CHAPTER XIV.
It takes a long time for a country neighborhood to recover from a sensation. Three or four years after Madame Koller, or Eliza Peyton had disappeared along with her mother and Ahlberg, people were still discussing her wonderful ways. Mr. Cole was paying his court mildly to Olivia Berkeley, but in his heart of hearts he had not forgotten his blonde enslaver. The Colonel was the same Colonel—his shirt-ruffle rushed out of his bosom as impetuously as of old. He continued to hate the Hibbses. Dashaway had been turned out to grass, but another screw continued to carry the Colonel’s colors to defeat on the county race track. Olivia, too, had grown older, and a great deal prettier. A chisel called the emotions, is always at work upon the human countenance—a face naturally humane and expressive grows more so, year by year.
It is not to be expected that she was very happy in that time. Life in the country, varied by short visits to watering places in the summer and occasionally to cities in the winter, is dull at best for a girl grown up in the whirl of civilization. There came a time—after Pembroke, taking Miles with him had gone to Washington, when life began to look very black to Olivia Berkeley’s eyes. She suffered for want of an object in life. She loved her father very much, but that cheerful, healthful and robustious old person hardly supplied the craving to love and tend which is innate in every woman’s heart. It is at this point in their development that women of inferior nature begin to deteriorate. Not so with Olivia Berkeley. Life puzzled and displeased her. She found herself full of energy, with many gifts and accomplishments, condemned in the flower of her youth to the dull routine of a provincial life in the country. She could not understand it—neither could she sit down in hopeless resignation and accept it. She bestirred herself. Books there were in plenty at Isleham—the piano was an inestimable comforter. She weathered the storm of ennui in this manner, and came to possess a certain content—to control the outward signs of inward restlessness. Meanwhile she read and studied feverishly, foolishly imagining that knowing a great number of facts would make her happy. Of course it did not—but it made her less unhappy.
As for Pembroke, the fate which had fallen hard on Olivia Berkeley had fondly favored him. He was not only elected to Congress, but he became something of a man after he got there. The House of Representatives is a peculiar body—peculiarly unfavorable to age, and peculiarly favorable to youth. Pembroke, still smarting under his mortification, concluded to dismiss thoughts of any woman from his mind for the present, and devote himself to the work before him. With that view, he scanned closely his environment when he went to Washington. He saw that as a young member he was not expected to say anything. This left him more leisure to study his duties. He aspired to be a lawyer—always a lawyer. He found himself appointed to a committee—and his fellow members on it very soon found that the quiet young man from Virginia was liable to be well informed on the legal questions which the House and the committees are constantly wrangling over. Every man on that committee became convinced that the quiet young man would some day make his mark. This was enough to give him a good footing in the House. His colleagues saw that election after election, the young man was returned, apparently without effort on his part, for Pembroke was not a demagogue, and nothing on earth would have induced him to go into a rough and tumble election campaign. At last it got so that on the few occasions when he rose in his place, he had no trouble in catching the Speaker’s eye. He was wise enough not to be betrayed by his gift of oratory into speech-making—a thing the House will not tolerate from a young member. He had naturally a beautiful and penetrating voice and much grace and dignity in speaking. These were enough without risking making himself ridiculous by a premature display as an orator. He sometimes thrilled when the great battles were being fought before his eyes—it was in the reconstruction time—and longed for the day which he felt would come when he might go down among the captains and the shouting, but he had the genius of waiting. Then he was a pleasant man at dinner—and his four years army service had given him a soldierly frankness and directness. He lived with Miles in a simple and quiet way in Washington. He did not go out much, as indeed he had no time. He became quite cynical to himself about women. The pretty girls from New York were quite captivated with the young man from Virginia. They wanted to know all about his lovely old place, especially one charming bud, Miss de Peyster.
“Come and see it,” Pembroke would answer good-naturedly. “Half the house was burned up by our friends, the enemy—the other half is habitable.”
“And haven’t you miles and miles of fields and forests, like an English nobleman?” the gay creature asked.
“Oh yes. Miles and miles. The taxes eat up the crops, and the crops eat up the land.”
“How nice,” cried the daughter of the Knickerbockers. “How much more romantic it is to have a broken down old family mansion and thousands of acres of land, than to be a stockbroker or a real estate man—and then to have gone through the whole war—and to have been promoted on the field—”
Pembroke smiled rather dolefully. His ruined home, his mortgaged acres, Miles’ life-long trouble, his four years of marching and starving and fighting, did not appear like romantic incidents in life, but as cruel blows of fate to him.
But Helena de Peyster was a pleasant girl, and her mother was gentle, amiable, and well-bred. They had one of the gayest and most charming houses in Washington, and entertained half the diplomatic corps at dinner during every week. They would gladly have had Pembroke oftener. He came in to quiet dinners with them, assumed a fatherly air with Helena, and liked them cordially. They were good to Miles too, who sometimes went to them timidly on rainy afternoons when he would not be likely to find anybody else.