The Lieutenant-Governor: A Novel. Carryl Guy Wetmore

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hands in his pockets. He was cold, John, I could see that, and, no doubt, hungry! And there I was, in that dreadful little brougham, with my hateful furs, as warm as toast, and I didn't even speak to him. I could have died of shame!"

      She buried her face in her hands, bending low over the tea-table. Barclay was leaning forward in his chair, his lips set.

      "It's impossible," he murmured, "impossible!"

      The girl looked up suddenly, a white spot in the centre of each cheek, where the pressure of her thumbs had left its mark in the tender, pink flesh.

      "Improbable – yes!" she said, "but not impossible. Oh, I wish I could believe otherwise, but I'm sure, I'm sure! Oh, John! You are so big, so strong, so powerful now! Think of it – Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia! You can do anything. And if he is here in Kenton City, homeless, cold, starving, you must find and help him – for me, Johnny boy, for me!"

      The Lieutenant-Governor had risen, and was pacing up and down the room, with his brows knit, and his strong, white hands chafing slowly against each other, palm to palm. It seemed impossible, indeed! Spencer Cavendish, the last of one of Alleghenia's proudest families; Spencer Cavendish, the brilliant young society pet and sportsman; Spencer Cavendish, the wit, the viveur– a beggar in the street? And yet —

      The scandal of Cavendish's sudden and reckless plunge into sodden, open dissipation, two years before, freshly called to Barclay's mind by Natalie's words, had pointed to almost any finale, however debased, however sordid. Barclay mentally invoked the face of his former friend, as he had seen it on the occasion of their last meeting, flushed, swollen-eyed, insolent, the fine patrician mouth hideously contorted and maundering insults, filth, banality.

      "And I did it!" the girl was saying. "Don't forget that, John. Unwittingly, ignorantly, helplessly, if you will, I did it, just the same. If I could have loved him, I could have saved him. As it was, I had to send him away, and he has come to – to this! Oh, don't you see? Don't you understand that something more than chance has crossed my path with his, just at this moment of my supremest happiness, and of his utter degradation? My duty is plain. It is to help him, to uplift him, to make a man of him once more – to undo what I have done! I'm responsible – and I'm helpless! What can I do? What can any girl do in such a case? I can't go out into the streets and search for him. I can only turn to you, Johnny boy, and rely upon your aid."

      "But, Natalie dearest," said the Lieutenant-Governor slowly, "don't you see that it is impossible, all this? I cannot allow such an affair to come into your pure, sweet life, bringing with it the knowledge of the depths to which men may fall, and the shadow of misery and degradation. I cannot bear that, in even the remotest way, you should blame yourself for that which it was never in your power to prevent or remedy. A man – this man – has no business to cast on you the blight of his own weakness and folly, to establish a relation of cause and effect between your refusal of him and the subsequent transformation of a gentleman into a common drunkard."

      "John!"

      "Ah, don't think me bitter, dearest! If the man you saw was actually Cavendish, I pity him from the bottom of my heart. But it was his hands which built up the barrier between his life and ours, and it must be his that tear it down. It is intolerable that in his degradation he should come into your life again, and have, even in your imagination, the smallest claim upon you – intolerable! The paths of my love for you and my duty toward you are identical in this respect. There can be no alternative – no quibbling. At least until he has redeemed himself, if redemption is still possible, the thought of him, his presence, his misdoings, must not and shall not contaminate the atmosphere in which you live and move."

      Natalie had risen suddenly, her eyes ablaze.

      "Ah, John!" she said. "Am I then a toy, a sugar figure, that I must be packed in cotton, and shielded from all knowledge of the evil in the world? Is that what it means to be a woman? Ah, no! It is bad enough to be hemmed in by the wretched conventionalities which prevent my doing openly what I conceive to be my duty, without adding to the restrictions that actually exist the imaginary one that I must not even think of the misery, the wretchedness, the sordid vice which abound just across the borders of the comfortable little world in which I live. And see, boy dear! – with all the force of my conviction that things should be otherwise, yet I am reasonable. I don't ask to see Spencer, or to have an active hand in his redemption. I realize that the time for that has passed, and that you are just in saying that he must come to me, not I to him – and come to me another than the man he is to-day. Anything else is impossible: that I see and accept. But the hideous fact remains. A man who loved me once, who offered me all that a man can offer a woman, is walking the streets of Kenton City, cold, hungry, homeless – a beggar! What business is it of yours or mine what his past follies and weaknesses were? His temptations may have been beyond our understanding, but his present plight is not. He is begging – begging at our very doors – a man whom we have called by the name of friend! I can't help him. All I can do, as I said before, is to turn to you, whom I love better than all the world, and ask you to save him, in my stead. Ah, boy, boy! – I've given you all I refused to him, taken at your hands all I put away at his. You can afford to be generous!"

      The Lieutenant-Governor came slowly toward her, and, placing his hands upon her shoulders, looked her in the eyes.

      "Dearest and Most Beautiful," he said tenderly, "you are right. I hope – I believe – that you were overwrought, fanciful, that it is not true. But if it is, if Cavendish is begging in our streets, then, so surely as I am Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia, I will pull him out of them, and make a man of him, if it takes a month and every police officer and detective in Kenton City to find him. And that not alone for your sake, tenderest-hearted, but for mine. I can afford to be generous, God bless your sweet face, I can indeed!"

      And he bent over reverently, and kissed her hand.

      IV

      AS BETWEEN FRIENDS

      There were but two guests at the Rathbawnes' dinner-table that night, the Lieutenant-Governor and Colonel Amos Broadcastle, a veteran of the Rebellion, brevetted Major for conspicuous gallantry at Lookout Mountain, and now commanding officer of the Ninth Regiment, N. G. A., the crack militia organization of Kenton City. Colonel Broadcastle had seen his sixty-five, but his broad, square shoulders, his rigid carriage, and his black hair, even now only slightly touched with gray, clipped twenty years from his appearance. His eye was one that was famous throughout the Alleghenia Guard, – an eye accustomed to control, not a single man, or two, or three, but a thousand, moving as one at his command; an eye enforcing obedience immediate, machine-like, and unquestioning.

      It had been a momentous day for the Ninth when Amos Broadcastle, retiring from the staff of a former Governor, had accepted, first a majority therein, and then, three months later, its colonelcy. He found ten companies, in no one instance exceeding twenty files front. He found a field and staff vain, incompetent, and jealous; company officers deficient alike in their knowledge of tactics and in their conception of their responsibilities; sergeants, corporals, and lances chosen without any view to fitness, and ignorant and tyrannical in their positions; and finally, the rank and file lazy, untidy, and frankly contemptuous of the school of the soldier. Some one had once said of the Ninth that there was consolation to be found in the mortifying knowledge that the men composing it were there with the unique view of escaping jury duty. The consolation lay in the probability that such infernally bad soldiers would have made jurors quite as infernally bad.

      But Broadcastle, a born disciplinarian and a trained tactician, was now in a position to echo, albeit in a different spirit, the arrogance of Louis: "Nous avons changé tout cela!" Ten years had sufficed to change the indolent and incompetent Ninth of Alleghenia into a regiment rivaling in prestige the Seventh of New York. The commissioned officers were thrust upon, rather than achieved by, their companies, but, once established СКАЧАТЬ