And after the confusion, the distress and the joy of the afternoon out in
the park when she and her gift had been accepted and acclaimed, there
came days full of deep and perfect peace to Caroline Darrah Brown.
Long, strenuously delightful mornings she spent with Tempie in the
excitements of completing her most comprehensive culinary education and
the amount of badinage she exchanged upon the subject with David Kildare
occupied many of his unemployed minutes. His demands for the most
intricate and soul-trying concoctions she took a perfect joy in meeting
and his enthusiasm stimulated her to the attempting of the most difficult
feats.
His campaign was on with full force and his days were busy ones, but he
managed to drop into the kitchen at any time when he deemed it at all
certain that he would find her there and was always fully rewarded.
He often found Andrew Sevier in the library in consultation with the
major over the management of the delicate points in the campaign and
occasionally brought him into Tempie's kingdom with him. And Caroline
laughed and blushed and explained it all to them with the most beautiful
solicitude, Tempie looking on positively bridling with pride.
And there were other mornings when she took her sewing and crept in the
library to work, while the major and Andrew held consultation over the
affairs of the present or absent David.
The whisky ring had purchased one of the morning papers, which had
hitherto borne a reputation for extreme conservatism, and had it appear
each morning with brilliant, carefully modulated arguments for the
machine; doctored statistics and brought allegations impossible to be
investigated in so short a time.
And all of every afternoon and evening Andrew Sevier sat at an
editorial desk down at the office of the reform journal and pumped hot
shot through their flimsy though plausible arguments. His blood was up
and his pen more than a match for any in the state, so he often sat most
of the night writing, reviewing and meeting issue after issue. The
editor-in-chief, whose heart was in making a success of the campaign
by which his paper would easily become the leading morning paper, gave
him full rein, aided and abetted him by his wide knowledge of all the
conditions and pointed out with unerring judgment the sore spots on the
hide of the enemy at which to send the gadfly of investigation.
So each day while Andrew and the major went carefully over possibilities
to be developed by and against the enemy, Caroline listened with absorbed
interest. Now and then she would ask a question which delighted them both
with its ingenuousness, but for the most part she was busily silent.
And in the exquisiteness of her innocence she was weaving the spell of
the centuries with the stitches in her long seams. There are yet left in
the world a few of the elemental women whose natures are what they were
originally instituted and Caroline Darrah was unfolding her predestinated
self as naturally as a flower unfolds in the warmth of the spring
sunshine. The cooking for David and Andrew, the sewing for busy Phoebe,
the tactfully daughterly attentions to the major and Mrs. Matilda were
all avenues for the outpouring of the maturing woman within, and
powerless in his enchantment, Andrew Sevier was swept along on the tide
of her tenderness.