Mr. Hooker fixed his eyes on the ceiling, rose, and pretended to look out of the window; then, taking his seat again by the table, as if fronting an imaginary audience, and pulling slowly at his gauntlets after the usual theatrical indication of perfect sangfroid, said,--"There ain't any!"
"Good heavens!" said Brant, with genuine emotion. "I beg your pardon. Really, I"--"Mrs. Hooker and me are divorced," continued Hooker, slightly changing his attitude, and leaning heavily on his sabre, with his eyes still on his fanciful audience. "There was, you understand"--lightly tossing his gauntlet aside--"incompatibility of temper--and--we--parted! Ha!"
He uttered a low, bitter, scornful laugh, which, however, produced the distinct impression in Brant's mind that up to that moment he had never had the slightest feeling in the matter whatever.
"You seemed to be on such good terms with each other!" murmured Brant vaguely.
"Seemed!" said Hooker bitterly, glancing sardonically at an ideal second row in the pit before him, "yes--seemed! There were other differences, social and political. You understand that; you have suffered, too." He reached out his hand and pressed Brant's, in heavy effusiveness. "But," he continued haughtily, lightly tossing his glove again, "we are also men of the world; we let that pass."
And it was possible that he found the strain of his present attitude too great, for he changed to an easier position.
"But," said Brant curiously, "I always thought that Mrs. Hooker was intensely Union and Northern?"
"Put on!" said Hooker, in his natural voice.
"But you remember the incident of the flag?" persisted Brant.
"Mrs. Hooker was always an actress," said Hooker significantly.
"But," he added cheerfully, "Mrs. Hooker is now the wife of Senator Boompointer, one of the wealthiest and most powerful Republicans in Washington--carries the patronage of the whole West in his vest pocket."
"Yet, if she is not a Republican, why did she"--began Brant.
"For a purpose," replied Hooker darkly. "But," he added again, with greater cheerfulness, "she belongs to the very elite of Washington society. Goes to all the foreign ambassadors' balls, and is a power at the White House. Her picture is in all the first-class illustrated papers."
The singular but unmistakable pride of the man in the importance of the wife from whom he was divorced, and for whom he did not care, would have offended Brant's delicacy, or at least have excited his ridicule, but for the reason that he was more deeply stung by Hooker's allusion to his own wife and his degrading similitude of their two conditions. But he dismissed the former as part of Hooker's invincible and still boyish extravagance, and the latter as part of his equally characteristic assumption. Perhaps he was conscious, too, notwithstanding the lapse of years and the condonation of separation and forgetfulness, that he deserved little delicacy from the hands of Susy's husband. Nevertheless, he dreaded to hear him speak again of her; and the fear was realized in a question.
"Does she know you are here?"
"Who?" said Brant curtly.
"Your wife. That is--I reckon she's your wife still, eh?"
"Yes; but I do not know what she knows," returned Brant quietly.
He had regained his self-composure.
"Susy,--Mrs. Senator Boompointer, that is,"--said Hooker, with an apparent dignity in his late wife's new title, "allowed that she'd gone abroad on a secret mission from the Southern Confederacy to them crowned heads over there. She was good at ropin' men in, you know. Anyhow, Susy, afore she was Mrs. Boompointer, was dead set on findin' out where she was, but never could. She seemed to drop out of sight a year ago. Some said one thing, and some said another. But you can bet your bottom dollar that Mrs. Senator Boompointer, who knows how to pull all the wires in Washington, will know, if any one does."
"But is Mrs. Boompointer really disaffected, and a Southern sympathizer?" said Brant, "or is it only caprice or fashion?"
While speaking he had risen, with a half-abstracted face, and had gone to the window, where he stood in a listening attitude.
Presently he opened the window, and stepped outside. Hooker wonderingly followed him. One or two officers had already stepped out of their rooms, and were standing upon the veranda; another had halted in the path. Then one quickly re-entered the house, reappeared with his cap and sword in his hand, and ran lightly toward the guard-house. A slight crackling noise seemed to come from beyond the garden wall.
"What's up?" said Hooker, with staring eyes.
"Picket firing!"
The crackling suddenly became a long rattle. Brant re-entered the room, and picked up his hat.
"You'll excuse me for a few moments."
A faint sound, soft yet full, and not unlike a bursting bubble, made the house appear to leap elastically, like the rebound of a rubber ball.
"What's that?" gasped Hooker.
"Cannon, out of range!"
