Calvert of Strathore | Page 5

Mr. Jefferson most deeply impressed his listener. For there was no attribute of Mr. Jefferson's mind so keen, so unerring, so forceful as that peculiar power of divining the drift of the masses. It was this power which later made him so greatly feared and greatly respected in his own land. Forewarned and forearmed, he had but to range himself at the head of multitudes, whose will he knew almost before they were aware of it themselves, or else to stand aside, and, unscathed, let it pass him by in all its turbulence and strength. But though he could foresee the trend of events, his judgment was not infallible as to their values and consequences. Even as he spoke of the disquieting progress of affairs, even as he predicted the yet more serious turn they were to take, his countenance expressed a boundless, if somewhat vaguely defined, belief and happiness in the future.
The glow of enthusiasm was not at all reflected in the keen, attentive face of the younger man opposite him, whose look of growing disquietude betrayed the fact that he did not share Mr. Jefferson's hopes or sympathies. Indeed, it was inevitable that these two men of genius should hold dissimilar views about the struggle which the one had so clearly divined was to come and of which the other so clearly comprehended the consequences. It was inevitable that the man who had the sublime audacity to proclaim unfettered liberty and equality to a new world should differ radically from the man whose supreme achievement had been the fashioning and welding of its laws. They talked together until the wintry sun suddenly suffered an eclipse behind the mountains of gray clouds which had been threatening to fall upon it all the afternoon, and only the light from the crackling logs remained to show the bright enthusiasm of Mr. Jefferson's noble face and the sombre shadow upon Mr. Morris's disturbed one.
CHAPTER II
THE FRANCE OF 1789
France was sick. A great change and fever had fallen upon her, and there was no physician near skilled enough to cure her. Now and then one of her sons would look upon the pale, wasted features and note the rapidly throbbing pulse, the wild ravings of the disordered brain, and, frightened and despondent, would hurry away to consult with his brothers what should be done. But never to any good. Medicines were tried which had been potent with others in like sickness, but they seemed only to increase her delirium or lessen her vitality--never to bring her strength and reason. Day by day she grew worse. 'Twas as if some quick poison were working in her veins, until at last the poor body was one mass of swollen disfigurements, of putrid sores, that only a miracle from Heaven could heal. As miracles could not be looked for, everyone who had any skill in such desperate cases was called, and a thousand different opinions were given, a thousand different cures tried. And when all was seen to have been in vain, her tortured children, in their despair, left her and turned upon the false physicians, putting them to death and with ferocious joy avenging her agonies. And in the quiet which thus fell upon her, when all had left her to die, the fever and pain vanished; from her opened veins the poisoned blood dropped away; to the blinded eyes sight returned; in the distracted brain reason once more held sway. Slowly and faintly she arose and went about her business.
It was of that fast-sickening France, of that blighted land of France, that Mr. Jefferson spoke so earnestly in the gathering darkness of that winter's day in the year 1789. The storm which had just swept over the American colonies had passed, leaving wrecks strewn from shore to shore, 'tis true, but a land fairer and greater than ever, a people tried by adversity and made strong. The tempest, which had been so gallantly withstood by our ably manned ship of state, had blown across the Atlantic and was beating upon the unprotected shores of France. The storm was gathering fast in that most famous year of 1789--the alpha and omega of French history, the ending of all things old, the beginning of all things new, for France. Two years before the bewildered Assemblée des Notables had met and had been dismissed to spread their agitation and disaffection throughout all France by the still more bewildered Loménie de Brienne, who was trying his hand at the impossible finances of France after the fall of that magnificent spendthrift, Monsieur Colonne. He, in turn, had been swept from his office and replaced by the pompous and incompetent Necker. Lafayette, the deus ex machina of the times, had asked for his States-General, and now in this never-sufficiently-to-be-remembered year