A few days after her call at his office, Betty gave one of her renowned dinner parties. It was "in honor of Colonel Burr." The guest of honor carried all before him that evening. The people who had come to stare at him as an escaped arch-criminal went home wholly enslaved by his magnetic charm. Aaron Burr had come to his own again.
In saying good night to his hostess, Burr lingered after the other guests had trundled off cityward in their carriages. Then, taking his leave with bared head, there in the moonlight on the steps of the Jumel mansion, he dropped lightly to one knee and raised Betty's hand to his lips.
"Madam," he breathed, the merciful moonlight making him for the moment his young and irresistible self again, "madam, I give you my hand. My heart has long been yours."
It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought—or affected to think—it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he drew the siege lines closer to the citadel.
At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back. But he did. He came back the very next day—July 1, 1833. And with him in the carriage was another old man—the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first wife.
To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room. Wondering, she obeyed.
"Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to marry you. Pray get ready at once!"
Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill at argument that had made him master of men and women alike—all were brought into play.
An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts. But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality. Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well.
At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was won. He knew it.