The Plum Tree Part 20

"And good has come? I have heard that figs do grow on thistles."

"Good has come. But, I think, in spite of me, not through me."

"But now that you see," she said, turning her eyes to mine with appeal in them, and something more, I thought, "you will--you will not go on?"

"I don't know. Is there such a thing as remorse without regret?" And then my self-control went and I let her see what I had commanded myself to keep hid: "I only know clearly one thing, Elizabeth--only one thing matters. _You_ are the whole world to me. You and I could--what could we not do together!"

Her color slowly rose, slowly vanished. "Was _that_ what you came to tell me?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered, not flinching.

"_That_ is the climax of your moralizings?"

"Yes," I answered. "And of my cowardice."

A little icy smile just changed the curve of her lips. "When I was a girl, you won my love--or took it when I gave it to you, if you prefer.

And then--you threw it away. For an ambition you weren't brave enough to pursue honorably, you broke my heart."

"Yes," I answered. "But--I loved you."

"And now," she went on, "after your years of self-indulgence, of getting what you wanted, no matter about the cost, you see me again. You find I have mended my heart, have coaxed a few flowers of happiness to bloom. You find there was something you did not destroy, something you think it will make you happier to destroy."

"Yes," I answered, "I came to try to make you as unhappy as I am. For I love you."

She drew a long breath. "Well," she said evenly, "for the first time in your life you are defeated. I learned the lesson you so thoroughly taught me. And I built the wall round my garden high and strong. You--"

she smiled, a little raillery, a little scorn--"you can't break in, Harvey--nor slip in."

"No need," I said. "For I _am_ in--I've always been in."

Her bosom rose and fell quickly, and her eyes s.h.i.+fted. But that was for an instant only. "If you were as brave as you are bold!" she scoffed.

"If I were as brave without you as I should be with you!" I replied.

Then: "But you love as a woman loves--herself first, the man afterward."

"Harvey Sayler denouncing selfishness!"

"Do not sneer," I said. "For--I love you as a man loves. A poor, pale shadow of ideal love, no doubt, but a man's best, Elizabeth."

I saw that she was shaken; but even as I began to thrill with a hope so high that it was giddy with fear, she was once more straight and strong and calm.

"You have come. You have tried. You have failed," she went on after a long pause. And in spite of her efforts, that deep voice of hers was gentle and wonderfully sweet. "Now--you will return to your life, I to mine." And she moved toward the entrance to the drawing-room, I following her. We stood in silence at the front doorway waiting for my carriage to come up. I watched her--maddeningly mistress of herself.

"How can you be so cold!" I cried. "Don't you see, don't you feel, how I, who love you, suffer?"

Without a word she stretched out her beautiful, white hands, long and narrow and capable. In each of the upturned palms were four deep and b.l.o.o.d.y prints where her nails had been crus.h.i.+ng into them.

Before I could lift my eyes to her face she was turning to rejoin her workmen. As I stood uncertain, dazed, she glanced at me with a bright smile. "Good-by again," she called. "A pleasant journey!"

"Thank you," I replied. "Good-by."

Driving toward the road gates, I looked at the house many times, from window to window, everywhere. Not a glimpse of her until I was almost at the road again. Then I saw her back--the graceful white dress, the knot of blue-black hair, the big white hat, and she directing her workmen with her closed white parasol.

XXII

MOSTLY ABOUT MONEY

I went up to New York, to find confusion and gloom at our headquarters there.

Senator Goodrich had subtly given the impression, not only to the workers but also to the newspaper men, who had given it to the public, that with his resignation the Burbank campaign had fallen to pieces.

"And I fear you'll have some difficulty in getting any money at all down town," said Revell, the senior Senator from New York state, who envied and hated Goodrich and was therefore, if not for personal reasons, amiably disposed toward me. "They don't like our candidate."

"Naturally," said I. "That's why he's running and that's why he may win."

"Of course, he'll carry everything here in the East. The only doubt was in this state, but I had no difficulty in making a deal with the opposition machine as soon as they had sounded Scarborough and had found that if he should win, there'd be nothing in it for them--nothing but trouble. I judged he must have thrown them down hard, from their being so sore. How do things look out West?"

"Bad," said I. "Our farmers and workingmen have had lots of idle time these last four years. They've done too much of what they call thinking."

"Then you need money?" asked Revell, lengthening his sly, smug old face.

"We must have four millions, at least. And we must get it from those people down town."

He shook his head.

"I think not," was my careless reply. "When they wake up to the danger in Scarborough's election, the danger to business, especially to their sort of business, they'll give me twice four millions if I ask it."

"What do you wish me to do?"

"Nothing, except look after these eastern states. We'll take care of the West, and also of raising money here for our campaign during October out there."

"Can I be of any service to you in introducing you down town?" he asked.

"No, thank you," said I. "I have a few acquaintances there. I'm not going to fry any fat this trip. My fire isn't hot enough yet."

And I did not. I merely called on two of the big bankers and four heads of industrial combinations and one controller of an ocean-to-ocean railway system. I stayed a very few minutes with each, just long enough to set him thinking and inquiring what the election of Scarborough would mean to him and to his cla.s.s generally. "If you'll read his speeches,"

said I to each, "you'll see he intends to destroy your kind of business, that he regards it as brigandage. He's honest, afraid of nothing, and an able lawyer, and he can't be fooled or fooled with. If he's elected he'll carry out his program, Senate or no Senate--and no matter what scares you people cook up in the stock market." To this they made no answer beyond delicately polite insinuations about being tired of paying for that which was theirs of right. I did not argue; it is never necessary to puncture the pretenses of men of affairs with a view to saving them from falling into the error of forgetting that whatever "right" may mean on Sunday, on week days it means that which a man can compel.

I returned to Fredonia and sent Woodruff East to direct a campaign of calamity-howling in the eastern press, for the benefit of the New York, Boston and Philadelphia "captains of industry." At the end of ten days I recalled him, and sent Roebuck to Wall Street to confirm the fears and alarms Woodruff's campaign had aroused. And in the West I was laying out the money I had been able to collect from the leading men of Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio and western Pennsylvania--except a quarter of a million from Howard of New York, to whom we gave the vice-presidential nomination for that sum, and about half a million more given by several eastern men, to whom we promised cabinet offices and posts abroad. I put all this money, not far from two millions, into our "campaign of education" and into those inpourings of delegations upon Burbank at his "rural retreat."

To attempt to combat Scarborough's popularity with the rank and file of his own party, was hopeless. I contented myself with restoring order and arousing enthusiasm in the main body of our partizans in the doubtful and uneasy states. So ruinous had been Goodrich's management that even at that comparatively simple task we should not have succeeded but for the fortunate fact that the great ma.s.s of partizans refuses to hear anything from the other side; they regard reasoning as disloyalty--which, curiously enough, it so often is. Then, too, few newspapers in the doubtful states printed the truth about what Scarborough and his supporters were saying and doing. The cost of this perversion of publicity to us--direct money cost, I mean--was almost nothing. The big papers and news a.s.sociations were big properties, and their rich proprietors were interested in enterprises to which Scarborough's election meant disaster; a mult.i.tude of the smaller papers, normally of the opposition, were dependent upon those same enterprises for the advertising that kept them alive.

Perhaps the most far-sighted--certainly, as the event showed, the most fortunate--single stroke of my campaign was done in Illinois. That state was vital to our success; also it was one of the doubtful states where, next to his own Indiana, Scarborough's chances were best. I felt that we must put a heavy handicap on his popularity there. I had noticed that in Illinois the violently radical wing of the opposition was very strong. So I sent Merriweather to strengthen the radicals still further.

I hoped to make them strong enough to put through their party's state convention a platform that would be a scarecrow to timid voters in Illinois and throughout the West; and I wished for a "wild man" as the candidate for governor, but I didn't hope it, though I told Merriweather it must be done. Curiously enough, my calculation of the probabilities was just reversed. The radicals were beaten on platform; but, thanks to a desperate effort of Merriweather's in "coaxing" rural delegates, a frothing, wild-eyed, political crank got the nomination. And he never spoke during the campaign that he didn't drive voters away from his ticket--and, therefore, from Scarborough. And our machine there sacrificed the local interests to the general by nominating a popular and not insincere reformer.

When Roebuck and I descended upon Wall Street on October sixteenth, three weeks before election, I had everything in readiness for my final and real campaign.