Elizabeth remained silent for a while, and then forced herself to say: “My husband was one of the best of men. He was as good as my father.”
“That settles it,” replied Clavering, with grim humor. “I never knew a woman in my life who spoke of her husband’s goodness first who was really in love with him. When a woman is in love with a man, it isn’t his goodness she thinks of first; it is his love. Now don’t fly off at that; I’m not a conventional man, and you must know it if you ever heard of me before. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful. On the contrary, I want your good opinion—I have wanted it ever since the first time I ever saw you. I was very much struck with you then. I have wanted to know you and I have planned to know you. Have I committed any crime?”
“But—but—you are a married man,” said Elizabeth, faltering, and conscious that she was talking like an ingénue.
Clavering laughed as he replied: “That’s downright school-girlish. Any boarding-school miss would say the same. Well, I can’t help it now that I married a woman totally unsuited to me before I was twenty-one years old. Come, Mrs. Darrell, we are not children. I wanted to know you, I say, and I always try to do what I want to do. Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Well, let us then know each other. I swear to you I know less of women than I do of any subject I have ever tried to master. True, I never had time until lately; and, besides, I was a middle-aged man before I ever met any educated and intelligent women. In the class of life from which I spring women are household drudges and bearers of children, and I never knew them in any other aspect until I was over forty years of age. Then you can’t imagine what a stunning revelation to me a woman was who had never done anything but amuse herself and improve herself. Suppose you had never met any educated men till now—wouldn’t you find them captivating?”
When a man talks to a woman as she has never been talked to before he is certain of finding an interested listener, and, it follows, a tolerant listener. So Elizabeth could not disguise her interest in Clavering, nor was it worth while to pretend to be offended with him. The superficial knowledge she had of the vicissitudes of his life was calculated to arouse and fix her attention; and there was so little to do in her present life that she would have been more or less than mortal if she had turned from the first object of interest she had yet met with in her new and changed and dreary life.
She paused awhile before answering Clavering’s last question. “I dare say I should feel so,” she answered. “I remember how it was when I was first married and went to India. Everything interested me. I could not look at a native without wanting to ask all manner of questions of him and about him, which of course I could not be allowed to do; and the life there is so strange—their race problem is so different from ours, and all my modes of thought had to be changed. I was in India over eight years, and it was as strange to me when I left it as when I arrived.”
Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.
“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the education of a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write, and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice-President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all-round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well-educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”
“I have heard my father speak of Mrs. Thorndyke, whose family he knew many years ago, and he visits occasionally at Senator Thorndyke’s. Mrs. Thorndyke sent me a request that I would call to see her, but—but—I don’t pay any visits now.”