The room was small, and so well filled with furniture that there seemed little s.p.a.ce for the long limbs of Alfred Irons, who, however, had contrived to make himself comfortable by the aid of various cushions covered with bright-colored sateens. He had lighted a cigar without thinking it necessary to ask leave, and had even made himself more easy by putting one leg across a low chair.
Mrs. Sampson was fully aware that in her struggles with life she had sometimes provoked laughter, often disapproval, and now and then given rise to positive scandal, yet she was still accustomed to at least a fair semblance of respect from the men who came to see her; women, it is to be noted, being not often seen within her walls, since those who were willing to come she did not care to receive, and those whom she invited seldom set her name down on their calling lists. Among themselves, at the clubs or elsewhere, the men speculated more or less coa.r.s.ely and unfeelingly upon the foundations of the numerous scandals which had from time to time blossomed like brilliant and life-sapping parasites upon the tree of Mrs. Sampson"s reputation. Her name, either spoken boldly or too broadly hinted at to be misunderstood, adorned many a racy tale told in smoking-rooms after good dinners, or when the hours had grown small in more senses than one; and her career was made to point more than one moral drawn for the benefit of the sisters and daughters of the men who joked and sneered concerning her.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was born of a good old Boston family, to which she clung with a desperate clutch which her relatives ignored so far as with dignity they were able. Her father had been a lawyer of reputation, and his portrait was still displayed prominently in the daughter"s parlor, a circ.u.mstance which had given Chauncy Wilson opportunity for a jest rather clever than elegant concerning Judge Welsh"s well-known fondness in life for watching the progress of criminal cases. Of her husband, the late Mr. Sampson, there was very little said, and not much was known beyond the fact that having run away from school to marry him, Amanda had shared a shady and it was whispered rather disreputable existence for three years, at the end of which she was fortunately relieved from the matrimonial net by his timely decease; an event of which she sometimes spoke to her more intimate male friends with undisguised satisfaction.
It might not have been easy to tell how far Mrs. Sampson"s subsequent career was forced upon her by circ.u.mstances, and how far it was the result of her own choice. She always represented herself as the victim of a hard fate: but her relatives, one of whom was Mr. Staggchase, declared that Amanda had no capabilities of respectability in her composition. Mrs. Staggchase, upon whom marriage had conferred the privilege of expressing her mind with the freedom of one of the family, while it happily spared her from the responsibility of an actual relative, declared that everything had been done to keep Mrs. Sampson within the bounds of propriety, but all in vain. The income from the estate of the late Judge Welsh was not large, and as Mrs. Sampson"s tastes, especially in dress, were somewhat expensive, it followed that she was often reduced to devices for increasing her bank account which were generally adroit and curious, but often not of a character to be openly boasted of. She had had some business transactions already with Irons, who was at this moment laying out the plan of work in a fresh operation where she might make herself useful.
"Of course," he said, "all the men from Wachusett way are on our side, and the men from the other part of the county will be against us."
"What other part of the county?" Mrs. Sampson inquired.
She had laid down her sewing and was listening intently, with a look of keen intelligence, the tips of her long and rather large fingers pressed closely together. She hated Irons devoutly, but his scheme meant financial profit to her, and various bills were troublesomely overdue.
"That"s what we have to discover. When we find out, I"ll let you know.
The other syndicate have been deucedly close-mouthed about their plans, but of course they can"t keep dark a great while longer; and in any case I am on the track of the information."
"And what," Mrs. Sampson asked, with an air of innocence too obviously artificial, "am I expected to do?"
Irons glanced at her with a wink, taking in her plain, vivacious face with its sparkling eyes, her fine figure, and stylish, if somewhat too p.r.o.nounced, presence.
"The old game," he said. "Show a tender and sisterly interest in a few of the country members. There are one or two men from the western part of the state that we want to capture at once before the thing is started. Do you know anybody in that region?"
"My father, Judge Welsh," she answered with an amusing touch amid her frankness of the air with which she always mentioned her ancestors in society, "had numerous connections there."
"Ah, that is good," the visitor responded, with evident satisfaction.
He knocked the ashes from his cigar into a tiny bronze which Mrs.
Sampson had put within his reach when he showed signs of throwing them upon the carpet, and then plunged into a discussion of the members of the State Legislature with whom it was possible for Mrs. Sampson to establish an acquaintance, and whom she was likely to be able to influence. He drew from his pocket a list of men, and with quite as business-like an air his hostess produced a similar doc.u.ment from her desk; the pair being soon deep in consultation over the schedules.
Lobbying in Ma.s.sachusetts is not by the public recognized as a well-organized business, and yet any one who desires to secure personal influence to aid or to hinder legislation is seldom at a loss to find people well experienced in such work. The lobby to the eyes of the public, moreover, consists entirely of men, if one excepts the group of foolish intriguers in favor of the vagaries of proposed law-making by which it is supposed the distinctions of s.e.x may be abolished. There are in the city, however, women who by no means lack experience in manipulating the votes of country members, and who are but too willing to sell their services to whoever can make it to their pecuniary interest to favor a bill.
Mrs. Amanda Welsh Sampson was extremely adroit and careful in concealing her connection with the law-making of the State. She was in evidence in most public places; at the theatres, the concert halls, the County Club races, and at every fashionable entertainment to which her cleverness could procure her admission, her conspicuous figure, made more prominent by a certain indefinable loudness of style, a marked dash of manner, and gowns in a taste rather daring than refined, was too conspicuous to be overlooked. Yet it is doubtful if she had ever been up the steps leading to the gilded-domed capitol in her life. She went about much; and the unchaperoned life which in virtue of her widowhood and her love of freedom she chose to lead, the width of the circle over which her acquaintance extended, allowed her to carry on her work un.o.bserved; so that while a great variety of stories of one sort of queerness or another were told of Mrs. Sampson, this particular side of her career was almost unknown.
"There is Mr. Greenfield," Mrs. Sampson observed, tapping her teeth with her pencil. "His wife was a cousin of my husband. I don"t know them at all, but I could easily ask him to come and see me. It would be only proper to offer him the hospitality of the town, you know."
"Good!" cried Mr. Irons, slapping his open palm down on his knee.
"Greenfield"s the hardest nut we"ve got to crack in the whole business.
He"s the sort of man you can"t talk to on a square business basis.
You"ve got to mince things d.a.m.ned fine with him, and he"s chairman of the Railroad Committee, you know. He"d have a tremendous amount of influence, anyway."
"He"s a little tin G.o.d at Fentonville, I"ve heard," Mrs. Sampson responded, laughing in the mechanical way which was her habit. "When he"s at home they say the sun doesn"t rise there till he"s given his permission."
Irons in his excitement took his leg down from its supporting chair and sat up straight, dropping his list of members to the floor and clasping his knees with his heavy hands.
"Now look here, old lady," he said, "here"s a chance to show your mettle. If you"ll manage Greenfield, I"ll run the rest of the hayseed crowd, and I"ll make it something handsomer than you ever had in your life."
The woman smiled a smile of greed and cunning.
"I"ll take care of him," she said. "And he shall never know he has been taken care of either."
Irons laughed with coa.r.s.e jocoseness.
"A man has very little chance that falls into your clutches," he observed, "but in this particular case you"ve got a heavy contract on hand. Greenfield"s got his price, of course, like everybody else, but I"m hanged if I know what it is. If you offered him tin he"d simply fly out on the whole thing and n.o.body could hold him. There isn"t any particular pull in politics on him. This new-fashioned independence has knocked all that to pieces; and Greenfield is an Independent from the word go. I don"t know what you"re to bait your hook with, unless it"s your lovely self."
Mrs. Sampson began a laugh, and then recovering herself, she frowned.
"Don"t be personal," she said. "I won"t stand it."
She began to feel that the circ.u.mstances were such as to make her important to her caller"s schemes, and her air by insensible degrees became more a.s.sured and less subservient. She knew her man, and she was prepared for his becoming proportionately more respectful. He dusted a little heap of ashes from the small table beside him and scattered them with his foot, in a well-meant attempt to cover the traces of his previous untidiness. She watched him with a covert sneer.
"Even so difficult a problem as that," she said, with a slight toss of the head, a bit of antique coquetry which impressed him with a new sense of her thorough self-possession, and imposed itself upon his untrained mind as the air of a true woman of the world; "I fancy I can solve. Leave him to me. I"ll find out what can be done with him."
"If he can be got hold of," Irons remarked, reflectively, "he will carry the whole thing through. They"d believe him up at Feltonville if he told them it was right to walk backward and vote to give their incomes to the temperance cranks."
He rose to go as he spoke, unconsciously a.s.suming with the overcoat he put on that air of stiffness and immaculate propriety which he wore always in public. He seldom allowed himself the undignified freedom which marked his intercourse with Mrs. Sampson, and he liked the rest he found in being for a time his vulgar, ill-bred self with no restraints of artificial manner.
"Well, good afternoon," he said, extending his large hand, into which she laid hers with a certain faint air of condescension. "I"ve got to go to a meeting of the committee on the new statue. They"ve got a new fellow they are trying to push in, a young unlicked cub that Peter Calvin"s running. I"ll let you know anything that"s for our advantage."
When he was gone, Mrs. Sampson produced a brush and a dustpan from behind the books on a whatnot and carefully collected the scattered ashes of his cigar.
"Vulgar old brute!" she muttered. "To think of my having to clean up after him; his mother was my grandmother"s laundress."
Then she smiled contemptuously, and added by way of self-consolation,--
"But it will all count in the bill, Al Irons."
X
THE BITTER PAST.
All"s Well That Ends Well; v.--3.
"Do you see much of Mrs. Herman?" Helen Greyson asked of Edith Fenton, as they sat at luncheon together in the latter"s pretty dining-room.
"Why, no," was the somewhat hesitating answer. "I really see very little of her. The fact is we have so little common ground to meet on.
--You know Arthur says I am dreadfully narrow, and I am sometimes afraid he is right. I have tried to know her, but of course I couldn"t take her into society. She wouldn"t enjoy it, and she wouldn"t feel at home, even if she"d go with me."
Helen smiled with mingled amus.e.m.e.nt and wistfulness.
"No," she responded. "I can"t exactly fancy Ninitta in society. She"d be quite out of her element. My master in Rome, Flammenti, had a way of saying a thing was like the pope at a dancing-party, and I fancy Ninitta at an afternoon tea would be hardly less out of place."
"But she must be very lonely," Edith said, stirring her coffee meditatively. "She used to have a few Italians come to see her; people she met that time she ran away, you remember, and we brought her home, but they don"t come now."
"Why not?"
Edith smiled and raised her eyebrows.