The Magnificent Adventure - Emerson Hough (fiction books to read .txt) 📗

at his side, with a half smile of badinage on his own face. Lewis bowed again, formally, and Anthony Merry answered with equal politeness and ceremony.

“Yes,” said the envoy, “to be sure I recall the young man. I met him in the anteroom at the President’s house.”

Meriwether Lewis cast him a quick glance, but made no answer. He knew well enough the slighting estimate in which everything at Washington was held by this minister accredited to our government. Also he knew, as he might have said, something about the diplomat’s visit at the Executive Mansion. For thus far the minister from Great Britain to Washington had not been able to see the President of the United States.

“And you are done your ride?” said Burr quickly, for his was a keen nose to scent any complication. “Tell me”—he lifted his own reins now to proceed—“you saw nothing of my daughter, Mrs. Alston? We missed her at the house, and have feared her abduction by some bold young Virginian, eh?”

His keen eye rested fairly on the face of the younger man as he spoke. The latter felt the challenge under the half mocking words.

“Yes,” he replied calmly, “I have seen Mrs. Alston. I left her but now at the old mill, having a cup of coffee with the miller’s wife. I had not time myself for a second, although Mrs. Alston honored me by allowing me to sit at her table for a moment. We met by accident, you see, as we both rode, a short time ago. I overtook her when it was not yet sunrise, or scarcely more.”

“You see!” laughed Burr, as he turned to Merry. “Our young men are early risers when it comes to pursuit of the fair. I must ride at once and see to the welfare of my daughter. She may be weeping at losing her escort so soon!”

They all smiled in proper fashion. Lewis bowed, and, lifting his hat, passed on. Burr, as they parted, fell for just a half-moment into thought, his face suddenly inscrutable, as if he pondered something.

“There is the ablest man I have seen in Washington,” blurted out Merry suddenly, apropos of nothing that had been said. “He has manners, and he rides like an Englishman.”

“Say not so!” said Burr, laughing. “Better—he rides like a Virginian!”

“Very well; it is the same thing. The Virginians are but ourselves—this country is all English yet. And I swear—Mr. Burr, may we speak freely?—I cannot see, and I never shall see, what is the sense in all this talk of a new democracy of the people. Now, what men like these—like you——”

“You know well enough how far I agree with you,” said Burr somberly.

“’Tis an experiment, our republic, I am willing to say that boldly to you, at least. How long it may last——”

“Depends on men like you,” said Merry, suddenly turning upon him as they rode. “How long do you suppose his Majesty will endure such slights as they put on us here day by day? My blood boils at the indignities we have had to suffer here—cooling our heels in your President’s halls. I call it mere presumptuousness. I cannot look upon this country as anything but a province to be taken back again when England is ready. And it may be, since so much turbulence and discourtesy seem growing here, that chance will not wait long in the coming!”

“It may be, Mr. Merry,” said Aaron Burr. “My own thoughts you know too well for need of repetition. Let us only go softly. My plans advance as well as I could ask. I was just wondering,” he added, “whether those two young people really were together there at the old mill—and whether they were there for the first time.”

“If not, ’twas not for the last time!” rejoined the older man. “Yonder young man was made to fill a woman’s eye. Your daughter, Mr. Burr, while the soul of married discreetness, and charming as any of her sex I have ever seen, must look out for her heart. She might find it divided into three equal parts.”

“How then, Mr. Minister?”

“One for her father——”

Aaron Burr bowed.

“Yes, her father first, as I verily believe. What then?”

“The second for her husband——”

“Certainly. Mr. Alston is a rising man. He has a thousand slaves on his plantations—he is one of the richest of the rich South Carolinian planters. And in politics he has a chance—more than a chance. But after that?”

“The third portion of so charming a woman’s heart might perhaps be assigned to Captain Meriwether Lewis!”

“Say you so?” laughed Burr carelessly. “Well, well this must be looked into. Come, I must tell my son-in-law that his home is in danger of being invaded! Far off in his Southern rice-lands, I fear he misses his young wife sometimes. I brought her here for the sake of her own health—she cannot thrive in such swamps. Besides, I cannot bear to have her live away from me. She is happier with me than anywhere else. Yes, you are right, my daughter worships me.”

“Why should she not? And why should she not ride with a gallant at sunrise for an early cup of coffee, egad?” said the older man.

Burr did not answer, and they rode on.

In the opposite direction there rode also the young man of whom they spoke. And at about the time that the two came to the old mill and saw Theodosia Alston sitting there—her face still cast down, her eyes gazing abstractedly into her untasted cup on the little table—Meriwether Lewis was pulling up at the iron gate which then closed the opening in the stone wall encircling the modest official residence of his chief and patron, President Jefferson.

CHAPTER IV PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY

There stood waiting near the gate one of Mr. Jefferson’s private servants, Samson, who took the young man’s rein, grinning with his usual familiar words of welcome as the secretary dismounted from his horse.

“You-all suttinly did warm old Arcturum a li’l bit dis mawnin’, Mistah Mehywethah!”

Samson patted the neck of the spirited animal, which tossed its head and turned an eye to its late rider.

“Yes, and see that you rub him well. Mind you, if Mr. Jefferson finds that his whitest handkerchief shows a sweat-mark from the horse’s hide he will cut off both your black ears for you, Samson—and very likely your head along with them. You know your master!” The secretary smiled kindly at the old black man.

“Yassah, yassah,” grinned Samson, who no more feared Mr. Jefferson than he did the young gentleman with whom he now spoke. “I just lookin’ at you comin’ down that path right now, and I say to myself, ‘Dar come a ridah!’ I sho’ did, Mistah Mehywethah!”

The young man answered the negro’s compliment with one of his rare smiles, then turned, with just a flick of his gloves on his breeches legs, and marched up the walk to the door of the mansion.

At the step he turned and paused, as he usually did, to take one look out over the unfinished wing of stone still in process of erection. On beyond, in the ragged village, he saw a few good mansion houses, many structures devoted to business, many jumbled huts of negroes, and here and there a public building in its early stages.

The great system of boulevards and parks and circles of the new American capital was not yet apparent from the place where Mr. Thomas Jefferson’s young secretary now stood. But the young man perhaps saw city and nation alike advanced in his vision; for he gazed long and lingeringly before he turned back at last and entered the door which the old house servant swung open for him.

His hat and crop and gloves he handed to this bowed old darky, Ben—another of Mr. Jefferson’s plantation servants whom he had brought to Washington with him. Then—for such was the simple fashion of the ménage, where Meriwether Lewis himself was one of the President’s family—he stepped to the door beyond and knocked lightly, entering as he did so.

The hour was early—he himself had not breakfasted, beyond his coffee at the mill—but, early as it was, he knew he would find at his desk the gentleman who now turned to him.

“Good morning, Mr. Jefferson,” said Meriwether Lewis, in the greeting which he always used.

“Good morning, my son,” said the other man, gently, in his invariable address to his secretary. “And how did Arcturus perform for you this morning?”

“Grandly, sir. He is a fine animal. I have never ridden a better.”

“I envy you. I wish I could find the time I once had for my horses.” He turned a whimsical glance at the piled desk before him. “If our new multigraph could write a dozen letters all at once—and on as many different themes, my son—we might perhaps get through. I vow, if I had the money, I would have a dozen secretaries—if I could find them!”

The President rose now and stood, a tall and striking figure of a man, over six feet in height, of clean-cut features, dark hazel eye, and sandy, almost auburn, hair. His long, thin legs were clad in close-fitting knee breeches of green velveteen, somewhat stained. His high-collared coat, rolling above the loosely-tied stock which girded his neck, was dingy brown in color, and lay in loose folds. He was one of the worst-clad men in Washington at that hour. His waistcoat, of red, was soiled and far from new, and his woolen stockings were covered with no better footwear than carpet slippers, badly down at the heel.

Yet Thomas Jefferson, even clad thus, seemed the great man that he was. Stooped though his shoulders were, his frame was so strong, his eye so clear and keen, though contemplative, that he did not look his years.

Here was a man, all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things—indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve—these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence of a personal world.

He stood careless, slipshod, at the side of a desk cluttered with a mass of maps, papers, letters in packets or spread open. There were writing implements here, scientific instruments of all sorts, long sheets of specifications, canceled drafts, pages of accounts—all the manifold impedimenta of a man in the full swing of business life. It might have been the desk of any mediocre man; yet on that desk lay the future of a people and the history of a world.

He stood, just a trifle stooped, smiling quizzically at the young man, yet half lovingly; for to no other being in the world did he ever give the confidence that he accorded Meriwether Lewis.

“I do not see how I could be President without you, Merne, my son,” said he, employing the familiar term that Meriwether Lewis had not elsewhere heard used, except by his mother. “Look what we must do today!”

The young secretary turned his own grave eye upon the cluttered desk; but it was not dread of the redoubtable tasks awaiting him that gave his face all the gravity it bore.

“Mr. Jefferson—” he began, but paused, for he could see now standing before him his friend, the man whom, of all in the world, he loved, and the man who believed in him and loved him.

“Yes, my son?”

“Your burden is grievous hard, and yet——”

“Yes, my son?”

But Meriwether Lewis could not speak further. He stood now, his jaws set hard, looking out of the window.

The older man came and gently laid a hand upon his shoulder.

“Come,