T

Book II-The Revolution

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST LADY OF THE LAND

HE little house on the Capitol hill now became

the centre of fevered activity. This house,

selected by its grim master to become the executive mansion of the Nation, was perhaps the most modest structure ever chosen for such high uses.

It stood, a small, two-story brick building, in an unpretentious street. Seven windows opened on the front with black solid-panelled shutters. The front parlour was scantily furnished. A huge mirror covered one wall, and on the other hung a life-size oil portrait of Stoneman, and between the windows were a portrait of Washington Irving and a picture of a nun. Among his many charities he had always given liberally to an orphanage conducted by a Roman Catholic sisterhood.

The back parlour, whose single window looked out on a small garden, he had fitted up as a library, with leatherupholstered furniture, a large desk and table, and scattered on the mantel and about its walls were the photographs of his personal friends and a few costly prints. This room he used as his executive office, and no person was allowed to enter it without first stating his business or

presenting a petition to the tawny brown woman with restless eyes who sat in state in the front parlour and received his visitors. The books in their cases gave evidence of little use for many years, although their character indicated the tastes of a man of culture. His Pliny, Cæsar, Cicero, Tacitus, Sophocles, and Homer had evidently been read by a man who knew their beauties and loved them for their own sake.

This house was now the Mecca of the party in power and the storm-centre of the forces destined to shape the Nation's life. Senators, Representatives, politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign ministers, and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to the uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his house as the first lady of the land.

When Charles Sumner called, a curious thing happened. By a code agreed on between them, Lydia Brown touched an electric signal which informed the old Commoner of his appearance. Stoneman hobbled to the folding-doors and watched through the slight opening the manner in which the icy Senator greeted the negress whom he was compelled to meet thus as his social equal, though she was always particular to pose as the superior of all who bowed the knee to the old man whose house she kept.

Sumner at this time was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress. It was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at which Stoneman loved to laugh.

The Senator from Massachusetts had just made a speech in Boston expounding the "Equality of Man," yet he

could not endure personal contact with a negro. He would go secretly miles out of the way to avoid it.

Stoneman watched him slowly and daintily approach this negress and touch her jewelled hand gingerly with the tips of his classic fingers as if she were a toad. Convulsed, he scrambled back to his desk and hugged himself while he listened to the flow of Lydia's condescending patronage in the next room.

"This world's too good a thing to lose!" he chuckled. "I think I'll live always."

When Sumner left, the hour for dinner had arrived, and by special invitation two men dined with him.

On his right sat an army officer who had been dismissed from the service, a victim of the mania for gambling. His ruddy face, iron-gray hair, and jovial mien indicated that he enjoyed life in spite of troubles.

There were no clubs in Washington at this time except the regular gambling-houses, of which there were more than one hundred in full blast.

Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at Hall & Pemberton's Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for its famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned to like him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of such singular fluency that he quite captivated the old Commoner's imagination.

"Upon my soul, Howle," he declared soon after they met, "you made the mistake of your life going into the army. You're a born politician. You're what I call a natural liar, just as a horse is a pacer, a dog a setter. You

not let her go. Now that she is crushed and lies bleeding at our feet-you shall not make war on the wounded, the dying, and the dead!"

Again the lion gleamed in the calm gray eyes.

Ε

CHAPTER V

THE BATTLE OF LOVE

LSIE carried Ben Cameron's pardon to the anxious

mother and sister with her mind in a tumult.

The name on these fateful papers fascinated her. She read it again and again with a curious personal joy that she had saved a life!

She had entered on her work among the hospitals a bitter partisan of her father's school, with the simple idea that all Southerners were savage brutes. Yet as she had seen the wounded boys from the South among the men in blue, more and more she had forgotten the difference between them. They were so young, these slender, dark-haired ones from Dixie-so pitifully young! Some of them were only fifteen, and hundreds not over sixteen. A lad of fourteen she had kissed one day in sheer agony of pity for his loneliness.

The part her father was playing in the drama on which Ben Cameron's life had hung puzzled her. Was his the mysterious arm back of Stanton? Echoes of the fierce struggle with the President had floated through the halfopen door.

She had implicit faith in her father's patriotism and pride in his giant intellect. She knew that he was a king among men by divine right of inherent power. His sen