He suddenly became aware that a chair beside him was occupied, and he wheeled about sharply. His sense of companionship was justified; a man sat there. North stared at him, more puzzled than surprised, endeavouring to fit the familiar face to some name on his long list of acquaintances, and wondering who in Washington could have given a fancy-dress ball that night. His visitor wore his hair in a queue and powdered, a stock of soft lawn, and a dress-coat of plum-coloured cloth cut as in the days of the founders of the Republic.
Although it was some moments before North recognized his visitor, his resentment at this unseasonable intrusion passed quickly; the personality in the chair was so charming, so magnetic, so genial. He was a young man, between thirty and forty, with a long nose, a mobile mouth, dark gray-blue eyes full of fire and humour, and a massive head. It was a face of extraordinary power and intellect, but lit up by a spirit so audacious and impulsive and triumphant that it was like a leaping flame of dazzling brilliancy in some forbidding fortress. He was smiling with a delighted expression of good fellowship; but North experienced a profound conviction that the man was weighing and analyzing him, that he would weigh and analyze everybody with whom he came in contact, and make few mistakes.
"Who the deuce can he be?" he thought, "and why doesn't he speak?" And then it occurred to him that he had not spoken, himself. He was about to inquire with somewhat perfunctory courtesy in what manner he could serve his visitor, when his glance fell on the man's hands. He sat erect with a slight exclamation and experienced a stiffening at the roots of his hair. The hands under the lace ruffles were the most beautiful that ever had been given to a man, even to as small a man as this. They were white and strong and delicate, with pointed fingers wide apart, and filbert nails. North knew them well, for they were the hands of the man whom he admired above all men in the history of his country. But until to-night he had seen them on canvas only, in the Treasury Department of the United States. His feeling of terror passed, and he sat forward eagerly.
"The little lion," he said caressingly, for the man before him might have been his son, although he had been in his tomb with a bullet in his heart for nearly a century. But he looked so young, so restless, so indomitable, that the years slipped out of the century, and Hamilton once more was the most brilliant ornament of a country which had never ceased to need him.
"Yes," he said brightly, "here I am, sir, and you see me at last. This is that one moment in the lifetime of the few when the spirit burns through the flesh and recognizes another spirit who has lost that dear and necessary medium. I have been with you a great deal in your life, but you never have been able to see me until to-night." He gave his head an impatient toss. "How I have wished I were alive during the last three or four months!" he exclaimed. "Not that I could have accomplished what you could not, sir, but it would have been such a satisfaction to have been able to make the effort, and then, when I failed, to tell democracy what I thought of it."
North smiled. All sense of the supernatural had left him. His soul and Hamilton's were face to face; that was the one glorified fact. "I have been tempted several times lately to wish that we had your aristocratic republic," he said, "and that I were the head and centre of it. I have felt a strong desire to wring the neck of that many-headed nuisance called 'the people,' and proceed as if it were where the God of nations intended those incapable of governing should be and remain without protest."
"Oh, yes, you are an aristocrat. That is the reason I have enjoyed the society of your mind all these years. You were so like me in many ways when you were my age, and since then I seem to have grown older with you. I died so young. But in you, in the last twenty years, I seem to have lived on. You have built an iron wall all round those terrible fires of your youth, and roofed it over. It is only now and then that a panel melts and the flame leaps out; and the panel is so quickly replaced! I too should have conquered myself like that and made fewer and fewer mistakes."
"God knows what I might not have been able to do for my country. I have been mad to leap into the arena often enough."
"You are not dead. No man is, whose inspiration lives on. More than one of us would be of shorter stature and shorter gait if we never had had your accomplishment to ponder over. And as to what the nation would have been without you—"
"Yes!" cried Hamilton. "Yes! How can any man of ability submit to death without protest, shrug his shoulders cynically, and say that no man's disappearance causes more than a whirl of bubbles on the surface, that the world goes on its old gait undisturbed, and does as well with the new as the old? Look at Great Britain. She hasn't a single great man in all her eleven million square miles to lead her. That is answer enough to a theory which some men are sincere enough in believing. This country always has needed great leaders, and sometimes she has had them and sometimes not. The time is coming when she will need them as she has not done since the days when three or four of us set her on her feet."