“I have come to the conclusion,” said Peter, “that there is no use in our trying to be friends. So we had better give up at once. Don’t you think so?”
“What a pretty horse Miss Winthrop has?” said Leonore. And she never obtained an answer to her question, nor answered Peter’s.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
A MUTINEER.
After Peter’s return from Washington, there was a settled gloom about him positively appalling. He could not be wooed, on any plea, by his closest friends, to journey up-town into the social world. He failed entirely to avail himself of the room in the Rivington’s Newport villa, though Dorothy wrote appealingly, and cited his own words to him. Even to his partners he became almost silent, except on law matters. Jenifer found that no delicacy, however rare or however well cooked and served, seemed to be noticed any more than if it was mess-pork. The only moments that this atmosphere seemed to yield at all was when Peter took a very miscellaneous collection of rubbish out of a little sachet, meant for handkerchiefs, which he now carried in his breast-pocket, and touched the various articles to his lips. Then for a time he would look a little less suicidal.
But it was astonishing the amount of work he did, the amount of reading he got through, the amount of politics he bossed, and the cigars he smoked, between the first of June, and the middle of August The party-leaders had come to the conclusion that Peter did not intend to take a hand in this campaign, but, after his return from Washington, they decided otherwise. “The President must have asked him to interfere,” was their whispered conclusion, “but it’s too late now. It’s all cut and dried.”
Peter found, as this remark suggested, that his two months’ devotion to the dearest of eyes and sweetest of lips, had had serious results. As with Mutineer once, he had dropped his bridle, but there was no use in uttering, as he had, then, the trisyllable which had reduced the horse to order. He had a very different kind of a creature with which to deal, than a Kentucky gentleman of lengthy lineage, a creature called sometimes a “tiger.” Yet curiously enough, the same firm voice, and the same firm manner, and a “mutineer,” though this time a man instead of a horse, was effective here. All New York knew that something had been done, and wanted to know what. There was not a newspaper in the city that would have refused to give five thousand dollars for an authentic stenographic report of what actually was said in a space of time not longer than three hours in all. Indeed, so intensely were people interested, that several papers felt called upon to fabricate and print most absurd versions of what did occur, all the accounts reaching conclusions as absolutely different as the press portraits of celebrities. From three of them it is a temptation to quote the display headlines or “scare-heads,” which ushered these reports to the world. The first read:
“THE BOSSES AT WAR!”
“HOT WORDS AND LOOKS.”
“BUT THEY’LL CRAWL LATER.”
“There’s beauty in the bellow of the blast,
There’s grandeur in the growling of the gale;
But there’s eloquence-appalling, when Stirling is aroaring,
And the Tiger’s getting modest with his tail”
That was a Republican account. The second was: