“I’m sorry, Martin. I am, honestly. Will you tell Dell that I——”
“I’ll tell her nothing but that you wouldn’t come. Nothing else matters. And I think you owe her that, at least.”
“But——”
The other man turned away, crossed the street, and walked back across the Square. Stroude could see him swinging on between the bushes, and the remembrance of another trail which Boyce Martin would climb rushed over him. More plainly than the crocus-bordered path to the White House shone the moonlit path up to the cabin on Pisgah where Dell Martin used to wait for his own coming, the cabin where she now waited for death. The memory of that way, twisting among laurel and rhododendrons, stabbed him more sharply than had Boyce Martin’s words; but with the old habit of setting aside disturbing thoughts, he tried to thrust the memory from his brain as he unlocked the door of his house.
A servant, coming forward at the sound of his key in the lock, gave him a message with a careful precision which bespoke respect for the executive management that directed his tasks. “Mrs. Stroude wishes you to be told, sir, that she is at the theatre and will see you when she comes in. And she made an appointment, sir, for Senator Manning and two other gentlemen to see you to-night on their way from the Pan-American dinner. She said it was very important.”
He thanked the man and went upstairs to the library, switching on light after light to dispel its shrouding gloom. He tried to read, but the pages of the periodicals he took up ran into dullness. He chewed his cigar savagely, finding it flavourless. He strove to concentrate on his impending interview with Manning and his companions, realizing its portent, but he could not focus his attitude. Impatiently he thrust away the work which always waited his attention on his homecoming—findings of committees, digests of newspaper editorials, confidential reports on public interests in various measures, letters from men who had constituted themselves his captains. He frowned at the framed photograph of his wife, the only decoration she had placed upon his table; and he grimaced at the portrait of himself which Rhoda had set above the immaculate mantel. He was weary with work, he told himself, crossing the room and flinging wide open the windows which looked down on the Square.
The thrill of the night wind, prematurely warm as it crossed the Potomac, and burdened with elusive odours of a Southern March, caught him unawares. For a moment he stood drinking deeply of the immortal beauty of the recurrent springtime. Memories he had thought long dead and buried went over him. Pictures more vivid than those on the walls framed themselves in the darkened greenery of the little park: a girl in a faded gingham dress waving him welcome on a hill road, a girl with eyes brighter than mountain stars telling him her love, flinging away all thought or care of herself, giving him everything and glorying in the gift, even to the last sacrifice of her departure from him. Not as she was now, Boyce Martin’s wife dying in that far-away little community of his native hills, but as she had been when she had defied their little world to come to him, Stroude saw her. In the thought of what she had been to him, he flung out his arms. “After all these years,” he muttered, “after all these years!” And as if drawn by a power stronger than his will, he crossed to the table, and picking up the telephone, called the information desk of the Union Station. “What time does the Mountain Mail on the C. & O. go out now?” he asked. “One o’clock? One-fifteen.” He hung up the receiver and saw again the photograph of his wife.
He studied it with suddenly arrested attention. What would she think of his desire to leave Washington at a time when, according to her fundamental ideas, his presence was imperative for the fulfillment of his ambition? Or was it her ambition? He gazed at the pictured countenance, seeing the determination of the uplifted chin, meeting the challenge in the steady eyes. Rhoda was certainly her father’s daughter. Old Peter Armond’s indomitable will and shrewdly calculating brain lived on in her. For the fourteen—or was it fifteen?—years of their marriage she had managed Stroude’s career as cleverly as ever her father had directed one of his lieutenants, and he had acknowledged his debt to her with a certain attitude of amusement. Now, facing the last triumphal stage of its development, he felt an angry distaste of Rhoda’s manœuvring. It might bring him, he conceded, to the goal but he wished he might have travelled a simpler path.
He had been an obscure Congressman of fiery political rectitude when he had met Rhoda Armond. She, and her group, and the circumstances the Armond connection had conjured for him, had made him into a statesman. Or was it only that they had made it possible for him to plant his own standards on the heights? At any rate, he owed her something, he thought. She was his wife, even though her attitude toward him was that of a director of destinies. She had given him, after all, what he had desired from her. She had made the upward road smooth, and she had dowered him with loyal faith in his ability. It wasn’t fair to compare her attitude toward him with Dell’s. He had never given to Rhoda what he had given Dell. Poor little Dell! But what good could he do her now by going to her? Twenty-five years would have changed her as they had changed him. They had had their day, and the sun of it had set long since. “I won’t go; I can’t,” he said, and turned back to the work on his desk, not looking up until his wife entered the room.
She came, a tall, consciously beautiful woman, bringing with her an aroma of power as subtle and as pervasive as the perfume of her toilet. She gave to Stroude the greeting of a perfunctory kiss on his brow, and stood off for his admiration. It was, however, not the product of her personality as much as her satisfaction in the work which struck him as he watched her. Rhoda’s thought of herself as well as of him was that of a sculptor of his masterpieces. Stroude accepted it with the affectionate tolerance of a long marital relationship, feeling somehow sorrier for Rhoda than she would ever feel for herself, since she would never know what she had missed from life. “I was playing your game to-night,” she told him.