"With the chance strengthening every hour," observed Colonel Ashburton, and as he turned his back to the view, his mild and innocent gaze fell on Caroline's figure. "It is good to see you, Miss Meade," he said gallantly, with a bow in which his blue eyes and silvery hair seemed to mingle. "I hope the sound of politics will not frighten you?"
Caroline looked up with a smile from her knitting. "Not at all. I was brought up in the midst of discussions. But are we in the way?"
The Colonel's gallantry was not without romantic flavour. "It is your Eden, and we are the intruders," he answered softly. It was a pity, thought Caroline, while she looked at him over Letty's head, that a velvet manner like that had almost vanished from the world. It went with plumes and lace ruffles and stainless swords.
"I am going to drive, father," called Letty, "if mother ever comes."
"That's good." Blackburn smiled as he responded, and then moving a step or two nearer the garden, drew several deep wicker chairs into the sunshine. For a few minutes after they had seated themselves, the men gazed in silence at the hazy hills on the horizon, and it seemed to Caroline that Blackburn was drawing strength and inspiration from the radiant, familiar scene.
"I have never wanted anything like this," he said at last, speaking very slowly, as if he weighed each separate word before it was uttered.
"Not for yourself, but for the country," replied the Colonel in his musical voice, which sounded always as if it were pitched to arouse sleeping enthusiasm. He had once been in Congress, and the habit of oratorical phrasing had never entirely left him. "Do you know, Blackburn, I sometimes think that you are one of the few statesmen we have left. The others are mixtures of so many ingredients—ambition, prejudice, fanaticism, self-interest—everything but the thought of the country, and the things for which the country should stand. It's the difference, I suppose, between a patriot and a politician."
"It is not that I am less selfish," Blackburn laughed with embarrassment as he answered, "but perhaps I have had a harder time than the others, and have learned something they haven't. I've seen how little material things or their acquisition matter in life. After all, the idea is the only thing that really counts—an idea big enough to lift a man out of his personal boundaries, big enough to absorb and possess him completely. A man's country may do this, but not a man's self, nor the mere business of living."
As he paused, though his head was turned in Caroline's direction, she had a queer impression that he was looking beyond her at some glowing vision that was imperceptible to the others. She knew that he was oblivious of her presence, and that, if he saw her at all, she was scarcely more to him than an image painted on air. The golden light of the afternoon enveloped his figure, yet she realized that the illumination in his face was not due to the shifting rays of the sun. She did not like him—the aversion she felt was too strong for her to judge him tolerantly—but she was obliged to admit that his straight, firm figure, with its look of arrested energy, of controlled power, made Colonel Ashburton and the stranger from the North appear almost commonplace. Even his rough brown clothes possessed a distinction apart from the cut of his tailor; and though it was impossible for her to define the quality which seemed to make him stand alone, to put him in a class by himself, she was beginning to discern that his gift of personality, of intellectual dominance, was a kind of undeveloped genius. "He ought to have been a writer or a statesman," she thought, while she looked at his roughened hair, which would never lie flat, at his smoky grey eyes, and his thin, almost colourless lips. It was a face that grew on her as she watched it, a face, she realized, that one must study to understand, not attempt to read by erring flashes of insight. She remembered that Colonel Ashburton had told her that Blackburn had no small talk, but that he spoke well if he were once started on a current of ideas. "It is true. He speaks just as if he had thought it all out years ago," she said to herself while she listened, "just as if every sentence, every word almost, was crystallized." She felt a mild curiosity about his political convictions—a desire to know what he really believed, and why his opinions had aroused the opposition of men like Charles Peyton and Robert Colfax.
"I used to believe, not long ago, that these things counted supremely," Blackburn said presently, with his eyes on the river—those intense grey eyes which seemed always searching for something. "I held as firmly as any man by the Gospel of Achievement—by the mad scramble to acquire things. I had never had them, and what a man hasn't had, he generally wants. Perhaps I travelled the historic road through materialism to idealism, the road America is following this very hour while we are talking. I am not saying that it isn't all for the best, you know. You may call me an optimist, I suppose, down beneath the eternal muddle of things; but I feel that the ambition to acquire is good only as a process, and not as a permanent condition or the ultimate end of life. I haven't a doubt that the frantic struggle in America to amass things, to make great fortunes, has led to discoveries of incalculable benefit to mankind, and has given a splendid impetus to the development of our country. We wanted things so passionately that we were obliged to create them in order to satisfy our desires. This spirit, this single phase of development, is still serving a purpose. We have watched it open the earth, build railroads, establish industries, cut highways over mountains, turn deserts into populous cities; and through these things lay the foundation of the finer and larger social order—the greater national life. We are fond of speaking of the men who have made this possible as money-grubbers or rank materialists. Some of them were, perhaps, but not the guiding spirits, the real builders. No man can do great constructive work who is not seeking to express an imperishable idea in material substance. No man can build for to-morrow who builds only with bricks and mortar."