The Candidate: A Political Romance
accounts of the things that never happen."
"I am sure that Mr. Grayson was not your authority for such a
statement," said Harley, with a smile, although he did not wholly relish
her banter.
"Oh no, Uncle James is a very polite man, and very considerate of the
feelings of others."
"Then it is a supposition of your own?"
"Oh no, not a supposition at all; the New York newspapers sometimes
reach us even in Idaho."
Harley did not respond to her banter, thinking it premature, as she had
never seen him before. He could not forget the reserve and shyness
natural to him, and he felt a sense of hostility. He glanced at her, and
saw a cheek ruddier than the cheeks of American women usually are, and a
chin with an unusually firm curve. Her hair was dark brown, and when the
electric light flashed upon her it seemed to be streaked with dull gold.
But the chin held him with an odd sort of fascination, and he strove to
read her character in it. "Bold and resolute," he decided, "but too
Western, entirely too Far Western. She needs civilizing." He was rather
glad that he was going away with Mr. Grayson on the morrow and would not
see her again.
"I should think," she said; "that the life of a newspaper correspondent
is extremely interesting. You have all the pleasures and none of the
responsibilities; you go to war, but you do not fight; you enter great
political campaigns, but you cannot be defeated; you are always with the
victor and never with the vanquished; you are not bound by geographical
limits nor by facts, nor--"
"Excuse me, Miss Morgan," interrupted Harley, with dignity. "In my
profession, as in all others, there are irresponsible persons, but the
great majority of its followers are conscientious and industrious. If
you only knew how--"
"That sounds as if it had been prepared in advance," she exclaimed. "I
am sure that you have used it many times before."
"You must not mind Sylvia," said Mrs. Grayson, smiling her grave, quiet
smile. "She seldom means what she says, or says what she means."
"Aunt Anna," exclaimed Miss Morgan, "you are really too hard upon your
beloved niece. I never before dined with the staff correspondent of a
great New York newspaper, and I am really seeking information. Now I
wish to know if in his profession imagination is the most valuable
quality, as I have heard it said."
"Do you wish to embroil me with the press so early?" asked Mr. Grayson,
laughing.
"I have heard great tales about them and their daring," she persisted.
"I am not sure that even now he has not a camera concealed under his
coat."
"Why, Sylvia, what a strange thing to say!" exclaimed Mrs. Grayson.
But Harley started in his seat and flushed a deep red. "Miss Morgan, I
shall have to ask your pardon," he exclaimed.
Mr. and Mrs. Grayson looked at them in surprise.
"Here is something that we do not understand," said Mr. Grayson.
"Why, Uncle James, there is nothing strange about what I have said,"
continued Miss Morgan, with the most innocent face. "I thought all of
them carried cameras, else how do we get all the wonderful pictures?"
Harley felt inclined to tell the entire table his experience, but on
second thought he remained silent, as the girl from Idaho began to pique
him, and he was not willing that the advantage should remain wholly with
her, especially when she was from the very Far West. So he affected
complete indifference, and, when they asked him about his adventures in
the recent war on the other side of the world, he talked freely about
them, which he had never done before, because, like most Americans, he
was a modest man, enduring in silence lectures on the sin of boasting
from others who boasted as they breathed. Most of the time he spoke
apparently to Mr. and Mrs. Grayson, but he kept a side-look upon the
girl from Idaho who had played with him and humiliated him.
She became silent, as if satisfied with the flight of the arrows that
had gone already from her quiver, and seemed to listen with an air of
becoming respect; but Harley surprised once or twice the lurking twinkle
in her eye, and he was not sure that she was wholly subdued. Opposition
and difficulties always increased his resolve, and he doubled his
efforts. He spoke lightly of the kingdoms and republics whose fortunes
he had followed in a casual way and of the men whom the heave of affairs
had brought to the surface for a space, and always he kept that
side-look upon her. These relations, surely, would impress, because
what could she, a child of the Idaho wilds, know of the great world? And
its very mystery would heighten to her its coloring and effect.
Harley could talk well, all the better because he talked so rarely of
himself, and even now it was of himself only by indirection, because he
spoke chiefly of men whom he had known and deeds that he had witnessed.
Watching the girl closely with that side-look, he did not see the
twinkle reappear in her eye; instead she sat demure and silent, and he
judged that he had taken her beyond her depth. At last he stopped, and
she said, in a subdued tone:
"Did I not tell you, Uncle James, that imagination was the great quality
the correspondents need?"
Harley flushed, but he could not keep from joining Mr. Grayson in his
laugh. The candidate, besides laughing, glanced affectionately at the
girl. It was evident that his niece was a favorite with Jimmy Grayson.
"I shall ask Miss Morgan to tell me about Idaho," said Harley.
"It's quite wild, you know," she said, gravely; "and all the people need
taming. But it would be a great task."
When they went back to the drawing-room Harley and the girl were behind
the others, and he lingered a moment beside her.
"Miss Morgan," he said, "I want to ask your pardon again. You know it
was in the dark, and mine was an honest mistake."
"I will if you will tell me one thing."
"What is it?"
"Have you really got a camera with you?"
"If I had I should take a picture of you and not of Mr. Grayson."
Harley remained awhile longer, and Miss Morgan's treatment remained
familiar and somewhat disconcerting, rather like the manner of an elder
sister to her young brother than of a girl to a man whom she had known
only two or three hours. When he rose to leave, she again offered him
her hand with perfect coolness. Harley, in a perfunctory manner,
expressed his regret that he was not likely to see her again, as he was
to leave the next day with Mr. Grayson. The provoking twinkle appeared
again in the corner of her eyes.
"I don't intend that you shall forget me, Mr. Harley," she said,
"because you _are_ to see me again. When you come to Washington in
search of news, I shall be there as the second lady of the land--Aunt
Anna will be first."
"Oh, of course, I forgot that," said Harley, but he was not sure that
she had Washington in mind, remembering Mrs. Grayson's assertion that
she did not always mean what she said nor say what she meant.
The night was quite dark, and when he had gone a few yards Harley
stopped and looked back at the house. He felt a distinct sense of
relief, because he was gone from the presence of the mountain girl who
was not of his kind, and whom he did not know how to take; being a man,
he could not retort upon her in her own fashion, and she was able to
make him feel cheap.
The drawing-room was still lighted, and he saw the Idaho girl pass in
front of one of the low windows, her figure completely outlined by the
luminous veil. It seemed to him to express a singular, flexible
grace--perhaps the result of mountain life--but he was loath to admit
it, as she troubled him. Harley, although young, had been in many lands
and among many people. He had seen many women who were beautiful, and
some who were brilliant, but it had been easy to forget every one of
them; they hardly made a ripple in the stream of his work, and often it
was an effort to recall them. He had expected to dismiss this Idaho girl
in the same manner, but she would not go, and he was intensely annoyed
with himself.
He went to the telegraph-office, wrote and filed his despatch, and then,
lighting a cigar, strolled slowly through the streets. It was not eleven
o'clock, but it seemed that everybody except himself was in bed and
asleep. The lights in all the houses were out, and there was no sound
whatever save that of the wind as it came in from the prairie and
stirred the new foliage of the trees. "And this is our wicked America,
for which my foreign friends used to offer me sincere condolences!"
murmured Harley.
But he returned quickly to his own mental disturbance. He felt as he
used to feel on the eve of a battle that all knew was coming off, there
on the other side of the world. He was then with an army which he was
not at all sure was in the right; but when he sat on a hill-top in the
night, looking at the flickering lights of the enemy ahead, and knowing
that the combat would be joined at dawn, he could not resist a feeling
of comradeship with that army to which, for a time--and in a sense,
perhaps, alien--he belonged. Those soldiers about him became friends,
and the enemy out there was an enemy for him, too. It was the same now
when he was to go on a long journey with Jimmy Grayson, who stood upon a
platform of which he had many doubts.
He turned back to the hotel, and when he entered the lobby a swarm of
men fell upon him and demanded the instant delivery of any news which
he might have and they had not. They were correspondents who had come by
every train that afternoon--Hobart, Churchill, Blaisdell, Lawson, and
others, making more than a score--some representing journals that would
support Grayson, and others journals that would call him names, many and
bad.
"We hear that you have been to dinner with the candidate," said
Churchill, the representative of the New York _Monitor_, a sneering
sheet owned by one foreigner and edited by another, which kept its eye
on Europe, and considered European opinion final, particularly in regard
to American affairs; "so you can tell us if it is true that he picks his
teeth at table with a fork."
"You are a good man for the _Monitor_, Churchill," said Harley, sharply.
"Your humor is in perfect accord with the high taste displayed, and you
show the same dignity and consideration in your references to political
opponents."
"Oh, I see," said Churchill, sneering just as he had been taught to
sneer by the _Monitor_. "He is the first guest to dine with the
Presidential nominee, and he is overpowered by the honor."
"You shut up, Churchill!" said Hobart, another of the correspondents.
"You sha'n't pick a quarrel with Harley, and you sha'n't be a
mischief-maker here. There are enough of us to see that you don't."
Harley turned his back scornfully upon Churchill, who said nothing more,
and began to tell his friends of Grayson.
"He is an orator," he said. "We know that by undoubted report, and his
manner is simple and most agreeable. He has more of the quality called
personal magnetism than any other man I ever saw."
"What of his ability?" asked Tremaine, the oldest of the correspondents.
Harley thought a little while before replying.
"I can't make up my mind on that point," he said. "I find in him, so far
as I can see, a certain simplicity, I might almost say an innocence,
which is remarkable. He is unlike the other public men whom I have met,
but I don't know whether this innocence indicates superficiality or a
tact and skill lying so deep that he is able to plan an ambush for the
best of his enemies."
"Well, we are to be with him five months," said Tremaine, "and it is our
business to find out."
III
THE START
They were to start at dawn the next day, going back to Chicago, where
the campaign would be opened, and Harley, ever alert, was dressing while