CHAPTER XI.
AN AWAKENING.
Judge Thorn sat looking over the evening paper.
Lost in her own thoughts, Jean sat in the shadow of a palm idly thrumming a guitar, the soft pliant strains corresponding well with the expression of her face.
A sudden exclamation from her father caused her to look up.
His profile alone was visible to her, but there is an expression in outlines when one understands the subject, and she knew that something of an unusually puzzling or distressing nature engaged him.
Eagerly watching, she played on softly.
Presently the judge crushed the paper into a ball and with another exclamation of disgust threw it across the room where it rolled behind a scrap basket under a desk. At sight of so uncommon a procedure Jean went to her father's side.
"What news, father mine? What news?" she asked.
Judge Thorn pointed in the direction of the wadded paper.
"Jean," said he, solemnly, "you remember how proudly I boasted to you when Congress prohibited that blackest disgrace of our army, the liquor-selling canteen. You know how deeply I felt the shame and disgrace upon the whole legal profession when an officer of the cabinet perpetrated the outrage that thwarted the will of the sovereign people. Jean, girl, in a long life of close contact with the nation's politics I have never met anything that has so deeply tried my loyalty to the party in which I have helped to work out the political problems of almost half a century as did that act that, as a life-long student of law, I recognized as a fraud.
"But I have bolstered my shattered faith in the party with my absolute confidence in the President. I have refused to believe—to this very hour I have refused to believe that the man whose magnificent career I have watched with such interest and of whose stainless honor I have been so proud, would consent to be a party to such an act of anarchy. I have insisted, as you well know, stoutly holding my position though the long delay has made me sick at heart, that when the long routine of official red tape had at length unrolled itself and the case should finally come to the President, justice would be done and the nation's honor vindicated.
"Now, look there!"
And with hands that trembled with suppressed anger the old jurist unfolded the crumpled paper, which Jean had recovered, and pointed out the telegraphic report that told how another high official of the President's official family had disgraced himself, his profession and the administration by the formal declaration that he accepted the historic Griggs infamy as a correct interpretation of law.
"Jean, my child, spare me. Say nothing now, child. I can not bear it. The faith of a lifetime is shattered. On that page I read, plainly as if it were printed there, that the President is a party to the infamy. The party of my lifelong loyalty stands committed by the act of its chosen leaders to the foulest anarchy that ever disgraced a civilized people. Had I no thought for temperance, as a citizen and as a lawyer, I could not otherwise than see in this the forerunner of the gravest national disaster."
The young woman listened with an expression in which deepest scorn for the treason done was mingled with tender pity for the stricken man at her side. Sharp, cutting words crowded to her lips for a final argument, but her love for her father checked them.
Just then, in the silence, a step was heard approaching the house. In a twinkling the canteen outrage slipped from the mind of the girl, for the step was one whose echo had made indelible prints on her heart and whose owner she had been many times heartsick to see.
She had hardly time to wonder what brought him at an hour long past the usual time for making calls before he was with them.
When he had been informed by the judge of the latest chapter in the history of the canteen outrage, Mr. Allison laughed heartily.
"What have you been voting for the last ten years, Judge," he asked.
"Not for the canteen," the older man answered warmly.
"I have, and for every other measure conducive to the best interests of the trade—and we have voted the same ticket to a dot."
Finding the judge rather indisposed to talk just then the young man turned to his hostess.
"I am on a quest," he said. "Tell me of some one possessed of enough knowledge of human nature to recommend a course that will square me with an unruly conscience and—a woman."
"My father is a legal light, ask him. He needs diversion now, I think," and Jean smiled at sight of his perplexed face.
"His specialty has not been 'man atoms of a great iniquity,'" said Allison with a smile that hardly concealed his anxiety. "Tell me, what would you do if you had been a 'man-atom,' had grown disgusted with the mother mass and wished to completely sever your connection with it before God and man?"
"You mean if I were a man? Well, first I would ask the Lord to forgive me for ever having been a 'man-atom.'"
"I have been duly penitent," assented the questioner.
"Then I would buy some paper—a quantity of it—and I would write yards and yards of resolutions stating that 'it can never be legalized without sin.'"
"And then?"
"Then I should pray a whole lot—and pursue the even tenor of my way; and if my conscience should assert itself in the face of all this, I should think it too cranky a conscience to be humored."
"What about the woman?"
Jean smiled.
"Woman? Women," she said, "have notions. To save their lives they cannot see the use in wasting paper and prayers. They would DO something. Women—some women—believe in standing right with God and conscience though the heavens fall."
"So do some men," said Allison, gravely.
Jean started slightly. The tone of his voice, the look of his eye, conveyed to her the knowledge that somewhere, somehow, since she had seen him last he had been awakened.
Involuntarily she clasped her hands and in the passing glance she gave him Gilbert Allison caught a glimpse of the heaven that orthodox people say follows the resurrection of the just.
Judge Thorn roused himself from the spell that had been cast over him by the news in the crumpled paper.
A second time he took it in his hands and slowly, solemnly crushed it.
"The rank and file, the men whose honesty and virtue have made the party great," he said, "have been defrauded, outraged. My support of the administration and of the party of my political life is forever ended unless it reclaim the right to a decent man's support."
While her father talked, Jean, lest in the first moments of her delightful discovery she should clap her hands or cry or dance or in some other unconventional way outrage grave decorum, returned to her seat and her guitar.
The fringed palm threw long jagged shadows over her dress and stretched away to meet the firelight dancing on the hearth-rug.
The mingled tones of the two voices reached her ear, but she heard them indistinctly. To the soft strains that answered the strokes of her fingers, she kept repeating over and over to herself, "He is awake, he is awake."
Presently she heard her father leave the room.
Then her heart began to whirl and beat in a way unknown to her before. She caught the faint chime of a distant steeple bell and the notes of the low music died away to a plaintive breathing as she counted the strokes, for she knew the fateful hour of her life was at hand.
Just as the last stroke quivered out onto the new hour, he came. He sat down beside her and putting aside the guitar, drew her close to him.
"You are awake," she said softly, as if half afraid of breaking some magic spell. "Tell me about it."
He dropped his hand over one of hers and described the tragedy of the victims of the "great iniquity" that he had seen on that eventful night.
When he spoke of the murdered child he felt her hand clinch in his and when he told of the prayer consigning the "respectable" dealer to the place prepared for Satan and his earthly henchmen, involuntarily she would have drawn away from him, but his arm bound her like a band of steel.
"A tortured face—a bitter prayer—a bloody tragedy—ugly instruments; but in the hands of the Divinity that smooths out man's rough hewing they have cut away the last outline of a 'man-atom.' Are you glad? Has fate fashioned me to the satisfaction of one peerless, priceless woman?"
For one moment Jean hesitated. Then——
But what business is that of ours? Our story has been of the daughter of a Republican, and the young woman whose face is hidden upon the shoulder of Gilbert Allison, once rum-seller, now by God's grace Prohibitionist, is no longer the daughter of a Republican; for Judge Thorn's resolution, slow formed, is as unbreakable as nature's laws.
THE END.
Section 17 of the Army Act, passed by Congress March 2, 1899, reads:
"That no officer or private soldier shall be detailed to sell intoxicating drinks as a bartender or otherwise, in any post exchange or canteen, nor shall any other person be required or allowed to sell such liquor in any encampment or fort, or on any premises used for military purposes by the United States; and the Secretary of War is hereby directed to issue such general order as may be necessary to carry the provisions of this section into full force and effect."
After vainly trying to find some other method of evading the law, Secretary Alger, then the head of the War Department, obtained from Attorney-General Griggs the opinion that the army saloon, known as the canteen, could run as usual if only the bartenders were not soldiers. Griggs said:
"The designation of one class of individuals as forbidden to do a certain thing raises a just inference that all other classes not mentioned are not forbidden. A declaration that soldiers shall not be detailed to sell intoxicating drinks in post exchanges necessarily implies that such sale is not unlawful when conducted by others than soldiers.... The act having forbidden the employment of soldiers as bartenders or salesmen of intoxicating drinks, it would be lawful and appropriate for the managers of the post exchanges to employ civilians for that purpose. Of course, employment is a matter of contract, and not of requirement or permission."
This opinion, pronounced anarchy by every judge and every lawyer, outside of the President's Cabinet, that has spoken upon it, is upheld by Secretary Root, the new head of the War Department; and by President McKinley.