When he asked this question she looked up at him with an expression of indignant pride, as she spoke:
“I say again, Mr. Ratcliffe, what I said once before. Do whatever is most for the public good.”
“And what is most for the public good?”
Madeleine half opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated, and stared silently into the fire before her. What was indeed most for the public good? Where did the public good enter at all into this maze of personal intrigue, this wilderness of stunted natures where no straight road was to be found, but only the tortuous and aimless tracks of beasts and things that crawl? Where was she to look for a principle to guide, an ideal to set up and to point at?
Ratcliffe resumed his appeal, and his manner was more serious than ever.
“I am hard pressed, Mrs. Lee. My enemies encompass me about. They mean to ruin me. I honestly wish to do my duty. You once said that personal considerations should have no weight. Very well! throw them away! And now tell me what I should do.”
For the first time, Mrs. Lee began to feel his power. He was simple, straightforward, earnest. His words moved her. How should she imagine that he was playing upon her sensitive nature precisely as he played upon the President’s coarse one, and that this heavy western politician had the instincts of a wild Indian in their sharpness and quickness of perception; that he divined her character and read it as he read the faces and tones of thousands from day to day? She was uneasy under his eye. She began a sentence, hesitated in the middle, and broke down. She lost her command of thought, and sat dumbfounded. He had to draw her out of the confusion he had himself made.
“I see your meaning in your face. You say that I should accept the duty and disregard the consequences.”
“I don’t know,” said Madeleine, hesitatingly; “Yes, I think that would be my feeling.”
“And when I fall a sacrifice to that man’s envy and intrigue, what will you think then, Mrs. Lee? Will you not join the rest of the world and say that I overreached myself, and walked into this trap with my eyes open, and for my own objects? Do you think I shall ever be thought better of, for getting caught here? I don’t parade high moral views like our friend French. I won’t cant about virtue. But I do claim that in my public life I have tried to do right. Will you do me the justice to think so?”
Madeleine still struggled to prevent herself from being drawn into indefinite promises of sympathy with this man. She would keep him at arm’s length whatever her sympathies might be. She would not pledge herself to espouse his cause. She turned upon him with an effort, and said that her thoughts, now or at any time, were folly and nonsense, and that the consciousness of right-doing was the only reward any public man had a right to expect.
“And yet you are a hard critic, Mrs. Lee. If your thoughts are what you say, your words are not. You judge with the judgment of abstract principles, and you wield the bolts of divine justice. You look on and condemn, but you refuse to acquit. When I come to you on the verge of what is likely to be the fatal plunge of my life, and ask you only for some clue to the moral principle that ought to guide me, you look on and say that virtue is its own reward. And you do not even say where virtue lies.”
“I confess my sins,” said Madeleine, meekly and despondently; “life is more complicated than I thought.”
“I shall be guided by your advice,” said Ratcliffe; “I shall walk into that den of wild beasts, since you think I ought. But I shall hold you to your responsibility. You cannot refuse to see me through dangers you have helped to bring me into.”
“No, no!” cried Madeleine, earnestly; “no responsibility. You ask more than I can give.”
Ratcliffe looked at her a moment with a troubled and careworn face. His eyes seemed deep sunk in their dark circles, and his voice was pathetic in its intensity. “Duty is duty, for you as well as for me. I have a right to the help of all pure minds. You have no right to refuse it. How can you reject your own responsibility and hold me to mine?”
Almost as he spoke, he rose and took his departure, leaving her no time to do more than murmur again her ineffectual protest. After he was gone, Mrs. Lee sat long, with her eyes fixed on the fire, reflecting upon what he had said. Her mind was bewildered by the new suggestions which Ratcliffe had thrown out. What woman of thirty, with aspirations for the infinite, could resist an attack like this? What woman with a soul could see before her the most powerful public man of her time, appealing—with a face furrowed by anxieties, and a voice vibrating with only half-suppressed affection—to her for counsel and sympathy, without yielding some response? and what woman could have helped bowing her head to that rebuke of her overconfident judgment, coming as it did from one who in the same breath appealed to that judgment as final? Ratcliffe, too, had a curious instinct for human weaknesses. No magnetic needle was ever truer than his finger when he touched the vulnerable spot in an opponent’s mind. Mrs. Lee was not to be reached by an appeal to religious sentiment, to ambition, or to affection. Any such appeal would have fallen flat on her ears and destroyed its own hopes. But she was a woman to the very last drop of her blood. She could not be induced to love Ratcliffe, but she might be deluded
