Читать книгу The Iron Game: A Tale of the War - Henry F. Keenan - Страница 14

The shifting of Jack's company to the regimental camp in Warchester left a broad gap in the lines of the social life of Acredale. Jack's going alone, to say nothing of the others, would have eclipsed the gayety of many home groups besides his own, in which the Sprague primacy in a social sense was acknowledged. Since the influx of the new-made rich, under the stimulus of the war and Acredale's advantages as a resort, there were a good many who disputed the Sprague leadership—tacitly conceded rather than asserted. Chief of the dissidents was Elisha Boone, who, by virtue of longer tenure, vast wealth, and political precedence, divided not unequally the homage paid the patrician family. Boone was fond of speaking of himself as a "self-made man," and the satirical were not slow to add that he had no other worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when he came to Acredale aspired to political leadership in the Democratic party.

But Senator Sprague was too firmly enshrined in the loyalty of the district to be overcome by the parvenu's manoeuvres or his money. His ambition in time turned to rancor as he marked the patrician's disdainful disregard of his (Boone's) efforts to supplant him. Hatred of the Spragues became something like a passion in Boone. Sarcasms and disparagement leveled at his social and political pretensions he attributed to the Senator and his family. All sorts of slurs and gossip were reported to him by busybodies, until it became a settled purpose with Boone to make the Sprague family feel heavy heart-burnings for the sum of the affronts he had endured. It was to them he attributed the whispered gibes about his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the awful story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, the spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley. Once, too, when he had so well manipulated the district delegates that he was sure of nomination in the convention, Senator Sprague had hurried home from Washington and defeated him just as the prize was in his grasp. The Senator made a speech to the delegates, in which he pointedly declared that it was men of honor and brains, not men of money, that should be chosen to make the laws.

"The time will come, Senator, that you'll be sorry for this hour's work," Boone said, joining Sprague at the door as he was leaving the hall.

"How's that?" the other asked, with just the shade of superciliousness in the tone admired in the Senate for suavity. "I hope I am always sorry when I do wrong, in speech or act; I teach my children to be."

"Well, if you think it right to run the party for a few lordly idlers too proud to mix with the people—men who think they are better born and better bred than the rest of us—I don't want to have anything more to do with it. I will go elsewhere."

"That's your privilege, sir. The Whigs have plenty of room for self-made men. Though I do think you are taking too personal a view of to-day's contest, your defeat was purely a matter of duty. Moore, whom we have chosen, was a poor Irish settler here before you came. He was promised the nomination two years ago." With a lofty bow the Senator turned and stalked in another direction as if he did not care for the other's further company. Even this small and wholly unintended affront worked in the poor, misjudging victim of morbid self-esteem, as a cinder in the eye will torture and blind the sufferer to all the landscape. Boone mingled no more with the Democrats. He threw himself with the fervor of the convert into the radical wing of the Whigs, and was brought into close relation with some of the most admired of the band of great men who created the young Republican party. If Douglas, Dickinson, Cass, Van Buren, Seymour, or any eminent Democrat passing through Warchester stopped to break bread with their colleague Sprague in his Acredale retreat, straightway the splendid Sumner, the Ciceronian Phillips, or the Walpole-Seward, or some other of the shining galaxy of agitators, whose light so shone before men that the whole land was presently brought out of darkness, met at Boone's table to maintain the balance in distinction.

It was Boone's liberal purse that paid the expenses of the memorable campaign in the Warchester district, wherein the Democrats were first shaken in their hold. It was his money that finally secured the seat in Congress for Oswald, who was his tenant and debtor. It was therefore no surprise when Oswald—who had been greatly aided in business affairs by Senator Sprague—passed over the prior claims of his old patron's son, and gave the cadetship to Wesley Boone, the son of his new liege. It was looked upon as another step in the ladder of gratitude when Wesley carried off the captaincy in the Acredale company, though everybody knew that young Boone was not in any way so well fitted for the "straps" as Jack. When one day an item appeared in the local paper to the effect that President Lincoln had shown the "sagacity for which he was so well known, in honoring our distinguished townsman, Elisha Boone, Esq., with the appointment of ambassador to Russia," everybody thought the statement only natural. There were many congratulations. But when, having declined this splendid proffer, the authorities pressed the place of "Assistant Secretary of the Treasury" upon their townsman, the whole village awoke to the fact that all its greatness had not gone when Senator Sprague was gathered to his fathers.

The event was potent as the cross Constantine saw, or dreamed he saw, in the sky, in the conversion of party workers to the new Administration. Everybody looked forward to an eminent future for the potent partisan and millionaire, the first of that—now not uncommon—hierarchy that replace the feudal barons in modern social forces. Had he listened to the eager urging of Kate, his daughter and prime minister, Boone would have accepted the foreign mission; but he stubbornly refused to listen to her in this.

Kate Boone was like her father only in strong will, vehement purpose, and a certain humorous independence that made her a great delight among even the anti-Boone partisans in both Acredale and Warchester. Since the death of her mother, Kate had been head of her father's household—an imperious, capricious, kind-hearted tyrant, who ruled mostly by jokes and persuasions of the gentler sort. It was her father's one lament that Kate was not "the boy of the family, for she had more of the stuff that makes the man in her little finger than Wes had in his whole body." She kept him in a perpetual unrest of delight and dismay. She espoused none of his piques or prejudices; she was as apt to bring people he disliked to his dinner-table as those he liked. She was forever making him forgive wrongs, or what he fancied to be wrongs, and causing him seem at fault in all his squabbles, so that he was often heard to say, when things went as he didn't want them:

"I don't know whether I am to blame or the other fellow until Kate hears the story."

His illiteracy and lack of polish were the secret grief of the rich man's life. Kate was quick in detecting this. Much of it she saw was due to the shyness that unschooled men feel in the presence of college men, or those who have been trained. On returning from her seminary life, the young girl set about remedying the single break in her father's perfections. She was far too clever to let him know her ambitious purpose. With a patience almost maternal and an exquisite adroitness, she interested him in her own reading, which was comprehensive, if not very well ordered. But she won the main point. During the long winter evenings her father found no pleasure like that Kate had always ready for him in the cheery library. He was soon amazed at his keen interest in the world of mind unrolled to his understanding; more than all, he retained with the receptivity of a boy all that was read to him. Kate made believe that she needed his help in reviewing her own studies, and so carried him through all she had gone over in the seminary classes. Boone began presently to see that education is not the result of mere attendance in schools and the parroting of the classics in a few semesters in college. Without suspecting it, his varied business enterprises and his wide experience of men had grounded him as well in the ordinary forms of knowledge as nine in ten college men attain.

"Education, after all, papa, is like a trade. A man may be able to handle all the tools and not know their names. Now, you are a well-informed man, but, because you didn't know logic, grammar, scientific terms, and the like, you thought yourself ignorant."

In the new confidence in himself he was surprised at his own ability in launching a subject in the presence of his eminent friends when especially Kate was on hand to support the conversation. She got him not only to buy fine pictures, as most rich men do, but she made him see wherein their value lay, so that when artists and amateurs came to admire his treasures, he could talk to them without gross solecisms.

"I'm not a liberal education to you, papa, as Steele said of the Duchess of Devonshire. That implies too much, but I am an index. You can find out what you need to know by keeping track of my ignorance."

Elisha Boone's domestic circle was a termagancy—as Kate often told his guests—tempered by wit and good-humor. He was prouder of his daughter than of his self-made rank or his revered million. In moments of expansive good-nature he invited business or political associates to "Acre Villa," as his place was called, to enjoy the surprise Kate's graces wrought in the guests. But these were not always times of delight to the doting parent. Kate was a shrewd judge of the amenities; and if the personages who came, at the father's bidding, gave the least sign of a not unnatural surprise to find a girl so well bred and self-contained in the daughter of such a man as Boone, she became very frigid and left the father to do the honors of the evening visit. No entreaty could move her to reappear on the scene. In time, the prodigal papa was careful to submit a list of the names of his proposed guests, as chamberlains give royalty a descriptive list of those to be bidden to court.

Kate was on terms that, if not cordial, were not constrained, with the Spragues. She had gone to the same seminary with Olympia, had danced with Jack, and, in the cadetship affair, had plainly given her opinion that her brother Wesley, having no taste or fitness for military life, Jack, who had, should have the prize. But two motives entered into the father's determination: one was to annoy and humiliate the Spragues; the other, the sleepless craving of the parvenu to get for his son what had not been his, in spite of all the adulation paid him—the conceded equality of social condition. The army was then, as I believe it is considered now, the surest sign of higher caste in a democracy. Wesley, by the mere right to epaulets, would be of the acknowledged gentility. Nobody could sneer at him; no doors could be opened grudgingly when he called. He would, in virtue of his West Point insignia, be a knighted member of the blood royal of the republic. Some of this mysterious unction would distill itself into the unconsecrated ichor of the rest of the family, and Kate, as well as himself, would be part of the patrician caste. The daughter looked upon all this good-humoredly; she shared none of her father's morbid delusions on the subject. She rallied the cadet a good deal on his mission. When Wesley, after the June examinations, which he passed by the narrowest squeeze—'twas said by outside influence—came home to display his cadet buttons and his neat gray uniform in Acredale, Kate bantered the complacent young warrior jocosely.

"We shall all have to live up to your shoulder-straps and brass buttons after this, Wesley," she cried, as the proud young dandy strutted over the arabesques of the library, where the delighted papa marched him, the better to survey the boy's splendor. "And think of the fate that awaits you if, in the esteem of Acredale, you should turn out less than a Napoleon."

"Be serious, Kate, and don't tease the boy. Wesley knows what's expected of him; he has an opportunity to show what is in his stock. Thank God, men in the North can now come to their own without going down on their knees to the South!"

Wesley grinned. He was no match for his sister in the humorous bouts waged over his head against his father's prejudices and cherished social schemes. During the vacation she put a heavy penalty of raillery upon his swelling pride and vanity, sarcasm that tried the paternal patience as well as his own. Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy that comes from a high estimate of one's self. He was well favored in looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and carefully shod feet. He would have been called a "dude" had the word been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father's social pretensions. He was the first of the golden youth of his set to adopt the then reviving mode of parting the hair on the middle of the head. In the teeth of the village derision, he persisted in this with a tenacity that Kate declared gave promise of a "Wellington." For many who had at first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it, discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the lead. In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and "the proper thing" among the "well born" was not so distinctly laid down in the code of the élite. The accent and manners that now mark "good form" seemed queer, not to say bouffe, to even the first circles of home society, and the first disciples of "Anglomania" had a very hard time polishing the raw material. The home life of the Boones was something better and sincerer than the impression made upon their neighbors by the father's invincible push and high-handed ways. His daughter and son had been born to him in middle age. They had the reverence for the parent marked in the conduct of children who associate gray hairs with the venerable. With all her strong sense and self-assertion, Kate was proud of the fact that she was her father's daughter. It was a distinction to bear his name. His solidity, his masterful will, his well-defined, if narrow, convictions, were to her the sanctities one is apt to associate with lineage or magistracy. Wesley, though less impressionable than his sister, shared these secret devotions to the parent's parts, and bowed before his father's behests, in the filial reverence of the sons of the patriarchs. When Elisha Boone denounced the outbreak of John Brown at Harper's Ferry as more criminal than Aaron Burr's treason, his children made his prepossessions their own; when, three years later, the father proudly eulogized the uprising he had so luridly condemned, his children saw no tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father's character. Oddly enough, it was through the rival house this came. Olympia, a sort of ablegate in the social hierarchy of the village, had been thrown much with Kate, and was greatly amused with her point of view in many of the snarls arising in a provincial society. The intimacy had been begun in the New York school, where both had been in the same classes, and, though the families saw nothing of each other, the girls did. Kate was soon led to see that the Spragues had none of the patrician pretension her father attributed to them. Jack, too, had made much of her, and seemed to delight in her sharp retorts to the inanities of would-be wits. The episode in Elisha Boone's life, that all his success, wealth, and after exemplary conduct had not condoned in the village mind, was his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, I set this down with something of the delight Carlyle expresses when in the rubbish of history he found, among the shams called kings and nobles, anything like a man.

It is worth the noting, this trait of Acredale, at a time when riches and success are looked upon as condoning every breach of the decalogue. Just how the intimacy between the two men came about was not known. It, however, was known that when Boone first came to Acredale he had been helped in his affairs by Dick Perley's lavish means. In a few years Boone was the patron and Perley the client. As Boone grew rich Perley grew poor, until finally all was gone. Then the fairest lands of the Perley inheritance passed to Boone. It was the fireside history of the whole Caribee Valley that the rich contractor had encouraged the ruined gentleman in the excesses that ended the profligate's career; that the two men had staked large sums at play in Bucephalo, and that inability to meet his losses to Boone had caused Dick Perley's flight. He had been seen by one of the village people a year or two before the war in Richmond, and had been heard of in California later, but no word had ever reached his family, not even when his wife died, two years after his exile. There were those who said that Boone was in correspondence with his victim, and it was known that drafts, made by Dick Perley, had been paid by Boone at the bank in Warchester. Between Boone and the Perley ladies, whose house was separated from "Acre Villa" by a wide lawn and hedge, there had always been the tacit enmity that wrong on one side and meek unreproach on the other breeds. The rancor that manifested itself in Boone's treatment of the Misses Perley was not imitated by them. They never alluded to their affluent neighbor, never suffered gossip concerning the Boones in what Olympia humorously called the "Orphic adytum," the "tabby-shop," as Wesley named the Perley parlors. Young Dick, however, had none of the scruples that kept his aunts silent. One dreadful day, when he had been nagged to fisticuffs with Wesley, whose dudish dignity exacted a certain restraint with the hot-headed youngster, Elisha Boone, behind the thick hedge, heard on the highway outside his grounds this outrageous anathema: