“Been there every Sunday regularly since you
went away,” said Jack. “I am not
one of the family in one way, and in another way I
am. Honestly, I have tried my best to cut you
out. Not that you have not played your game well
enough, but there never was a game played so well that
some other fellow could not win by coppering it.
So I coppered everything you did—played
it for just the reverse. No go—lost
even that way. And I thought you were
the most perennial fool of your age and generation.”
I checked as gently as I could a joviality which I
thought unsuited to the time. “Mr. Dandridge,”
said I to him, “you know the Baroness von Ritz?”
“Certainly! The particeps criminis
of our bungled wedding—of course I know
her!”
“I only want to say,” I remarked, “that
the Baroness von Ritz has that little shell clasp
now all for her own, and that I have her slipper again,
all for my own. So now, we three—no,
four—at last understand one another, do
we not? Jack, will you do two things for me?”
“All of them but two.”
“When the Baroness von Ritz insists on her intention
of leaving us—just at the height of all
our happiness—I want you to hand her to
her carriage. In the second place, I may need
you again—”
“Well, what would any one think of that!”
said Jack Dandridge.
I never knew when these two left us in the crowd.
I never said good-by to Helena von Ritz. I did
not catch that last look of her eye. I remember
her as she stood there that night, grave, sweet and
sad.
I turned to Elisabeth. There in the crash of
the reeds and brasses, the rise and fall of the sweet
and bitter conversation all around us, was the comedy
and the tragedy of life.
“Elisabeth,” I said to her, “are
you not ashamed?”
She looked me full in the eye. “No!”
she said, and smiled.
I have never seen a smile like Elisabeth’s.
“’Tis the Star Spangled
Banner; O, long may it wave,
O’er the land of the free, and the home
of the brave!”
—Francis
Scott Key.
On the night that Miss Elisabeth Churchill gave me
her hand and her heart for ever—for which
I have not yet ceased to thank God—there
began the guns of Palo Alto. Later, there came
the fields of Monterey, Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo,
Contreras, Cherubusco, Molino del Rey—at
last the guns sounded at the gate of the old City
of Mexico itself. Some of that fighting I myself
saw; but much of the time I was employed in that manner
of special work which had engaged me for the last few
years. It was through Mr. Calhoun’s agency
that I reached a certain importance in these matters;
and so I was chosen as the commissioner to negotiate
a peace with Mexico.
