III
THE year and a half that had gone since their brilliant wedding had passed more slowly for Emily than for Garwood. They had gone East on a wedding journey, for Jerome had been able, as the first perquisites of his new position, to get passes, a trick he had already learned in the Legislature, though there his “transportation” had been confined to the limits of Illinois. They had gone to New York and of course to Washington, where their interests now centered. There they made the conventional rounds, visiting the Capitol and the White House, the Treasury and the Patent Office, ascending the Washington Monument, going over to Arlington and down to Mt. Vernon, seeing all the sights. Emily thus gained a store of memories that served her well in the months that came after. She said she could the better imagine Jerome going the daily rounds of his important duties for having seen the places in which he would be, and Garwood himself found that it was well to have visited on his wedding trip all the points of interest about the city, else he never would have visited them at all. It mattered not, perhaps, that Emily’s imaginings of her husband’s goings and comings in Washington were far from the reality—they served her as well as any.
She had planned during the long year in which Garwood waited so impatiently for the sitting of Congress to go to Washington with him. They had talked of it all the winter and during the spring. When March came and with its fourth day brought the sense that he was now in reality a congressman, Garwood had felt an increase of importance with an increase of impatience. The coming of his first voucher soon after was a joy to them both, and the four hundred and sixteen dollars and sixty-six cents it called for seemed to link them more firmly to officialdom. But Garwood longed to be sitting in his seat in the House of Representatives; to hear his name in the roll-call; he felt that he would not realize it all until he had been there long enough to have grown familiar, and yet not so long as to begin to dread the end. And Emily felt that her joy would not be full until she had seen him there.
The whole time for her had held other duties, duties of a sacred preparation, when she sat long days in the sunlight, with her eyelids drooped over white garments in her lap. Garwood had never been so tender of her before, and he hung about in a solicitude that betrayed a man’s love and a boy’s awkwardness. With a woman’s superior intuition she was the dominant one in those days, though the coming of the baby late in the fall left her helpless, and restored him suddenly to self-confidence. So, after all, when December came, with its long anticipated first Monday, Emily could not go to Washington with her husband and, bruised by the wrench of their first parting, she was left in the house with her father and her boy to face a long winter alone. All that winter she carefully read the accounts in the newspapers of the proceedings of Congress, and cast her eye each morning down the wide columns of the Congressional Record seeking the magic name “Mr. Garwood.”
It was only once or twice that she had the joy of finding Jerome’s name, and then what he said seemed formal and distant, and did not have a personal appeal to her. For instance, late in the session, she read:
“Mr. Garwood addressed the Committee of the Whole.”
And then in maddening parenthesis:
“(His remarks will appear later.)”
But when they did appear later, weeks later, on the very first page of the Record, with the words, “Speech of the Honorable Jerome B. Garwood,” in black types at the head, they were long and full of statistics, not at all like the fiery speech he had made that last night of the campaign. She could find no mention of the speech in the daily newspapers, and she had her fears that Jerome was not being appreciated. He had made an effort at first to write to her daily, but soon there were lengthy intervals between the letters, and the letters themselves grew shorter, seeming to have been written late at night, when he was tired and sleepy. But they were always filled with admonitions for the boy, and Emily found joy in translating them into the baby tongue the child understood so well, as she could tell by the big blue eyes and the cooings of his drooling little lips.
In January, just as she was beginning to recover her strength, a new trial came upon her, the last she had ever anticipated. The directors of the bank held their annual meeting, and to the surprise of all Grand Prairie, her father was not reëlected president. It was a blow to him, though he was too proud to show it. Yet Emily could see the change it wrought in him. He seemed to age suddenly, and shrank from going out, spending most of his time in his library, where he pretended to be reading his books, though she often surprised him with his glasses between the leaves in the old familiar way, gazing out at nothing. He had made the fatal discovery that old age was upon him at last.
Dade had gone away with her mother in search of health at some new springs in Maine. After trying their waters for a while they suddenly departed for Europe, as Dade announced in an ecstatic letter. Now they were in Holland, and Dade wrote from Amsterdam of the quaintness of the place and of the picturesque sails of the boats on the little Amstel, comparing them for color to those one sees, or imagines, on the Adriatic.
And so Emily was left alone with her old father and infant child. She had looked forward ardently to the adjournment of Congress and Jerome’s return. Now that he was come, she found that she was to see little of him. He must plunge into the campaign, he said.
On this Monday morning, he came in late for dinner, clapped his hands two or three times in the baby’s face, laughed at the winking of the blue eyes, ate his dinner alone at a corner of the dining table, smoked a cigar, read the Chicago papers, threw them in a heap on the floor, and then stretched himself on the divan in a dark corner of the parlor and went to sleep.