University of Virginia Library

53. CHAPTER LIII.
CAVE CANEM.

To show the different dispositions of Josie's
two latest lovers, and also to indicate the
divergent roads of feeling by which they
departed from her, we must positively sketch
a scene which befell between them.

One of the first things which Drummond
did after his refusal was to look up the rival
whom he had supplanted. They chanced
to meet by twilight in the little square opposite
the White House, a place which Hollowbread
now frequented much in the dim
and tender hours of the day, because there he
had often walked aforetime with his Josie.

“Aha, old boy!” exclaimed Sykes, in his
loud way. “Here we are in the same boat.
Cheer up. I am a fellow-sufferer—haw,
haw!”

“I don't understand you, Mr. Drummond,”
replied Hollowbread, glancing about him
with a worried, eager expression, as if he
would have liked to run away.

He looked the image of feeble wretchedness,
dilapidated in body and broken in
spirit. There were broad cloudings of gray
amidst his lead-colored hair, a stubbly, grizzled
beard all over his cheeks, chin, and
throat, and a broad streak of white around
the roots of his mustache. His face was fallen
and flabby; there were furrows on each side
of his mouth so fresh and deep that they

looked like wounds; and his dim, watery,
timorous eyes were set in a net-work of
tremulous, skinny puckers. It was obvious
that he had lost stones of weight, and also
that he had thrown aside his harness of
springs and bandages. His arms no longer
filled the sleeves which they had once fitted
in such a noble, sausage-like manner, while
his shrunken abdomen hung in a loose pouch
which reminded one of the build of an opossum.
That wondrous suit (the masterpiece
of a conscientious tailor), which had cased
so exactly a made-up man of two hundred
and fifty, bagged awkwardly, and one might
almost say sorrowfully, around a natural
man of rather less than two hundred.

“You are not looking well, Mr. Hollowbread,”
observed Drummond, surprised into
something like compassion.

“I can't get any sleep,” answered the old
gentleman, in a piteous tone of complaint—
the tone of a broken man, of an invalid.

“Come, my dear fellow, let us be frank,”
continued Drummond, laying a hand, meant
to be amiable, on a cringing shoulder. “I
know why you stick in Washington, as well
as why I stick here. We have done our
best, both of us. But our term is over, and
we may as well go home. We are both unseated
by the same little game, and by the
same little wire-puller. I have just been
sacked by Mrs. Murray.”

“You!” stared Hollowbread, his limp face
suddenly reddening and twitching.

“Yes. You won't believe, perhaps, that
I have been engaged to her. But so it is—
haw, haw!”

“I don't believe it, sir—it can't be, sir—I
won't believe it!” stammered the half-paralyzed
man, hastily and almost incomprehensibly.

“It is just as true as the Constitution. I
was engaged to her a month ago.”

“It is false, sir—as false as hell!” responded
Hollowbread, in something like a shout,
his face perfectly crimson.

“Oh, that may do in Congress,” said Sykes,
recognizing and smiling at the familiar
phrase of the honorable member who rises
to denounce an aspersion. “I have used
the simile myself, perhaps. But look here;
here is her last note to me. Read that.”

Mr. Hollowbread would not read; but he
was so far crushed by this readiness to produce
testimony that he could not help believing;
nor could he quite suppress an indistinct
groan of “Is it possible!”

“Oh, indeed it is possible and highly probable—haw,
haw!” declared Drummond.

He was full of vindictiveness; he wanted
to hurt the woman who had jilted him; he
would have been glad to prevent her from
ever again having an adorer. Fearful lest
Hollowbread might yet go back to her, he
was eager to inject into him some of his own
venom.

“You didn't know her, my dear fellow,”
he continued. “I don't know her. I don't
believe she knows herself. I don't believe
she knows for two days together what she
is likely to do, or what she wants. But one
thing I do know—you have had a deuced
good riddance. She is the most infernal—”

“Stop, sir!” hissed Hollowbread, fiercely,
turning upon him, with one shaking fist uplifted.
“I will have nothing said against
that dear lady. I will not hear a word to
her disparagement, sir—not a word!”

“Oh, very well!” nodded Sykes, with a
stare of wonder, coolly amused with this extraordinary
case of fidelity, of abused love
which would not cease loving. “As you
fancy, of course. But let me give you one
piece of advice, my dear fellow. You are
looking badly, and you need care. Go home
to your relatives for the rest of the vacation.”

Not deigning to reply, and feeling that he
had spoken his last word to Sykes Drummond,
Mr. Hollowbread wheeled slowly, and
tottered away.

“By Jove! he is really in love with her,”
muttered the man of thirty. “Who would
have thought an old fellow could love like
that? Well, one learns something new
every day—something new about one's fellow-idiots.”

Then he, too, stalked off, walking with his
usual firm, strong step, his pugnacious head
bent forward a little, like a bull musing of
battles.

Of a sudden, as he passed a thicket of evergreens,
he ran against some comparatively
slight figure and knocked it aside. By the
dim twilight he recognized the rounded outlines
and willowy movement of Squire Nancy
Appleyard.

“Mr. Drummond!” exclaimed the Bloomer,
in a gasp which confessed palpitating emotion,
as well as the shock of the collision.

“Well, what do you want now?” demanded
Skyes, harshly, for he was in one of his
most unlovely tempers, and this woman had
bothered him much.

“I want to know whether you ever think
of your promise to marry me,” was the answer—precisely
the answer he had expected.

“I was just thinking of it,” he said.

“And what —” she began pathetically,
fooled by her hopes.

“I was just thinking I wouldn't do it,” he
concluded, with a sardonic grin.

“Mr. Drummond!” shrieked the squire,
putting her hand behind her, as if to draw
either a weapon or a handkerchief.

“Look here!” he snarled. “If you pull
any more popguns on me, I'll break them
across your empty head. Now, mind!”

She made no reply, but she was evidently
dismayed by his threat, and, after a short
struggle to govern herself, burst out sobbing.

Not in the least pitying her, but rather

pleased to see what power he had over her
weak nerves, he gave her another warning
glare, and marched on. Scarcely had he
gone ten steps, however, ere he heard the report
of a pistol behind him.

He wheeled, ran back to Squire Appleyard,
caught her by the arm, shook her soundly,
and set her down hard on a bench.

“I told you not to fire at me, you idiot!”
he said. “Where is the pistol?”

“It went off in my pocket,” returned Miss
Nancy, beginning to cry. “And I don't know
but I'm shot.”

“Get it out for me,” he ordered. “I don't
want to bother with the mysteries of that
coat—or whatever you call it.”

It was really dreadful. Here was a man
who would not permit himself to be shot either
by night or by day. There was no precedent
in the history of American heroines
for the treatment of such a willful, irrational,
and brutal wretch. The Jael of California
herself, that spotless and fearless protégée
of the eloquent strong-minded, would have
been perplexed to deal with a wretch who
thus abused his superior strength.

After some tremulous fumbling, fearful
lest there should be another awful bang, and
sobbing the while as if her heart would burst
with a report, Squire Appleyard produced the
pistol.

Drummond took it, put it in his pocket,
wheeled around in silence, and coolly tramped
onward, with the air of one who had turned
his back on something for life.

A minute later, however, as this rough and
tough creature passed the “palatial residence”
of that eminent banker, Allchin, he
beheld a spectacle which made him start
and palpitate.

A carriage drove up, and from it descended
Josie Murray, magnificently arrayed, a vision
of beauty to dazzle one. In the portico
she turned, seemed to recognize him as he
passed, shook her large fan at him amicably,
and then disappeared within.

“A dinner-party, I suppose,” muttered
Drummond. “The old hyena will pick her
to the bones. I wish him a good appetite—
haw, haw!”

Let us follow Josie into the Belshazzar
scene of revelry (we quote from a city item
of the Newsmonger) which the great financier
had evoked from the magic realms of his
purse. The dinner was given in her honor
as a queen of fashion, as a power in politics,
as a successful claimant, as a goose worth
picking.

Allchin hoped to furnish forth many entertainments
out of the deposits which he
expected to coax from his honored guest.
He could do it without scruple, for it was
his practice to look upon a deposit in his
bank as so much clear income, and to use it
accordingly.

This man was one of the wonders and
signs of our financial age. He was the incarnation
of semi-genteel impudence, and of
half-conscious, reputable dishonesty. The
brass with which he could recommend a
fraudulent stock to a widow, or a retired
clergyman, or an old friend, might not be
surpassed in lustre by any other banker of
our times.

Language fails us in attempting to do
justice to this instinctive, remorseless, and
indiscriminate plunderer. He would cheat
any body, old or young, gentle or simple, man
or woman, saint or sinner, with the same
bland greediness and impenitence. He had
no more respect for age or sex or character,
in his freebootings, than a pirate. He would
have fleeced Ruth; he would have swindled
Florence Nightingale; he would have been
very glad to spoil Miss Burdett-Coutts. Had
he been one of the apostles, he would have
played the part of Judas, and got a much
better bargain, and never have hanged himself.
Had he been one of the converts of the
day of Pentecost, he would have gone “cahoots”
with Ananias and Sapphira. In short,
he was one of our greatest financial managers
and railroaders.

“And this is the heroine of the session!”
said Mr. Allchin, bowing his huge body over
Josie, and speaking in a deep, mellow rumble,
like a volcano about to lay waste some
flourishing region. “This is the magician
who turns Congressmen into apes and lapdogs,”
he added, with sincere admiration of
the immoral witchcraft.

“I did use them, didn't I?” smiled Josie,
unable to repress a little burst of vainglory,
and amusement as well.

“Yes; and abuse them!” grinned Allchin,
wagging his enormous head facetiously. “I
must beware. I may get enchanted myself.
I may become one of the—the victims,” he
concluded, after trying in vain to remember
some poetical simile.

Then he presented his other guests to her.
Some of them she already knew personally,
and all of them by reputation.

There were three financiers and railroaders,
sly, purring old cats of the business haymow,
with very soft fur and very long claws,
who were commonly supposed to mouse independently
of Allchin, and even to be his
rivals, but who were really engaged in a vast
secrect system of co-operation with him, each
helping the other to prey, and all gobbling
it together.

There was a New York broker, a dark,
lean, trim, hard, alert gentleman, reminding
one of a black-and-tan terrier, who had the
fame of being as destructive in a “corner”
as the other beast in a rat-bin, and who was
the Wall Street agent of his entertainer.

There was a lawyer of great notoriety and
really eminent ability, whose sole abominable
business it was to engineer private bills
through Congress, and who had earned fees

from all the other predatory adventurers
there present.

There were the wives of these genteel
“sports,” some clever and gracious, some
stupid and vulgar, but all magnificiently arrayed
in the spoils of financiering, and, on
the whole, fine enough to add lustre to their
husband's varnish of respectability.

Finally, there was a superb woman of
thirty-five, who was no other than Mr. Allchin's
own claimant; the claimant whom
he swore by, and vouched for, and recommended
to his wealthy friends, and backed,
as he asserted, with his own money; the
greatest claimant that had ever been known
in Washington, or in all our favored country;
a claimant who had no less than nineteen
millions in gold due her. Yes, the
whole of it was due her; she had never collected
a cent of it.

Of course a lady who had such a fortune
coming in some day would feel free to borrow
all she needed, and could afford to be
liberal in the matter of usury. A hundred
per cent. was what she allowed, interest being
payable when the note should fall due,
and the note falling due on the collection
of the first million. The loans which she
had gathered in and divided with the noble
banker who guaranteed her respectability
were already beyond computation.

In short, it was a gang of affiliated black-legs,
who had met to divide the winnings
of the late session, and who were willing, by-the-way,
to pluck the feathers of a lucky
novice.

Will Josie escape them without being
stripped of the golden plumage which she
has filched from Uncle Sam's eagle? It
seems hardly possible. If she dodges Allchin's
marble quarries, there are the Arizonian
mines; if these fail to ingulf her,
there are the tumbling, crushing stocks of
the Great Alaska Railroad; if she evades
these, she may trip among the corners and
margins of the New York Exchange; every
gentleman present has his rascally trap of
well-baited and fatal speculation.

Finally, there is the wonderful claimant,
with her romantic story and her dazzling
cent. per cent., no doubt the most dangerous
tempter of them all to Josie, who has just
pushed a claim to its goal easily and profitably,
and who consequently believes in claimantcy.
Alas for her, if she listens to these
charmers! She will soon have to begin the
world again.

Perhaps the reader may suggest that, if
she lose her fortune, she may marry the
rich and love-lorn Hollowbread. But it has
been revealed to us that a legal obstacle
stands in the way of this salvation. Mr.
Hollowbread, on reaching his relatives (and
heirs), presently made known to them a determination
to will all his property to Mrs.
Augustus Murray, and likewise exhibited
other symptoms of what they considered—
and justly considered — mental alienation.
Thereupon they got out a commission de
lunatico upon him, and had him placed under
a conservator.

It is saddening to leave our heroine under
the shadow of such threatening circumstances.
She had her pleasing traits; she
was beautiful, graceful, clever, entertaining,
and amiable; if she had only possessed
truthfulness and honor, she would have been
admirable. One can hardly help wishing her
well while conceding that she deserved ill.

But money easily and naughtily won is
so often easily and foolishly lost! No doubt,
too, Josie's head has been turned by her prodigious
and facile success, and she will be
exceptionally ready to fly in the face of ruin.
On the whole, our hopes for her are feeble
—feebler even than our good-will.