Tales of the Chesapeake Part 28

"G.o.d forgive me," cried Elk MacNair, sinking into a chair; "my brother, I beseech you, do not think so evil of me as to suppose that in this enterprise I would compromise your character for one minute, and if it shall be necessary, all the fault shall be mine by open confession. There is an old claim for postal services rendered many years ago, which has reposed in the catacombs of one of the departments. The claimant has long been dead, and it was purchased for a small sum from his heirs. There are some equities about the claim; the attestations in its favor are purely doc.u.mentary, and I have so entirely manipulated every instrumentality on the way to its pa.s.sage, judicial, legislative, and executive, that if the Committee on Ancient Contracts should report favorably upon it at the beginning of the session, my confederates in the House will see that it goes along, and the department will pay it immediately. Congress will then at once adjourn, within a day or two, for such is the usage here. With my share of the money, which will be large, I will be a man of wealth and able to turn my back once and for all upon this Capitol. You are to be the chairman of the committee; the other members, as is habitual here, will intrust the whole matter to you; a few words explanatory of this claim will send it on its way, and the crisis of my life will have pa.s.sed."

When the younger brother had finished, he also seemed to have expended his strength in the effort he had made, and he sat limp and despondent. The elder brother, on the contrary, appeared to recover his strength by a vigorous effort of the will. He stood up. He walked straight before his brother and looked down upon him with his penetrating blue eyes.

"Elk MacNair," he said, "tell me--by our common origin, solemnly, truthfully, and on your honor, tell me--will this claim stand the test of full investigation? Is it right?"

"Arthur," said the younger, feebly, "under that appeal I must speak truthfully. The claim is irregular; perhaps it has been paid already.

There is no time for investigation. I have stocked the cards, and the trick must be taken at once or never. You have this alternative. I can take you off that committee, and I have a man in reversion who will get the post and pa.s.s the claim."

The stature of Arthur MacNair seemed to expand, and he became the positive spirit of the room.

"Not so," he said; "it shall not pa.s.s, Elk MacNair, neither by my help nor by any other man's! You have acknowledged to me that there is no justice in this thing. You have made me a party to a fraud. You shall know that the only oath I came here to take is that of allegiance to the interests of the country. No brotherhood, no sympathy, no ambition, no pity, nothing shall be able to swerve me from my full duty."

"What would you do, fanatic?" cried Elk MacNair.

"I will denounce that claim upon the floor of Congress, and couple with the denunciation the story of this infamous proposal you have made to a member of Congress."

The younger brother gave a laugh.

"What nonsense, Arthur," he said. "If you expect to find any large cla.s.s of Americans who will appreciate such heroism, exhibited at the sacrifice of your own blood and family, you do not know your countrymen in these days. The only men who deal in sentiment in our time are demagogues, who never feel it. A sneer will go up from all the circles of the capital, from all the presses of the land, at a man who seeks, in a political age, to play the part of the elder Brutus."

"Miserable, lost, dishonored man!" said Arthur MacNair. "In the valleys of my State, in the quiet farming districts all through the Union, among the hard-working, the penurious, and the plain--such as you and your cla.s.s despise--there are armies of men who would rise and march upon this capital if they appreciated the whole of the scene in which you have figured to-day! You would steal the money of the people that you may buy a character and a position among your countrymen. Shame upon the man who would defend the acquisition of such booty to wed the woman he loves."

Every word which Arthur MacNair had uttered, and most of all the last, cut like a knife into the pride of Elk MacNair.

"I thought I was pleading with my brother," he said hoa.r.s.ely, "not to a stone. I shall say no more. I have placed myself in your power.

Remember this: if my point is not carried within three days, or if it be balked by your interference, I will blow out my brains. I have walked to the door of h.e.l.l on the battle-field, and I can go further."

He seized his hat and hurried away like a fury. Arthur MacNair stood motionless an instant in the middle of the floor, and then, worn out with the intensity of the scene, his limbs gave way beneath him, and he fell unconscious.

In a moment the hard, strong face and giant form of Jabel Blake appeared over the threshold of the bedroom; he lifted his Congressman and counsel in his arms and carried him grimly to a sofa.

III.

The Honorable Perkiomen Trappe was much delighted, on the morning subsequent to the occurrences related in our last chapter, to see Jabel Blake walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with the pensive air of a man whose heart had been broken. The Honorable Perkiomen supposed that Jabel had failed to receive some drawback or other upon his income-tax, and he rejoiced in the reverses of the close and thrifty.

But Jabel Blake was now concerned solely with the sudden and violent rupture between the MacNair brothers. He had little acquaintance with Elk MacNair, and no great fondness for him; but, being well informed as to the positive, combative traits of character in Arthur MacNair, Jabel knew very well that what his counsel had threatened to do he would do, though his own heart-strings might be sundered.

The deepest wish in Jabel's heart, next to establis.h.i.+ng a national bank in Ross Valley, was to see the marriage between Kate Dunlevy and the MacNair family brought to pa.s.s; yet such was his reverence for the Dunlevys and so great his antagonism to the Was.h.i.+ngton Lobby that he was half inclined to be himself the means of breaking off the match between the daughter of his great neighbor and exemplar and the son of his old chum and companion.

Jabel took his way to the house of the old Circuit Judge, which was one of a row of tall brown-stone structures not far from the city hall, and when he rang the bell a servant showed him to a library in the second story, where the Judge was dictating certain judicial opinions to his daughter. The two elderly men retired to an adjacent apartment, which seemed, from its appointments and the character of needlework and literature strewn about, to be the _boudoir_ of Miss Dunlevy; and the Judge, who was somewhat past the prime of life, plunged into a long story about Ross Valley and its early settlement, speaking much of the time with his eyes closed in a sort of half reverie, while Jabel, who occupied a seat nearer to the library, was meantime overhearing a conversation between Kate Dunlevy and young Elk MacNair, who had followed hard upon Jabel's heels. The old Judge meantime, used to their voices, paused only to remark that he thought Elk MacNair one of the strongest, most brilliant, and most promising men in the nation, and then went on with his dissertation upon pioneer days among the spurs of the Alleghenies. Jabel, however, who was an attentive, inquisitive busybody, and who lived in a part of the country where folks of quality and large pursuits were few, observed that the two voices in the next room were lowered, and that their key, while not so high, was yet even more startling than before.

"Kate," said Elk MacNair, "I had counted upon my brother as an a.s.sured ally in something of the most momentous importance to me at this juncture, before our marriage. My brother is a man of power, but of narrow views, and I have unconsciously aroused his animosity. He is not to be appeased. Nothing can divert him from his purpose.

"It can be nothing, if Arthur is the arbiter and your happiness the subject," said Miss Dunlevy.

"It is a point of honor differently taken by two men," said Elk MacNair; "and the issue is a matter of character. It is a matter of fortune besides, and if neither relents both will suffer."

These words were attended with some emotion which smote the rough feelings of Jabel Blake, and he was a witness of some subsidiary endearments, besides, which softened his indignation against the young officer. So he followed Elk MacNair from the house and accosted him upon the street.

"General," he said, "I claim the privilege of a guardian over you boys--over your brother in particular, who is a true man and an obstinate one. I know the matter of your difference. If you do not yield, Arthur MacNair will keep his word! You will be exposed on the floor of Congress, exactly as he promised, and your engagement with Kitty Dunlevy broken forever."

"Jabel Blake," answered the soldier, "I know just what I am about. I told my brother that I would blow my own head off if he sacrificed me for a sentiment. And just that I mean to do."

"I know the devil in the MacNair blood," said Jabel Blake; "but you are playing a false part and Arthur a true one. He fought his campaign against the corruptions and chicanery of power, and he will trample you out like a snake."

"He thinks he's correcting a boy," said Elk MacNair; "he shall find me a soldier."

"And you will find him a Christian soldier, truer to his allegiance than to rob his country!"

"Pshaw!" laughed Elk MacNair; "a skinflint who has raked up fortune with his fingers, ground down his laborers, pinched his soul, and stooped his stature for money, has no right to be my chaplain, Jabel Blake! You have grown rich like a scavenger. What matter if I bring down fortune with my rifle, though the American eagle be the bird. I would spare my body some of the dirty crawling you have done to get your bank!"

"Base boy!" cried Jabel Blake, with more contempt than anger; "I will live to teach you that a life of thrift and honest toil is above your power to insult it. You can neither repel me nor break your brother's heart. The time will come when you will weep to deserve the respect you have lost from these gray hairs."

He pa.s.sed away with his old, heavy, deliberate gait, and left the young man almost repentant.

IV.

The galleries and floors of the House of Representatives were crowded, as was usual upon early working days of the session. Among the members in a retired seat his red shock of hair, clerical dress, and thin, worn, commonplace, freckled face denoted the new member from the Scotch district of Pennsylvania. The gay daughter of the Honorable Perkiomen Trappe, picking him out from the diplomatic gallery by the aid of her opera-gla.s.s, remarked that she mourned for her country when Europe could behold such a specimen of homespun among American Congressmen.

"And what's more, pet," said the Honorable Perkiomen, "he's a bin put on a fat committee. He has the cheer in the room on Ancient Contracts, and your unfortnit father is only a member under him. I think that staving cavalry brother of his'n, Elk MacNair, fixed his feed for him!"

They turned to look at Elk MacNair, sitting in the gallery near by with the venerable Judge and the Judge's daughter. His dark goatee, eyes, and hair, were set in a face unusually pale and intense, and his manly and refined worldly bearing suited his a.s.sociations. Kate Dunlevy, with her charms of bloom, repose, and stateliness, looked like the wife of such a public man.

"Elk," said she, "you do not seem to be at ease to-day. You are pale and nervous, and you have stared down there at your brother's seat till people are taking notice of you."

"I am suffering a little, Kitty; that is all. My case comes up within five minutes, and I might as well blow my head off if it shall stick anywhere."

His eyes seemed to flame out with a reckless light as he said this.

"Arthur has a sick look as well," said Kate. "This public life is too exciting for him. See how nervously he sips that gla.s.s of water."

"Sick!" exclaimed Elk MacNair, with a voice of bitterness, yet with a melancholy glance of admiration in the direction of the Congressman; "he is more dangerous than sick. His will is sublime, Kate; nothing can soften it, not even pity."

The committees were now being called by the Speaker, and chairman after chairman rose to make his report. As the list diminished more and more, and the Committee upon Ancient Contracts approached its turn, there were no two such livid, deathly faces in all the crowded house as these two brothers wore. Elk MacNair's had a settled ferocity. The youthfulness and comely moods were gone from it, and the burnt-out countenance of a man of the world looked dead and ashen above the exhausted reservoirs of a diseased mind. Nothing was left but the last chance before despair, and apprehensive of the failure of this hope also, his gloved hand, resting upon a pocket hidden at his hip, sought support from the hilt of a pistol secreted there. Was _this_ the meaning of the sullen and ghastly determination glaring from his eyes? Yes, love and death were almost mated; and so in every busy Congress do the spectres of temptation and ill-omen lurk in wait.

The country brother on the floor showed also his tenacious purpose in his compressed lips, straight, expanded breast and shoulders, and clear and direct but grave look. No extremity of occasion could make a heroic figure of him, but in his plain face was the beauty of moral courage. He rose to his feet when the Speaker cried:

"Committee on Ancient Contracts is next in order. The gentleman from Pennsylvania!"

The people in the galleries were not disappointed that such a homely man should have no voice nor grace, and that he spoke only with the gravest effort.

"The gentleman's voice is inaudible to the chair," said the Speaker.

But Elk MacNair had heard it from where he sat. He had distinguished the fitful words:

"The committee reports against the ---- claim for postal services, desires that it do not pa.s.s, and the chairman wishes to make a personal explanation relative to the claim."

"Kitty," said Elk MacNair, in a coa.r.s.e whisper, "my brother has broken my heart!"