The Magnificent Adventure. Emerson Hough
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suttinly did warm old Arcturum a li’l bit dis mawnin’, Mistah Mehywethah!”
Samson patted the neck of the spirited animal, which tossed its head and turned an eye to its late rider.
“Yes, and see that you rub him well. Mind you, if Mr. Jefferson finds that his whitest handkerchief shows a sweat-mark from the horse’s hide he will cut off both your black ears for you, Samson—and very likely your head along with them. You know your master!” The secretary smiled kindly at the old black man.
“Yassah, yassah,” grinned Samson, who no more feared Mr. Jefferson than he did the young gentleman with whom he now spoke. “I just lookin’ at you comin’ down that path right now, and I say to myself, ‘Dar come a ridah!’ I sho’ did, Mistah Mehywethah!”
The young man answered the negro’s compliment with one of his rare smiles, then turned, with just a flick of his gloves on his breeches legs, and marched up the walk to the door of the mansion.
At the step he turned and paused, as he usually did, to take one look out over the unfinished wing of stone still in process of erection. On beyond, in the ragged village, he saw a few good mansion houses, many structures devoted to business, many jumbled huts of negroes, and here and there a public building in its early stages.
The great system of boulevards and parks and circles of the new American capital was not yet apparent from the place where Mr. Thomas Jefferson’s young secretary now stood. But the young man perhaps saw city and nation alike advanced in his vision; for he gazed long and lingeringly before he turned back at last and entered the door which the old house servant swung open for him.
His hat and crop and gloves he handed to this bowed old darky, Ben—another of Mr. Jefferson’s plantation servants whom he had brought to Washington with him. Then—for such was the simple fashion of the ménage, where Meriwether Lewis himself was one of the President’s family—he stepped to the door beyond and knocked lightly, entering as he did so.
The hour was early—he himself had not breakfasted, beyond his coffee at the mill—but, early as it was, he knew he would find at his desk the gentleman who now turned to him.
“Good morning, Mr. Jefferson,” said Meriwether Lewis, in the greeting which he always used.
“Good morning, my son,” said the other man, gently, in his invariable address to his secretary. “And how did Arcturus perform for you this morning?”
“Grandly, sir. He is a fine animal. I have never ridden a better.”
“I envy you. I wish I could find the time I once had for my horses.” He turned a whimsical glance at the piled desk before him. “If our new multigraph could write a dozen letters all at once—and on as many different themes, my son—we might perhaps get through. I vow, if I had the money, I would have a dozen secretaries—if I could find them!”
The President rose now and stood, a tall and striking figure of a man, over six feet in height, of clean-cut features, dark hazel eye, and sandy, almost auburn, hair. His long, thin legs were clad in close-fitting knee breeches of green velveteen, somewhat stained. His high-collared coat, rolling above the loosely-tied stock which girded his neck, was dingy brown in color, and lay in loose folds. He was one of the worst-clad men in Washington at that hour. His waistcoat, of red, was soiled and far from new, and his woolen stockings were covered with no better footwear than carpet slippers, badly down at the heel.
Yet Thomas Jefferson, even clad thus, seemed the great man that he was. Stooped though his shoulders were, his frame was so strong, his eye so clear and keen, though contemplative, that he did not look his years.
Here was a man, all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things—indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve—these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence of a personal world.
He stood careless, slipshod, at the side of a desk cluttered with a mass of maps, papers, letters in packets or spread open. There were writing implements here, scientific instruments of all sorts, long sheets of specifications, canceled drafts, pages of accounts—all the manifold impedimenta of a man in the full swing of business life. It might have been the desk of any mediocre man; yet on that desk lay the future of a people and the history of a world.
He stood, just a trifle stooped, smiling quizzically at the young man, yet half lovingly; for to no other being in the world did he ever give the confidence that he accorded Meriwether Lewis.
“I do not see how I could be President without you, Merne, my son,” said he, employing the familiar term that Meriwether Lewis had not elsewhere heard used, except by his mother. “Look what we must do today!”
The young secretary turned his own grave eye upon the cluttered desk; but it was not dread of the redoubtable tasks awaiting him that gave his face all the gravity it bore.
“Mr. Jefferson—” he began, but paused, for he could see now standing before him his friend, the man whom, of all in the world, he loved, and the man who believed in him and loved him.
“Yes, my son?”
“Your burden is grievous hard, and yet——”
“Yes, my son?”
But Meriwether Lewis could not speak further. He stood now, his jaws set hard, looking out of the window.
The older man came and gently laid a hand upon his shoulder.
“Come, come, my son,” said he, his own voice low and of a kindness it could assume at times. “You must not—you must not yield to this, I say. Shake off this melancholy which so obsesses you. I know whence it comes—your father gave it you, and you are not to blame; but you have more than your father’s strength to aid you. And you have me, your friend, who can understand.”
Lewis only turned on him an eye so full of anguish as caused the older man to knit his brow in deep concern.
“What is it, Merne?” he demanded. “Tell me. Ah, you cannot tell? I know! ’Tis the old melancholy, and something more, Merne, my boy. Tell me—ah, yes, it is a woman!”
The young man did not speak.
“I have often told all my young friends,” said Mr. Jefferson slowly, after a time, “that they should marry not later than twenty-three—it is wrong to cheat the years of life—and you approach thirty now, my son. Why linger? Listen to me. No young man may work at his best and have a woman’s face in his desk to haunt him. That will not do. We all have handicap enough without that.”
But still Meriwether could only look into the face of his superior.
“I know very well, my son,” the President continued. “I know it all. Put her out of your heart, my boy. Would you shame yourself—and her—and me?”
“No! Never would I do that, Mr. Jefferson, believe me. But now I must beg of you—please, sir, let me go soon—let it be at once!”
The older man stood looking at him for a time in silence, as he went on hurriedly:
“I must say good-by to you, best and noblest of men. Indeed, I have said good-by to—everything.”
“As you say, your case is hopeless?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, well, we have both been planning for our Western expedition these ten years, my son; so why should we fret if matters conspire to bring it about a trifle earlier than we planned?”
“I asked you when I was a boy to send me, but you could not then.”
“No, but instead I sent yonder maundering Michaux. He, Ledyard, and all the others failed me. They never saw the great vision. There it lies, unknown, tremendous—no man knows what—that new country. I have had to hide from