This was the man who had rolled away the mountains of official inertia and saved him from prison; who had stipulated with his daughter that she should not write to him in his cell; and who now embraced the first opportunity to greet him publicly with cordial words. Here, reflected the cashiered soldier, was poise more calculated than his own, and he smiled as he shook his head, giving the answer which he knew to be expected of him.
“No, thank you, senator.” Then he added a request: “But if these gentlemen can spare you for a few minutes I would appreciate a word with you.”
“Certainly, my boy.” With a glance about the little 37 company which made his excuses, Beverly rose and linked his arm through Spurrier’s, but when they stood alone on deck that graciousness stiffened immediately into manner more austere.
“I’ve seen Augusta,” began the younger man briefly, “and told her I wouldn’t seek to hold her to her promise. I suppose that meets with your approval?”
The public man, whom rumor credited with presidential aspirations, nodded. “Under the circumstances it is necessary. I may as well be candid. I tried vainly to persuade her to throw you over entirely, but I had to end in a compromise. She agreed not to communicate with you in any manner until your trial came to its conclusion.”
The cashiered officer felt his temples hammering with the surge of indignant blood to his forehead. This man who had so studiedly and successfully feigned genuine pleasure at seeing him, when other eyes were looking on, was telling him now with salamander coolness that he had urged upon his daughter the policy of callous desertion. The impulse toward resentful retort was almost overpowering, but with it came the galling recognition that, except for Beverly’s bull-dog pertinacity, Spurrier himself would have been a life-termer, and that now humility became him better than anger.
“Did you seek to have Augusta throw me over, without even a farewell—because you believed me guilty, sir?” His inquiry came quietly and the older man shook a noncommittal head.
“It’s not so much what I think as what the world will think,” he made even response. “To put it in the kindest words, Spurrier, you rest under a cloud.”
“Senator,” said the other in measured syllables, “I rest, also, under a great weight of obligation to you, but, there were times, sir, when for a note from her I’d willingly have accepted the death penalty.”