“Is General Jackson at home?” he asked. “I must see him to-night, at once. Tell him so.”
The servant bowed, and silently ushered the late arrival into the deserted banquet room.
His keen eye took in the surroundings with a half-amused, half-bewildered expression. The banquet table, despoiled of its beauty, the half-emptied wine glasses, the broken bits of cake, crumbled by beauty’s fair fingers; the odor of dying roses, smothered in their bloom, mingled with the scent of the undrunk wine; all told the story of revelry and its inevitable destiny.
The stranger crossed the room to the pillaged sideboard, and with the air of a man thoroughly at home, lifted a decanter and poured a tumbler full of wine, lifted it carelessly to his lips, drained it, and with the emptied vessel still in his hand turned to meet the master of the house.
He still wore the finery in which he had decked himself for the ball. In one hand he carried his pipe, over which he had been dozing with Rachel. But the eye was alive now; the quick, eagle eye. The ball had become a thing of the past. And as he stood for one brief moment in the doorway, himself, in his gala dress, seemed but another illustration of that indomitable grimness which hangs about a forsaken banquet room. At that moment the stranger lifted his face. It was a face stamped with the cunning of a fox, the courage of a lion, the simplicity of a child, the ambition of a god.
The master met the cool, fixed eye, and into his own leaped the smothered fire of outraged dignity. He lifted his hand, as if to curse.
“Do you know, sir, that the world is branding you a traitor? And that Felix Grundy refused to drink your health in my house to-night?”
A sneer flitted across the handsome features, but the low, rich voice only said, “Let him.”
It was the voice of Aaron Burr.