The Story of a Mine

“Well, I’m blanked, but this gets me.” (The speaker was a Territorial delegate.)

“At his time o’ life, too, lookin’ over pictures with a gal young enough to be his grandchild.” (This from a venerable official, since suspected of various erotic irregularities.)

“She don’t handsome any.” (The honorable member from Dakota.)

“This accounts for his protracted silence during the sessions.” (A serious colleague from the Senator’s own State.)

“Oh, blank it all!” (Omnes.)

Four went home to tell their wives. There are few things more touching in the matrimonial compact than the superb frankness with which each confides to each the various irregularities of their friends. It is upon these sacred confidences that the firm foundations of marriage rest unshaken.

Of course the objects of this comment, at least ONE of them, were quite oblivious. “I trust,” said Carmen, timidly, when they had for the fourth time regarded in rapt admiration an abominable something by some Dutch wood-chopper, “I trust I am not keeping you from your great friends:”—her pretty eyelids were cast down in tremulous distress:—“I should never forgive myself. Perhaps it is important business of the State?”

“Oh, dear, no! THEY will come again,—it’s THEIR business.”

The Senator meant it kindly. It was as near the perilous edge of a compliment as your average cultivated Boston man ever ventures, and Carmen picked it up, femininely, by its sentimental end. “And I suppose I shall not trouble you again?”

“I shall always be proud to place the portfolio at your disposal. Command me at any time,” said the Senator, with dignity.

“You are kind. You are good,” said Carmen, “and I—I’m but,—look you,—only a poor girl from California, that you know not.”

“Pardon me, I know your country well.” And indeed he could have told her the exact number of bushels of wheat to the acre in her own county of Monterey, its voting population, its political bias. Yet of the more important product before him, after the manner of book-read men, he knew nothing.

Carmen was astonished, but respectful. It transpired presently that she was not aware of the rapid growth of the silk worm in her own district, knew nothing of the Chinese question, and very little of the American mining laws. Upon these questions the Senator enlightened her fully. “Your name is historic, by the way,” he said pleasantly. “There was a Knight of Alcantara, a ‘De Haro,’ one of the emigrants with Las Casas.”

Carmen nodded her head quickly, “Yes; my great-great-great-g-r-e-a-t grandfather!”

The Senator stared.

“Oh, yes. I am the niece of Victor Castro, who married my father’s sister.”

“The Victor Castro of the ‘Blue Mass’ mine?” asked the Senator abruptly.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

Had the Senator been of the Gashwiler type, he would have expressed himself, after the average masculine fashion, by a long-drawn whistle. But his only perceptible appreciation of a sudden astonishment and suspicion in his mind was a lowering of the social thermometer of the room so decided that poor Carmen looked up innocently, chilled, and drew her shawl closer around her shoulders.

“I have something more to ask,” said Carmen, hanging her head,—“it is a great, oh, a very great favor.”

The Senator had retreated behind his bastion of books again, and was visibly preparing for an assault. He saw it all now. He had been, in some vague way, deluded. He had given confidential audience to the niece of one of the Great Claimants before Congress. The inevitable axe had come to the grindstone. What might not this woman dare ask of him? He was the more implacable that he felt he had already been prepossessed—and honestly prepossessed—in her favor. He was angry with her for having pleased him. Under the icy polish of his manner there were certain Puritan callosities caused by early straight-lacing. He was not yet quite free from his ancestor’s cheerful ethics that Nature, as represented by an Impulse, was as much to be restrained as Order represented by a Quaker.

Without apparently noticing his manner, Carmen went on, with a certain potential freedom of style, gesture, and manner scarcely to be indicated in her mere words. “You know, then, I am of Spanish blood, and that, what was my adopted country, our motto was, ‘God and Liberty.’ It was of you, sir,—the great Emancipator,—the apostle of that Liberty,—the friend of the down-trodden and oppressed,—that I, as a child, first knew. In the histories of this great country I have read of you, I have learned your orations. I have longed to hear you in your own pulpit deliver the creed of my ancestors. To hear you, of yourself, speak, ah! Madre de Dios! what shall I say,—speak the oration eloquent,—to make the—what you call—the debate, that is what I have for so long hoped. Eh! Pardon,—you are thinking me foolish,—wild, eh?—a small child,—eh?”

Becoming more and more dialectical as she went on, she said suddenly, “I have you of myself offended. You are mad of me as a bold, bad child? It is so?”

The Senator, as visibly becoming limp and weak again behind his entrenchments, managed to say, “Oh, no!” then, “really!” and finally, “Tha-a-nks!”

“I am here but for a day. I return to California in a day, as it were to-morrow. I shall never, never hear you speak in your place in the Capitol of this great country?”

The Senator said hastily that he feared—he in fact was convinced—that his duty during this session was required more at his desk, in the committee work, than in speaking, &c., &c.

“Ah,” said Carmen sadly, “it is true, then, all this that I have heard. It is true that what they have told me,—that you have given up the great party,—that your voice is not longer heard in the old—what you call this—eh—the old ISSUES?”

“If any one has told you that, Miss De Haro,” responded the Senator sharply, “he has spoken foolishly. You have been misinformed. May I ask who—”

“Ah!” said Carmen, “I know not! It is in the air! I am a stranger. Perhaps I am deceived. But it is of all. I say to them, When shall I hear him speak? I go day after day to the Capitol, I watch him,—the great Emancipator,—but it is of business, eh?—it is the claim of that one, it is the tax, eh? it is the impost, it is the post-office, but it is the great speech of human rights—never, NEVER. I say, ‘How arrives all this?’ And some say, and shake their heads, ‘never again he speaks.’ He is what you call ‘played—yes, it is so, eh?—played out.’ I know it not,—it is a word from Bos-ton, perhaps? They say he has—eh, I speak not the English well—the party he has shaken, ‘shook,’—yes,—he has the party ‘shaken,’ eh? It is right,—it is the language of Bos-ton, eh?”

“Permit me to say, Miss De Haro,” returned the Senator, rising with some asperity, “that you seem to have been unfortunate in your selection of acquaintances, and still more so in your ideas of the derivations of the English tongue. The—er—the—er—expressions you have quoted are not common to Boston, but emanate, I believe, from the West.”

Carmen de Haro contritely buried everything but her black eyes in her shawl.

“No one,” he continued, more gently, sitting down again, “has the right to forecast from my past what I intend to do in the future, or designate the means I may choose to serve the principles I hold or the party I represent. Those are MY functions. At the same time, should occasion—or opportunity—for we are within a day or two of the close of the Session—”

“Yes,” interrupted Carmen, sadly, “I see,—it will be some business, some claim, something for somebody,—ah! Madre de Dios,—you will not speak, and I—”

“When do you think of returning?” asked the Senator, with grave politeness; “when are we to lose you?”

“I shall stay to the last,—to the end of the Session,” said Carmen. “And NOW I shall go.” She got up and pulled her shawl viciously over her shoulders, with a pretty pettishness, perhaps the most feminine thing she had done that evening. Possibly, the most genuine.

The Senator smiled affably: “You do not deserve to be disappointed in either case; but it is later than you imagine; let me help you on the shorter distance in my carriage; it is at the door.”

He accompanied her gravely to the carriage. As it rolled away, she buried her little figure in its ample cushions and chuckled to herself, albeit a little hysterically. When she had reached her destination, she found herself crying, and hastily, and somewhat angrily, dried her eyes as she drew up at the door of her lodgings.

“How have you prospered?” asked Mr. Harlowe, of counsel for Royal Thatcher, as he gallantly assisted her from the carriage. “I have been waiting here for two hours; your interview must have been prolonged,—that was a good sign.”

“Don’t ask me now,” said Carmen, a little savagely, “I’m worn out and tired.”

Mr. Harlowe bowed. “I trust you will be better to-morrow, for we expect our friend, Mr. Thatcher.”

Carmen’s brown cheek flushed slightly. “He should have been here before. Where is he? What was he doing?”

“He was snowed up on the plains. He is coming as fast as steam can carry him; but he may be too late.”

Carmen did not reply.

The lawyer lingered. “How did you find the great New-England Senator?” he asked with a slight professional levity.

Carmen was tired, Carmen was worried, Carmen was a little self-reproachful, and she kindled easily. Consequently she said icily:

“I found him A GENTLEMAN!”

CHAPTER XV

HOW IT BECAME UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The closing of the – Congress was not unlike the closing of the several preceding Congresses. There was the same unbusiness-like, impractical haste; the same hurried, unjust, and utterly inadequate adjustment of unfinished, ill-digested business, that would not have been tolerated for a moment by the sovereign people in any private interest they controlled. There were frauds rushed through; there were long-suffering, righteous demands shelved; there were honest, unpaid debts dishonored by scant appropriations; there were closing scenes which only the saving sense of American humor kept from being utterly vile. The actors, the legislators themselves, knew it, and laughed at it; the commentators, the Press, knew it and laughed at it; the audience, the great American people, knew it and laughed at it. And nobody for an instant conceived that it ever, under any circumstances, might be otherwise.

The claim of Roscommon was among the Unfinished Business. The claimant himself, haggard, pathetic, importunate, and obstinate, was among the Unfinished Business. Various Congressmen, more or less interested in the success of the claim, were among the Unfinished Business. The member from Fresno, who had changed his derringer for a speech against the claimant, was among the Unfinished Business. The gifted Gashwiler, uneasy in his soul over certain other Unfinished Business in the shape of his missing letters, but dropping oil and honey as he mingled with his brothers, was King of Misrule and Lord of the Unfinished Business. Pretty Mrs. Hopkinson, prudently escorted by her husband, but imprudently ogled by admiring Congressmen, lent the charm of her presence to the finishing of Unfinished Business. One or two editors, who had dreams of a finished financial business, arising out of Unfinished Business, were there also, like ancient bards, to record with paean or threnody the completion of Unfinished Business. Various unclean birds, scenting carrion in Unfinished Business, hovered in the halls or roosted in the Lobby.

The lower house, under the tutelage of the gifted Gashwiler, drank deeply of Roscommon and his intoxicating claim, and passed the half-empty bottle to the Senate as Unfinished Business. But, alas! in the very rush, and storm, and tempest of the unfinishing business, an unlooked-for interruption arose in the person of a great Senator whose power none could oppose, whose right to free and extended utterance at all times none could gainsay. A claim for poultry, violently seized by the army of Sherman during his march through Georgia, from the hen-coop of an alleged loyal Irishman, opened a constitutional question, and with it the lips of the great Senator.

For seven hours he spoke eloquently, earnestly, convincingly. For seven hours the old issues of party and policy were severally taken up and dismissed in the old forcible rhetoric that had early made him famous. Interruptions from other Senators, now forgetful of Unfinished Business, and wild with reanimated party zeal; interruptions from certain Senators mindful of Unfinished Business, and unable to pass the Roscommon bottle, only spurred him to fresh exertion. The tocsin sounded in the Senate was heard in the lower house. Highly-excited members congregated at the doors of the Senate, and left Unfinished Business to take care of itself.

Left to itself for seven hours, Unfinished Business gnashed its false teeth and tore its wig in impotent fury in corridor and hall. For seven hours the gifted Gashwiler had continued the manufacture of oil and honey, whose sweetness, however, was slowly palling upon the congressional lip; for seven hours Roscommon and friends beat with impatient feet the lobby, and shook fists, more or less discolored, at the distinguished Senator. For seven hours the one or two editors were obliged to sit and calmly compliment the great speech which that night flashed over the wires of a continent with the old electric thrill. And, worse than all, they were obliged to record with it the closing of the – Congress, with more than the usual amount of Unfinished Business.

A little group of friends surrounded the great Senator with hymns of praise and congratulations. Old adversaries saluted him courteously as they passed by with the respect of strong men. A little woman with a shawl drawn over her shoulders, and held with one small brown hand, approached him timidly:

“I speak not the English well,” she said gently, “but I have read much. I have read in the plays of your Shakspeare. I would like to say to you the words of Rosalind to Orlando when he did fight: ‘Sir you have wrestled well, and have overthrown more than your enemies.’” And with these words she was gone.

Yet not so quickly but that pretty Mrs. Hopkinson, coming,—as Victrix always comes to Victor, to thank the great Senator, albeit the faces of her escorts were shrouded in gloom,—saw the shawled figure disappear.

“There,” she said, pinching Wiles mischievously, “there! that’s the woman you were afraid of. Look at her. Look at that dress. Ah, Heavens! look at that shawl. Didn’t I tell you she had no style?”

“Who is she?” said Wiles sullenly.

“Carmen de Haro, of course,” said the lady vivaciously. “What are you hurrying away so for? You’re absolutely pulling me along.”

Mr. Wiles had just caught sight of the travel-worn face of Royal Thatcher among the crowd that thronged the stair-case. Thatcher appeared pale and distrait: Mr. Harlowe, his counsel, at his side, rallied him.

“No one would think you had just got a new lease of your property, and escaped a great swindle. What’s the matter with you? Miss De Haro passed us just now. It was she who spoke to the Senator. Why did you not recognize her?”

“I was thinking,” said Thatcher gloomily.

“Well, you take things coolly! And certainly you are not very demonstrative towards the woman who saved you to-day. For, as sure as you live, it was she who drew that speech out of the Senator.”

Thatcher did not reply, but moved away. He HAD noticed Carmen de Haro, and was about to greet her with mingled pleasure and embarrassment. But he had heard her compliment to the Senator, and this strong, preoccupied, automatic man, who only ten days before had no thought beyond his property, was now thinking more of that compliment to another than of his success; and was beginning to hate the Senator who had saved him, the lawyer who stood beside him, and even the little figure that had tripped down the steps unconscious of him.

CHAPTER XVI

AND WHO FORGOT IT

It was somewhat inconsistent with Royal Thatcher’s embarrassment and sensitiveness that he should, on leaving the Capitol, order a carriage and drive directly to the lodgings of Miss De Haro. That on finding she was not at home, he should become again sulky and suspicious, and even be ashamed of the honest impulse that led him there, was, I suppose, manlike and natural. He felt that he had done all the courtesy required; he had promptly answered her dispatch with his presence. If she chose to be absent at such a moment, HE had at least done HIS duty. In short, there was scarcely any absurdity of the imagination which this once practical man did not permit himself to indulge in, yet always with a certain consciousness that he was allowing his feelings to run away with him,—a fact that did not tend to make him better humored, and rather inclined him to place the responsibility of the elopement on somebody else. If Miss De Haro had been home, &c. &c., and not going into ecstasies over speeches, &c. &c., and had attended to her business, i. e., being exactly what he had supposed her to be,—all this would not have happened.

I am aware that this will not heighten the reader’s respect for my hero. But I fancy that the imperceptible progress of a sincere passion in the matured strong man is apt to be marked with even more than the usual haste and absurdity of callous youth.

The fever that runs riot in the veins of the robust is apt to pass your ailing weakling by. Possibly there may be some immunity in inoculation. It is Lothario who is always self-possessed and does and says the right thing, while poor honest Coelebs becomes ridiculous with genuine emotion.

He rejoined his lawyer in no very gracious mood. The chambers occupied by Mr. Harlowe were in the basement of a private dwelling once occupied and made historic by an Honorable Somebody, who, however, was remembered only by the landlord and the last tenant. There were various shelves in the walls divided into compartments, sarcastically known as “pigeon holes,” in which the dove of peace had never rested, but which still perpetuated, in their legends, the feuds and animosities of suitors now but common dust together. There was a portrait, apparently of a cherub, which on nearer inspection turned out to be a famous English Lord Chancellor in his flowing wig.

There were books with dreary, unenlivening titles,—egotistic always, as recording Smith’s opinions on this, and Jones’s commentaries on that. There was a hand bill tacked on the wall, which at first offered hilarious suggestions of a circus or a steamboat excursion, but which turned out only to be a sheriff’s sale. There were several oddly-shaped packages in newspaper wrappings, mysterious and awful in dark corners, that might have contained forgotten law papers or the previous week’s washing of the eminent counsel. There were one or two newspapers, which at first offered entertaining prospects to the waiting client, but always proved to be a law record or a Supreme Court decision. There was the bust of a late distinguished jurist, which apparently had never been dusted since he himself became dust, and had already grown a perceptibly dusty moustache on his severely-judicial upper lip. It was a cheerless place in the sunshine of day; at night, when it ought, by every suggestion of its dusty past, to have been left to the vengeful ghosts, the greater part of whose hopes and passions were recorded and gathered there; when in the dark the dead hands of forgotten men were stretched from their dusty graves to fumble once more for their old title deeds; at night, when it was lit up by flaring gaslight, the hollow mockery of this dissipation was so apparent that people in the streets, looking through the illuminated windows, felt as if the privacy of a family vault had been intruded upon by body-snatchers.

Royal Thatcher glanced around the room, took in all its dreary suggestions in a half-weary, half-indifferent sort of way, and dropped into the lawyer’s own revolving chair as that gentleman entered from the adjacent room.

“Well, you got back soon, I see,” said Harlowe briskly.

“Yes,” said his client, without looking up, and with this notable distinction between himself and all other previous clients, that he seemed absolutely less interested than the lawyer. “Yes, I’m here; and, upon my soul, I don’t exactly know why.”

“You told me of certain papers you had discovered,” said the lawyer suggestively.

“Oh, yes,” returned Thatcher with a slight yawn. “I’ve got here some papers somewhere;”—he began to feel in his coat pocket languidly;—“but, by the way, this is a rather dreary and God-forsaken sort of place! Let’s go up to Welker’s, and you can look at them over a bottle of champagne.”

“After I’ve looked at them, I’ve something to show you, myself,” said Harlowe; “and as for the champagne, we’ll have that in the other room, by and by. At present I want to have my head clear, and yours too,—if you’ll oblige me by becoming sufficiently interested in your own affairs to talk to me about them.”

Thatcher was gazing abstractedly at the fire. He started. “I dare say,” he began, “I’m not very interesting; yet it’s possible that my affairs have taken up a little too much of my time. However,—” he stopped, took from his pocket an envelope, and threw it on the desk,—“there are some papers. I don’t know what value they may be; that is for you to determine. I don’t know that I’ve any legal right to their possession,—that is for you to say, too. They came to me in a queer way. On the overland journey here I lost my bag, containing my few traps and some letters and papers ‘of no value,’ as the advertisements say, ‘to any but the owner.’ Well, the bag was lost, but the stage driver declares that it was stolen by a fellow-passenger,—a man by the name of Giles, or Stiles, or Piles—”

“Wiles,” said Harlowe earnestly.

“Yes,” continued Thatcher, suppressing a yawn; “yes, I guess you’re right,—Wiles. Well, the stage driver, finally believing this, goes to work and quietly and unostentatiously steals—I say, have you got a cigar?”

“I’ll get you one.”

Harlowe disappeared in the adjoining room. Thatcher dragged Harlowe’s heavy, revolving desk chair, which never before had been removed from its sacred position, to the fire, and began to poke the coals abstractedly.

Harlowe reappeared with cigars and matches. Thatcher lit one mechanically, and said, between the pulls:

“Do you—ever—talk—to yourself?”

“No!—why?”

“I thought I heard your voice just now in the other room. Anyhow, this is an awful spooky place. If I stayed here alone half an hour, I’d fancy that the Lord Chancellor up there would step down in his robes, out of his frame, to keep me company.”

“Nonsense! When I’m busy, I often sit here and write until after midnight. It’s so quiet!”

“D—mnably so!”

“Well, to go back to the papers. Somebody stole your bag, or you lost it. YOU stole—”

“The driver stole,” suggested Thatcher, so languidly that it could hardly be called an interruption.

“Well, we’ll say the driver stole, and passed over to you as his accomplice, confederate, or receiver, certain papers belonging—”

“See here, Harlowe, I don’t feel like joking in a ghostly law office after midnight. Here are your facts. Yuba Bill, the driver, stole a bag from this passenger, Wiles, or Smiles, and handed it to me to insure the return of my own. I found in it some papers concerning my case. There they are. Do with them what you like.”

Thatcher turned his eyes again abstractedly to the fire.

Harlowe took out the first paper:

“A-w, this seems to be a telegram. Yes, eh? ‘Come to Washington at once.—Carmen de Haro.’”

Thatcher started, blushed like a girl, and hurriedly reached for the paper.

“Nonsense. That’s a mistake. A dispatch I mislaid in the envelope.”

“I see,” said the lawyer dryly.

“I thought I had torn it up,” continued Thatcher, after an awkward pause. I regret to say that here that usually truthful man elaborated a fiction. He had consulted it a dozen times a day on the journey, and it was quite worn in its enfoldings. Harlowe’s quick eye had noticed this, but he speedily became interested and absorbed in the other papers. Thatcher lapsed into contemplation of the fire.

“Well,” said Harlowe, finally turning to his client, “here’s enough to unseat Gashwiler, or close his mouth. As to the rest, it’s good reading—but I needn’t tell you—no LEGAL evidence. But it’s proof enough to stop them from ever trying it again,—when the existence of this record is made known. Bribery is a hard thing to fix on a man; the only witness is naturally particeps criminis;—but it would not be easy for them to explain away this rascal’s record. One or two things I don’t understand: What’s this opposite the Hon. X’s name, ‘Took the medicine nicely, and feels better?’ and here, just in the margin, after Y’s, ‘Must be labored with?’”