won't be speaker!'
'I'd undertake to be governor, if I thought the idea would fetch you. Give me a word of hope, and you'll see what I'd do!'
'No, no!' she said, shaking her head.'My governors are all Rajahs, and they live a long way from here.'
'But say, India's half the size of the United States. Which State are you going to?'
'Which----?'
'Ward, township, county, section? What's your post-office address?'
'Rhatore, in the province of Gokral Seetarun, Rajputana, India.'
'All that!' he repeated despairingly. There was a horrible definiteness about it; it almost made him believe she was going. He saw her drifting hopelessly out of his life into a land on the nether rim of the world, named out of the Arabian Nights and probably populated out of them. 'Nonsense, Kate! You're not going to try to live in any such heathen fairyland. What's it got to do with Topaz, Kate? What's it got to do with home? You can't do it, I tell you. Let them nurse themselves. Leave it to them! Or leave it to me! I'll go over myself, turn some of their pagan jewels into money, and organise a nursing corps on a plan that you shall dictate. Then we'll be married, and I'll take you out to look at my work. I'll make a go of it. Don't say they're poor. That necklace alone would fetch money enough to organise an army of nurses! If your missionary told the truth in his sermon at church the other night, it would pay the national debt. Diamonds the size of hens' eggs, yokes of pearls, coils of sapphires the girth of a man's wrist, and emeralds until you can't rest--and they hang all that around the neck of an idol, or keep it stored in a temple, and call on decent white girls to come out and help nurse them! It's what I call cheek.'
'As if money could help them! It's not that. There's no charity or kindness or pity in money, Nick; the only real help is to give yourself.'
'All right. Then give me too! I'll go along,' he said, returning to the safer humorous view.
She laughed, but stopped herself suddenly. 'You mustn't come to India, Nick. You won't do that? You won't follow me! You shan't.'
'Well, if I get a place as rajah, I don't say I wouldn't. There might be a dollar in it.'
'Nick! They wouldn't let an American be a rajah.'
It is strange that men to whom life is a joke find comfort in women to whom it is a prayer.
'They might let him run a rajah, though,' said Tarvin, undisturbed; 'and it might be the softer snap. Rajahing itself is classed extra hazardous, I think.'
'How?'
'By the accident insurance companies--double premium. None of my companies would touch the risk. They might take a vizier, though,' he added meditatively. 'They come from that Arabian Nights section, don't they?'
'Well, you are not to come,' she said definitively. 'You must keep away. Remember that.'
Tarvin got up suddenly. 'Oh, good-night! Good-night!' he cried.
He shook himself together impatiently, and waved her from him with a parting gesture of rejection and cancellation. She followed him into the passage, where he was gloomily taking his hat from its wonted peg; but he would not even let her help him on with his coat.
No man can successfully conduct a love-affair and a political canvass at the same time. It was perhaps the perception of this fact that had led Sheriff to bend an approving eye on the attentions which his opponent in the coming election had lately been paying his daughter. Tarvin had always been interested in Kate, but not so consecutively and intensely. Sheriff was stumping the district and was seldom at home, but in his irregular appearances at Topaz he smiled stolidly on his rival's occupation. In looking forward to an easy victory over him in the joint debate at Cañon City, however, he had perhaps relied too much on the younger man's absorption. Tarvin's consciousness that he had not been playing his party fair had lately chafed against his pride of success. The result was irritation, and Kate's prophecies and insinuations were pepper on an open wound.
The Cañon City meeting was set down for the night following the conversation just recorded, and Tarvin set foot on the shaky dry goods box platform at the roller skating rink that night, with a raging young intention to make it understood that he was still here--if he was in love.
Sheriff had the opening, and Tarvin sat in the background dangling a long, restless leg from one knee. The patchily illumined huddle of auditors below him looked up at a nervous, bony, loosehung man, with a kind, clever, aggressive eye, and a masterful chin. His nose was prominent, and he had the furrowed forehead and the hair thinned about the temples which come to young men in the West. The alert, acute glance which went roving about the hall, measuring the audience to which he was to speak, had the look of sufficiency to the next need, whatever it might be, which, perhaps, more than anything else, commends men to other men beyond the Mississippi. He was dressed in the short sack-coat, which is good enough for most Western public functions; but he had left at Topaz the flannel of everyday wear, and was clad in the white linen of civilisation.
He was wondering, as he listened to Sheriff, how a father could have the heart to get off false views on silver and the tariff to this crowd, while his daughter was hatching that ghastly business at home. The true views were so much mixed up in his own mind with Kate, that when he himself rose at last to answer Sheriff, he found it hard not to ask how the deuce a man expected an intelligent mass meeting to accept the political economy he was trying to apply to the government of a State, when he couldn't so much as run his own family? Why in the world didn't he stop his daughter from making such a hash of her life?--that was what he wanted to know. What were fathers for? He reserved these apt remarks, and launched instead upon a flood of figures, facts, and arguments.
Tarvin had precisely the gift by which the stump orator coils himself into the heart of the stump auditor: he upbraided, he arraigned; he pleaded, insisted, denounced; he raised his lean, long arms, and called the gods and the statistics and the Republican party to witness, and, when he could make a point that way, he did not scorn to tell a story. 'Why,' he would cry defiantly, in that colloquial shout which the political orator uses for his anecdotes, 'that is like a man I used to know back in Wisconsin, who----' It wasn't very much like the man in Wisconsin; and Tarvin had never been in Wisconsin, and didn't know the man; but it was a good story, and when the crowd howled with delight Sheriff gathered himself together a little and tried to smile, and that was what Tarvin wanted.
There were dissentient voices, and the jointness of the debate was sometimes not confined to the platform; but the deep, relishing groans which would often follow applause or laughter, acted as a spur to Tarvin, who had joined the janitor of the rink that afternoon in mixing the dusky brew on the table before him, and who really did not need a spur. Under the inspiration of the mixture in, the pitcher, the passionate resolve in his heart, and the groans and hisses, he melted gradually into an ecstasy of conviction which surprised even himself, and he began to feel at last that he had his audience under his hand. Then he gripped them, raised them aloft like a conjuror, patted and stroked them, dropped them to dreadful depths, snatched them back, to show that he could, caught them to his heart, and told them a story. And with that audience hugged to his breast he marched victoriously up and down upon the prostrate body of the Democratic party, chanting its requiem. It was a great time. Everybody' rose at the end and said so loudly; they stood on benches and shouted it with a bellow that shook the building. They tossed their caps in the air, and danced on one another, and wanted to carry Tarvin around the hall on their shoulders.
But Tarvin, with a choking at the throat, turned his back on it all, and, fighting his way blindly through the crowd which had gathered on the platform,
