He stood there with head bowed and he seemed to be speaking to himself. Stanton caught a phrase or two and found it was verse—banal verses, which were there and then fixed in his fly-paper memory. “Tell me, my secret soul,” it ran:
“Oh, tell me, Hope and Faith,
Is there no resting-place
From sorrow, sin, and death?
Is there no happy spot
Where mortals may be blessed,
Where grief may find a balm
And weariness a rest?”
The figure murmuring these lines seemed to be oblivious of his companion. He stood gazing under the moon, like a gaunt statue of melancholy. Stanton spoke to him but got no answer, and presently took his own road home. He had no taste for histrionic scenes. And as he went his way he meditated. Mad, beyond doubt. Not without power in him, but unbalanced, hysterical, alternating between buffoonery and these schoolgirl emotions. He reflected that if the American nation contained much stuff of this kind it might prove a difficult team to drive. He was thankful that he was going home next day to his orderly life.
II
Eighteen years have gone, and the lanky figure of Speed's store is revealed in new surroundings. In a big square room two men sat beside a table littered with the debris of pens, foolscap, and torn fragments of paper which marked the end of a Council. It was an evening at the beginning of April, and a fire burned in the big grate. One of the two sat at the table with his elbows on the mahogany, and his head supported by a hand. He was a man well on in middle life with a fine clean-cut face and the shapely mobile lips of the publicist and orator. It was the face of one habituated to platforms and assemblies, full of a certain selfconscious authority. But to-night its possessor seemed ill at ease. His cheeks were flushed and his eye distracted.
The other had drawn his chair to the fire, so that one side of him was lit by the late spring sun and one by the glow from the hearth. That figure we first saw in the Springfield store had altered little in the eighteen years. There was no grey in the coarse black hair, but the lines in the sallow face were deeper, and there were dark rings under the hollow eyes. The old suit of blue jeans had gone; and he wore now a frock-coat, obviously new, which was a little too full for his gaunt frame. His tie, as of old, was like a boot-lace. A new silk hat, with the nap badly ruffled, stood near on the top of a cabinet.
He smiled rather wearily. “We're pretty near through the appointments now, Mr. Secretary. It's a mean business, but I'm a minority President and I've got to move in zig-zags so long as I don't get off the pike. I reckon that honest statesmanship is just the employment of individual meannesses for the public good. Mr. Sumner wouldn't agree. He calls himself the slave of principles and says he owns no other master. Mr. Sumner's my notion of a bishop.”
The other did not seem to be listening. “Are you still set on re-enforcing Fort Sumter?” he asked, his bent brows making a straight line above his eyes.
Lincoln nodded. He was searching in the inside pocket of his frock-coat, from which he extracted a bundle of papers. Seward saw what he was after, and his self-consciousness increased.
“You have read my letter?” he asked.