
satisfy you? It must.”

“I will be satisfied with any thing that
you decide upon, barring your marriage with
Mr. Hollowbread.”

“And why not with that?” asked Josie,
roguishly, after a brief hesitation, which did
her conscience some little credit.

Then there was a scene of cooing and wooing,
which Drummond carried as far as she
would permit, and farther than Mr. Hollowbread
would have permitted.

The young Congressman had fully determined
to win her for a wife, if he could do
it. The claim, being at last in skillful hands,
seemed to him secure; and what with her
beauty, social position, and cleverness, she
was indeed a prize. So he courted her in
cold blood—no, not precisely thus, for the
current in his veins was of an ardent nature;
but, at all events, he courted her intelligently
and with a set purpose.

Now, Josie was one of those, we will suppose,
rare women who would rather be courted
by any sort of man than by no man.
Bradford had deserted her, most of her other
beans had cooled since the promulgation
of her engagement, and thus the constant
Drummond had enhanced in value through
lack of competition.

Once, as we know, she had disliked him,
and even now she did not fancy him overmuch.
But he would do in a pinch; and,
moreover, his thirty years were more enticing
than Mr. Hollowbread's sixty; and
finally, she needed his Congressional—alas!
for the degraded word!—yes, his Congressional
services. So she endured soft speeches
from this surely unlovely rough, and even
allowed him to kiss her patrician, her betrothed
hand.

He would have got on better with her
could she have trusted his discretion. But
his emotional fibre was so coarse, and so little
susceptible of sympathetic bruises, that
he often made dreadful blunders among the
delicacies of intimacy, just as a bull inevitably
commits damaging mistakes in a china-shop.

We have already related how he offended
her by his bovine ejaculation, “What would
the old man say?” And she did not feel at
all sure that he would not some day utter a
bellow in Mr. Hollowbread's ear about the
cordiality with which he was favored by Mr.
Hollowbread's betrothed.

Then there would be a quarrel among her
legislators, and her claim on her country's
strong-box might suffer thereby. Moreover,
what if Bradford should hear of these fondlings,
and should utterly despise her! There
was a thought which made her cringe with
honest pain, so nearly could she come to loving
purely and truly.

“All this is as a friend,” she said, to the
finger-kissing Drummond once — at least
once. “But other people might misunderstand
it. It is all strictly confidential, as
the phrase is. You must be very discreet,
sir!”

“You must take me to be no gentleman,”
he answered, with his characteristic self-assertion
and want of tact.

“Your faults run that way, Mr. Drummond,”
she retaliated, speaking very calmly,
however, and looking him softly in the eyes.

It was a terrible rebuke, and yet it sounded
like the pleading of an admirer who wishes
to amend in order to admire more entirely.
For a moment the bull in a china-shop
had a feeling as if an axe had been driven
in between his horns.

“Is it possible!” he murmured, for it seems
that he had been very ignorant of himself,
as probably each one of us is. “Perhaps I

158

am a little rough. I beg your pardon, Mrs.
Murray, for all my doings and sayings in the
way of being obnoxious. I will try to mend
my manners.”

“They are your greatest defect,” she went
on, surveying him with unflinching good-nature,
like a patient surgeon watching an
unwilling patient. “You put down people,
and then you exult over them. It makes
them want to fight you, or to get away from
you. If you would only be as gentle as you
are strong, if you would only say soft things
to people instead of hard ones, you would
double your power of influencing women—
yes, and men, too. And when you win a favor,
you should not blow a trumpet over it
as if it were a triumph. Now, I tell you all
this in kindness. I like you well enough to
want you to succeed. I want you to be a
popular man and a great one.”

“Thanks!” bowed Drummond, for once in
his life agreeably humble. “I assure you
that I am sincerely obliged to you, both for
the whipping and the motive. And now I
should like to state something which may
explain and excuse, or at least palliate, this
antagonistic tone which you find in me. Let
me tell you a story. Once upon a time a
soft-hearted old gentleman found a little boy
crying on a door-step. `Youngster,' said
this old gentleman, `what is the matter?'
`Oh!' blubbered this little boy, `my mammy
died, an' my papa married agin; an' then my
papa died, an' my mammy married agin; an'
now 'pears as though I wasn't any body's
son.' Well, that bereaved urehin, that proverb
of misfortune, was myself. I have had
a combative life. It was a series of buffetings
at the start, and it has been a struggle
ever since. What I have had I have fought
for. You can understand, perhaps, how I
grew up somewhat pugnacious, and also
somewhat disposed to celebrate my victories.”

“I don't blame you,” said Josie. “But
you are victorious now, and you must be
magnanimous. It will be the wisest way.”

Thenceforward they got on better together.
By an immense effort of intelligence, thoroughly
appreciable only to those who have
sought earnestly to discover and amend their
faults of demeanor, Drummond divined that
his triumphing laugh was offensive to human
ears, and labored diligently to break
himself of it, as well as of other forms of self-assertion.
Josie, on her part, saw that she
had influenced him, and liked him because
of it. Besides, now that he said few disagreeable
things and uttered an occasional
compliment, he was at times positively attractive.
She, of course, did not know, she
was too young yet to have learned how difficult,
how almost impossible, it is to change
character.

We are the sons of our ancestors; we are
our ancestors over again. One may say that
there is never a new, a perfectly individual
temperament born upon earth. Circumstances
and education vary the transmitted
type more or less in exteriors, but not at all
in its inner nature. Leave the plant to itself,
and it reverts to its primal character,
producing the hereditary fruit of its kind.
This Sykes Drummond, for instance, no matter
how he might strive to polish his manners,
would always be, in emergencies, and
in forgetful moments, coarse, insolent, and
masterful. He came of a breed remarkable
for its energy, arrogance, and combativeness.

However, these two now got on nicely together,
much to the grief of poor Mr. Hollowbread.
He did not receive any revelations
from Sykes, not even in the way of snorts of
triumphant laughter; and much less did he
glean any disturbing hints from the conversation
of our clever and considerate heroine.
But he saw things which worried him; he
found an envelope addressed to Drummond
in his betrothed's adored handwriting; he
encountered that gentleman several times
in the Warden parlor; he beheld him from a
distance entering the house; he caught him
leaving it.

Old men engaged to young lassies are always
jealous, and perhaps justly so. Mr.
Hollowbread was so troubled in this way
that he could not get his due and essential
allowance of sleep. He rose from wakeful
pillows with aching bones, a dizzy head, and
watery eyes, absolutely unable to see what
his breakfast was without glasses, and not
much better able to taste it.

He would have remonstrated with Josie
as to Drummond's visits, only that he loved
his little jilt dearly, and was therefore afraid
of her. Occasionally, indeed, he dared to
hint his dissatisfaction by talking little,
looking “grumpy,” and sighing. But it
amounted to just nothing at all. The man
kept coming, and she kept receiving him,
and, in short, it was dreadful.

At last—oh dear! that a conscientious
narrator should have to tell such things!—
at last our poor Hollowbread beheld Drummond
kissing Josie's hand.

Did he speak? No, he choked; he came
as near as possible to having a fit on the
spot; and, mixed with his griefs, he felt a
sudden terror lest he should die; yes, die and
lose his Josie.

An afflicted person in such a state of health
could do no better than to close the door
softly and go straight home.

That night he had to be sat up with, his
feet in a tub of hot water and mustard, and
a bandage soaked in chloroform around his
capacious noddle. His servitor in this extremity
subsequently reported that “Mars
Hollowbread had a most awful newraligy,
an' cried like a baby.”

It was in the bosom, however, that our
friend suffered mainly. Was his adored one

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false to him, or was that kiss a mere Drummondish
impertinence? Reason as he might
in favor of the latter supposition, he could
not help fearing that his Josie was an incurable
coquette, and that, even after their marriage,
she would continue to flirt. Should
he summon up all his self-respect and fortitude,
and tell her that he freed her from her
engagement?

“No, no; I could not do it!” groaned and
whimpered this pathetically earnest and
humble lover. “I am happier with her
playing the deuce with me than I would be
without her.”

Well, he did not die; nor did he quarrel
with his affianced because of the kiss; nor
did he ever say a word to her about it. As
nothing of the kind ever blasted his sight
again, he soon learned to hope that Drummond
had relinquished those obnoxious osculatory
habits, and at last half persuaded
himself that he had never seen what he did
see.

Meantime he kept on working faithfully
for Josie's claim, hoping thereby to win her
gratitude, and so keep her heart. Not a
thought now of statesman-like honor; not a
compunction as to robbing the treasury of
his country; not a throb of regret as to increasing
the burdens of a tax-hampered people.
He was a degraded marauder of politics,
fighting from the ambushes of special
legislation: a bewitched old Lothario, sacrificing
others and himself for a passion.