Albert seemed in an amiable mood as, divesting himself of his outer garments, he drew up a chair by the fire, offered Seth a cigar from his case and lighted one himself. He examined Seth’s face by the flame of the match, as the latter lighted his cigar, and appeared to be satisfied with the inspection.
“Sit down here,” he said pleasantly. “I want a good long talk with you. It was too bad to keep you waiting so long, but there was no help for it. I couldn’t see the people in New York that I wanted to see until to-day, and it was only by good fortune that I caught the train as it was. Then we were delayed on the road, of course. If an engineer on this one-horse line should ever get a train through on time I believe he’d have a fit, just from the shock of the thing. And then I had to wake up the man at the livery stable in Thessaly—fancy his being asleep at eight o’clock!—and he would only bring me as far as the foot of the hill, because he had been up to a dance all the previous night. But of course, in my position now, running for office, I couldn’t complain. Beside, I ought to be used to all these little delights of rural existence by this time.”
Albert stretched his feet out comfortably on the rail of the stove, and leaned back in his chair with an air of enjoyment. He had been growing very stout this past year, Seth noticed, and the bald spot on his crown had visibly spread. He seemed unwontedly good-natured too—a natural and proper accompaniment to increasing obesity.
“But all this has nothing to do with my asking you to come here, has it? Did Workman raise any objections to your coming?”
“No, of course not, after he read your letter.”
The lawyer smiled complacently: “I thought that letter would fetch him. Of course, my boy, the harshness of the letter was for effect on him, not on you. It simply gave you a chance to say you had got to come.”
Seth did not find himself wholly clear on this point, but he nodded assent. Albert looked at him, and seemed a trifle annoyed at having the conversation all to himself, but he went on after a moment’s pause, speaking now with good humored gravity:
“First of all, I ought to tell you how proud I have been of your fine progress on the Chronicle. I doubt if there is another young man of your age in the State who has done so much climbing in so short a time. I take a real satisfaction in thinking that you are my brother. I can’t tell you how often I say to myself: ‘Albert Fairchild, the best thing you ever did in your life, or ever will do, was to give that boy a chance.’”
This was gall and wormwood to the young man. He had almost succeeded in regaining the composure so abruptly scattered by Albert’s unexpected arrival. The fluttering agitation came back now, and brought with it a painful sense of shame and self-reproach as Albert’s words recalled the scene which his entrance had interrupted. Seth did not look his brother in the face, but murmured some commonplace of gratitude. He was glad that there was a red shade on the lamp; it might conceal his flush of humiliation.
Albert went on: “But you were not invited here so peremptorily just to hear this. Brotherly pride and affection are things that don’t need words—that can be taken for granted—are they not?”
Seth tried to smile, and said, “Yes, of course they are.”
“Well, youngster, I am taking them for granted in your case. Mind, as I said in my letter, I am not saying a word about gratitude. I don’t want the thing to be put on that footing at all. Brothers ought to be able to help each other, and all that, without lugging in the question of gratitude. I am talking to you as one man should to another who bears the same name, and was of the same mother. By George! poetry, isn’t it? Well, the point is this. The time has come when you can help me, help me immensely. I am not in this fight for myself alone. Personally I care very little about going to Congress. But I have got the family to consider, and I am in a position now where I can make a ten-strike for it. A good deal of it I have created myself. These countrymen up here in Dearborn County fancy they are shrewd politicians, but it has taken me, almost a novice in politics, less than two years to get the whole machinery right under my thumb. It’s in the blood, I tell you! There wasn’t another manager in this whole section that could hold a candle to the old Senator, in his day,—and if he could keep track of things now I imagine he’d admit that his grandson was no slouch.”
Albert chuckled quietly at the slang word, the expressiveness of which pleased him, and at the vision of the satisfaction of the departed ancestor which it suggested. He proceeded:
“I can’t tell you all my plans, but I am in a big combination. I have made use of my large connections as a lawyer in New York to arrange some things which would open your eyes if you knew them. It is all settled that I am going on to a Committee which will be worth while, I can tell you. And then, once started in the thing, with my grandfather’s name back of me, there is no telling where I may not climb. A name that has figured in the blue book as ours has is a tremendous power. The Republic derides heredity, but the public believes in it. It is human nature, my boy. And in this rehabilitation of the family name you have as much concern as I have—in fact more than I have—for you will enjoy even more than I shall the fame and wealth I am going to get out of this thing, for the family.”
“Where does the wealth come in, Albert? There is no money honestly to be made in politics.” Seth had forgotten his earlier embarrassment now, and the spirit of dispute was rising within him.
“My dear fellow,” said the elder brother, comfortably contemplating the rings of cigar smoke he was making, “to the wise there is money everywhere. The word ‘honesty’ in politics is a purely relative term, just as it is in your line, or in law, or in medicine. If we lawyers strictly graded our charges by the net value of our services to our clients, if doctors refused to make all calls upon patients that were not altogether necessary, and based their bills rigidly upon the actual good they had done—by George! the poor-houses would have to be enlarged. Take your own business, for instance, or I ought to call it a profession, too, I suppose. Are editors invariably candid with their readers, do you think? Do they always tell the disagreeable truth about people they make their money from? And don’t they have an open hand behind the back about the same as other folks do? Occasionally, I admit, an ass like our brother John does drift into the profession, and retains his childhood belief that the moon is made of green cheese. But I have noticed that such fellows as he, who run their papers on an exalted moral plane, generally come around to borrow money from the ungodly, toward the close of the year, to make their accounts balance. I am sorry to see that John and Ansdell have filled your head with all this nonsense. A newspaper man tearing his shirt in defense of financial fastidiousness in politics presents rather a comical spectacle, if you only knew it.”
“You have no right at all to say that!” Seth answered hotly. “I believe firmly that the newspaper men of this country, considering their influence and the great temptation to make money out of it, are as honest a body of men as you can find in America. This conventional talk about their venality is the cruellest kind of libel, and if you knew them as I do you wouldn’t lend yourself to circulating it.”
“Oh, I am not entirely without acquaintance in this white-winged profession of yours,” replied the lawyer, smilingly. “I know Mr. Mortimer Samboye, for example. I could tell you too, you confiding youngster, just his figure, and where the cheque, made payable to his wife, was cashed.”
“If you do know about Samboye, you know what I believe to be the one exception to the rule in the State. I don’t for a moment believe that there is another editor whom your people could have bought. It is an odious exception, to be sure, but exceptions prove the rule. If journalists and journals were in the market, as you and your machine friends seem to imagine, there would be no such widespread bolt against your machine ticket to-day.”
“Oh, you think so, do you?”
The lawyer was getting vexed. He stood up, thrust his hands deep into his trowsers pockets, and spoke with more sharpness than before.
“You think so! Why, man alive, this same d——d Chronicle of yours has been in the market since before you were born. I bet you to-day that Workman would rather plank out five thousand dollars from his own pocket than let me cross-examine him in the witness box on his recollections of the Chronicle’s record. Why, that is the very last paper in the State that has a title to throw stones! Do you want to know when this new reforming zeal of Workman’s was born? I can tell you. It was the day that another man (Dick Folts, if you wish names), was appointed to the Territorial Governorship that Workman wanted for his brother. So you thought it was only high morality and noble patriotic sentiments that ailed the Chronicle, did you? You never suspected that it was simply a bad case of brother—that it all happened because Samuel M. Workman of Toboggan was compelled to continue to adorn a private station? You think the world is run on kid-gloved, scriptural ethics? It reminds me of a novel I read here awhile ago. It set out to describe An American Politician—and in almost every scene in the book where he appeared, he was drinking tea in some lady’s drawing room, declaiming to the fair sex on how he was going to reform politics. He thought he was a deuce of a fellow, and so did the women and the author too. This politician was a good sample of all your reformers. I tell you, the men who go to afternoon teas in America, exert no more influence on American politics than—than a............