THE HENCHMAN
BY
MARK LEE LUTHER
AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF PRINCES," "THE RECKONING," "THE LIVERY OF
HONOR," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
TO
GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Those familiar with the early history of Western New York will know the
"Tuscarora Stories" of this volume for twice-told tales which the
author has ventured to adapt from the suggestive "Pioneer History of
Orleans County," by Judge Arad Thomas.
BOOK I
The Henchman
CHAPTER I
It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple
somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful
comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot,
and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this
pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant
lion, his massy head thrust high in the North Country, his forepaws
dabbled in the confluence of the Hudson and the Sound, his middle and
hinder parts stretched lazily westward to Lake Erie and the Niagara.
Roughly speaking, in this noble animal's rounding haunch, which Ontario
cools, lies the Demijohn Congressional District whose majority party
was now in convention assembled. In election returns and official
utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number like every
district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last
gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political
overturn should distort its outline afresh.
The spokesman of the defeated faction had been recognized by the chair,
and was moving that the convention's choice of the gentleman from
Tuscarora County be declared unanimous. His manner was even more
perfunctory than his words.
"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells
success."
"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to
the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."
Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface
resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could
he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign
hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity
sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on
horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all
public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his
protégé.
The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose seat
Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of tactless
integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side of
the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that the
Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather
than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed
their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the
convention. In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor
did any one attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes
they lacked but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The
whole story of their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's
succinct phrase, "There's no argument like delegates."
The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion
of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country
lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was
sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth
these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to
people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had
sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests
of the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people
of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings;
mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the
doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of
conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and
the Mayflower's claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only
ancestors worth reckoning had assumed a mask of comedy. Yet, all said,
the Yankee blood cropped out in face and limb and speech—particularly
in speech; the folk of the Demijohn District did not employ the dialect
of Hosea Biglow, nor a variant of it, but the insistent drawling R to
be heard on every second lip was of no doubtful lineage.
The victor, who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was
seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.
Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of
Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father
who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The
man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the
Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of
Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee,
and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got
the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive
scholarship in a narrow little sectarian college which boastfully
called itself a university. Here he acquired two wholesome things: a
perception that the college is but the beginning of education, and a
lasting disgust with bigotry of every stripe. There followed some
years of school-mastering by day and law-book drudgery by night, whose
end was his admission to the bar and a partnership with the man sitting
by his side. Then politics drew him, and, step by step, through rough
and ready service at the polls, in town caucus, county convention, what
not, he secured his footing and finally a seat in the lower house of
the State Legislature. In politics a hobby is often a useful piece of
property, and Shelby, who had a hobby, rode it to success; it made him
a marked man in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular
title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen
always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this
moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every
quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in
a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly
down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the
yellow glare of a gas-light chandelier, he showed for a simply clad,
businesslike person, with a well-set head and a shaven jaw, whose
firmness a cushion of superfluous flesh could not disguise.
"Thank you, boys," he said.
The offhand fashion of address provoked a fresh demonstration which the
nominee acknowledged with a good-humored nod. His eye sauntered over
the delegates, and with a shrewd twinkle halted on the dejected group
which had fought his nomination.
"This happy occasion reminds me of a Tuscarora County story," he began,
with a little drawl; "the story of Tired Tinkham's election as overseer
of highways at Noah's Basin—a pioneer classic which some of you have
doubtless heard. It happened in the early days of Noah's Basin, when
that interesting village contained perhaps a score less people than
walk its changeless streets to-day. Tired Tinkham was the local Rip
Van Winkle—the children's friend and labor's foe. No one could
whittle green willow whistles in the springtime like Tired Tinkham, or
fashion bows and arrows with such fascinating skill. Like Rip also he
drank whenever a drink was forthcoming, but unlike Rip he did not hunt.
Minks, coons, and squirrels were plentiful, with here and there a deer
or bear, but Tired Tinkham was too weary to hunt. He fished; fished
day in and day out in the canal basin, which gives the place its name;
fished till the packet captains came to know him and point him out as a
fixture in the scenery. But, lazy as he was, Tired Tinkham didn't
monopolize all the laziness in Noah's Basin. In one particular
laziness was epidemic, even among the otherwise industrious, and it
took the form of shirking the road tax. No roads were wretcheder than
theirs; nobody cared less than they. In his personal view of life
Tired Tinkham was a fit exponent of the local theory of public duty,
and some village humorist accordingly hit upon the idea of nominating
him for overseer of highways. Tired Tinkham looked more than commonly
fatigued at the suggestion, but did not put the crown away. His
election was unanimous. Then Noah's Basin woke up. The jubilee
bonfires were scarcely ashes before Tired Tinkham delivered at the
corner grocery what he called his inaugural address. 'I cal'late I
know why I wuz 'lected; he said. 'T' loaf 'n' let ye loaf. I cal'late
ye've mistook suthin'. Ye'll work.' And work Noah's Basin did as it
had never worked before."
Shelby noted that the anecdote won even a thin-lipped grin from the
hostile camp.
"The Tired Tinkhams aren't so rare in politics," he went on. "We
sometimes put them in the White House. Americans have a way of growing
up to their responsibilities, and perhaps even I shall prove another
sort of man than I've been ticketed." His tone quickened suddenly, and
his glance fastened on the defeated anew. "I should count this honor
less had it fallen as a ripe fruit falls, the prize of the first comer.
We've had our battle; we wear our scars; no battle worth the name is
without its scars; but I assume to speak for every man present when I
say that the blows we give and take do not rankle to the prejudice of
the common cause. Our quarrels are wholly in the family, where speech
is free, for it is a fundamental article of our party creed that the
will of the majority should prevail. The will of the majority made
plain, it is our healthy custom to strip off our coats, and go to work:
The party, not the individual, is of moment;—the historic party of our
fathers, the party of the living present, the party of the future whose
bounds no man may set."
As he dropped into his seat, Shelby added a foot-note.
"If that didn't jam their duty down those soreheads' throats," he told
Bowers, "I'll take another guess."
CHAPTER II
Meanwhile the nominee's fortunes and traits of character underwent
dissection in his own town at the first autumn assembly of the Culture
Club which, as always, met with Mrs. Hilliard. There were two profound
reasons for this constancy to Mrs. Hilliard,—her house boasted the
largest double parlors in New Babylon, and her husband had a billiard
table. The intimate association of billiards with the pursuit of
sweetness and light may at first seem grotesque, but Mrs. Hilliard
proved it to be not without warrant in sound philosophy; by her simple
formula billiards stood to culture as the Salvation Army to the
decorous body of the Church Militant, both alliances resting on the
basic truth that some souls will prick ears only to the beating of
tom-toms.
Theory aside, the fact was not to be blinked that she knew how to clash
cymbals to the unregenerate and drum up in the name of culture such a
varied company as no other woman could muster short of a silver
wedding. In the winning of the cultivated, Mrs. Hilliard took no
pride. They lent their countenance to any educational project, and she
owned to herself that given a like cause any capable woman with double
parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking
of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that
she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare
rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind
met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the
balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and
sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every
important walk in the town's life came to have its representative in
what in her heart of hearts Mrs. Hilliard called her salon.
The first autumn meeting should have gladdened the hostess. Her house
had never lighted to better advantage; everybody admired the new
decorations; she herself felt no impulse to quarrel either with nature
or her dressmaker; the programme had run with consummate
smoothness,—Volney Sprague, the editor of the Tuscarora County Whig,
reading a scholarly paper on Shakespeare's anachronisms, and his fast
friend Bernard Graves leading the discussion in his usual clever way;
furthermore, the ices which had been ordered for this very special
occasion had proved everything that ices should be. Yet Mrs. Hilliard
was dissatisfied.
"The club positively loses a vital something of its individuality when
Mr. Bowers and Mr. Shelby are absent," said she.
Mrs. Bowers, a large placid personage of indefinite waist-line,
remarked that nothing except politics could have dragged her husband
away.
"What a pity that the Hon. Seneca had to miss your anachronisms,
Volney," murmured Bernard Graves, who was a personable young gentleman
of thirty.
"And Shelby," queried the editor, "hasn't that choice spirit your pity
too?"
Mrs. Hilliard caught nothing of their sarcasm save Shelby's name.
"I miss his criticism," she declared. "It's so practical."
The editor fell to polishing his eye-glasses for lack of a reply.
"And so helpful," pursued the lady. "He has the faculty of ending a
tangled discussion with a word."
"The dear man usually changes the subject," muttered the editor
savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by Mrs. Bowers.
"Or fogs it round with one of his Tuscarora yarns," dropped Graves.
The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.
"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the
nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.
"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.
"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get
straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. Has
he won?"
"There was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun
to ballot."
Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.
"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.
Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.
"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary
talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."
"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We
shall talk politics if we choose."
Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the
drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment
of feminine comment from a divan hard by.
"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those
shoulders."
"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."
"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"
"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.
"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"
"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her
Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be
thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was
twenty-two."
"She says she feels twenty-two now."
"Well, she looks—" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.
"More literary discussion," said Sprague.
"It's as literary as politics."
"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."
"Why not? It's very human."
"So is politics."
"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree
about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores
me—this tiresome Shelby above all."
"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't
possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's
scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."
"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't
be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine
American is supposed to be interested in politics,—I wonder if the
Irish invented the notion,—but I can't conform; I don't know why."
"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."
"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of
Major Pendennis."
Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.
"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol
while other men struggle for civic decency."
"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he
added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly
after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"
"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."
"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to
see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very
shocking?"
Sprague laughed in spite of himself.
"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You
belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far
removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."
"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye
lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can
look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere
factory for frumps?"
"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching
the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it
her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?—One can't say precisely what."
"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a
favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She
is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."
"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He
counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little
Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."
"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers.
Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging
judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is
drenched with it."
Sprague bent his head to listen.
"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes
as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of
Samothrace.'"
Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved
to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an
anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been
Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this
juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a
yellow paper.
"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram—a telegram
from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think
of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first
of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses—her big blue eyes were
astigmatic—and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all,"
thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.
He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice
were as haphazard as it seemed:—
"Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club.
It stands first.
"C. R. SHELBY."
"Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "We come
first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true
nature of the man."
"It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance
of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background during
the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes."
Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.
"He'll be here in five minutes," she exclaimed, peering at the hall
clock. "The message was delayed somehow, and his train is due now. We
must devise a reception. We owe it to him. He thought of us. We must
think of him. What shall we do? Think, think, you clever people!"
"That preposterous woman means to turn this into a ratification
meeting," groaned the editor under his breath. "I must get out."
His hostess was of another mind, however, and barred retreat when he
attempted to make his excuses.
"You shan't desert us," she declared roguishly. "You can't," she
immediately added, at the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the
drive. "He's here! The hall, the hall! Into the hall!" And into the
hall Mrs. Hilliard masterfully bundled the Culture Club of New Babylon,
grouping it theatrically around the newel-post and up the winding stair.
"Gad," muttered Sprague, struggling to efface himself, "knock me in the
head."
Bernard Graves gleefully struck an attitude behind a friendly palm, and
Mrs. Hilliard threw wide the door.
"Welcome to your own people," she cried, and Shelby, closely followed
by Bowers, crossed the threshold into the light. Then big Joe
Hilliard, whom the unwonted commotion had attracted from the billiard
room, led a boisterous cheer, which the candidate received with
modestly bowed head. He flushed, and wrestled with his diffidence like
a schoolboy, as the house grew still and they waited for him to speak.
"I—I don't claim the credit, friends," he stammered. "It's your
victory."
CHAPTER III
Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising
for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow
Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and
testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for
will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity.
Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the
"tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months:
"Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice
only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.
This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office
door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit
her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office
chairs. The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement,
"The Lord has spared me for another month."
It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to
Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue,
and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her
will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan
herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged
Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious
simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful
abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown;
buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of
ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair
whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a
composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at
the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism
that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but
this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger
the texture of a zealot's sackcloth.
Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.
"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She
enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its
worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn.
"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized
Shelby.
"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me
a wuss turn than the stairs."
"They're trying moving stairways in some places,—a French invention, I
believe."
"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless
people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."
Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he
held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced
upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips
of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally
held to have been green.
"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.
The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his
brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes
a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his
writhings to the ancient table.
"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"
"Yes. He used it in his place of business."
"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl,"
pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement.
"Distillin's a wicked business."
"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day."
The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top
desk?"
"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."
"Law books, too?"
"Yes."
"Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of
political worthies past and present.
"Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to boot."
The widow sniffed again. "'Pears to me," said she, "you've got nothin'
new."
The man wheeled in his chair to a neighboring safe and took a
tape-bound document from a pigeon-hole.
"Shall we begin?" he asked.
"Yes—if you're so rushed," she returned, and composed her features to
fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he
could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the
pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and
transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be
took any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts
she recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a
"red cent," as everybody knew. Finally she called a halt. "Needn't go
any farther," she directed. "The first part's what I like to hear
best. Exceptin' one thing, all the rest about my green rep sofy
a-goin' to Cousin Phoebe, the pickle-caster to Brother Henry, the old
dishes what can't be sold to my beloved nephew, Jason Weatherwax, and
my best tablecloths and sheets and pillow-slips to his little Ann Eliza
when she gets a husband what's a good provider, is fixed jest as it hed
ought to be. What I want now is a postscript."
"Another codicil? Very well."
He made note of her wishes concerning a cherished feather bed which it
had struck her was too good for that "shiftless coot," Cousin Phoebe's
husband, to lie upon, and, bidding her bring her witnesses on the
morrow, bustled the will into his safe and fell upon his papers after
the manner of all lawyer kind since Chaucer's sergeant of the law who
"semed besier than he was."
The widow eyed his movements placidly.
"In a stew to hev me go?" she asked.
"Of course not," Shelby protested. "What put that in your head?"
"Your squirmin' round. Seein' I'm entirely welcome, I'll set a piece."
Shelby restrained the delight he said he felt and returned to his
papers under her relentless scrutiny.
"Telegraphs of congratulashun, I s'pose," the visitor presently
observed.
"Yes; my friends are rejoicing with me."
"Everybody tickled?"
"All but the common enemy, I trust."
"I ain't hed a chance to go about much and ask," said the widow, with a
preliminary sniff; "but I've met some as wa'n't tickled or enemies
neither."
"No? Well, after all, this isn't paradise, but New York politics."
"At Tompkins's—I alluz go to him for my Oolong—I heard that Doc
Crandall won't vote for you after your dead set at the place. He's one
of your party, isn't he?"
"Yes. The doctor is one of us. Good fellow, too."
"And at Brady's, where I get my corn meal, I heard somebody say you've
got the Irish down on you."
"Oh, I hope not," returned the candidate, cheerfully. "They're a most
respectable and industrious factor in our town's life. I like the
Irish."
"I s'pose."
He searched her face and concluded that her irony was unconscious; she
undeceived him.
"Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth now you're runnin' for office," she
said, laboring to her feet. "I'm s'prised you hevn't wings."
Shelby affected to relish the hoary jest, and escorted her gayly to the
door. "I'll look for you to-morrow," he assured her.
"Don't strain your eyes," said the widow.
The Hon. Seneca Bowers passed her on the stairs. Greeting the lawyer,
he seated himself behind the clerk's back, with a meaning slant of his
Grant-like head.
Shelby understood. "Leave those notices of trial for the present,
William," he ordered, "and get this stipulation signed. If the man
isn't in his office, try the county clerk's."
Bowers pulled with clock-work precision at his cigar, while the boy
uncoiled his long legs from his chair, and with furtive little pats at
his necktie and fiery shock, made ready to go out. Shelby stumbled
upon the waste-paper basket as the door slammed at his clerk's heels,
and with vicious satisfaction he kicked it to the room's far end.
The caller's eyes twinkled.
"The Widow Weatherwax been administering spiritual balm?" he asked.
"I could wring her neck," Shelby averred.
"Her will again?"
"Of course."
"You'll have it as long as you practise law. I did. It goes with the
office. Remunerative as ever?"
"Talk about 'benefit of clergy,'" exploded the younger man; "that
mediaeval bonanza isn't to be mentioned in the same week with the
ministerial half-rates, donations, and hold-ups we moderns put up with.
This pulpit pounder's shrew pays me no more than she pays the doctor,
the grocer, the butcher, and the rest. What a ukase I could issue if I
were Czar of these United States."
"Cousin Phoebe's 'sofy,' beloved Nephew Jason's unsalable dishes, and
Brother Henry's pickle-caster still extant?"
"Yes, yes," groaned Shelby.
"And little Ann Eliza's sheets and pillow-slips, I dare say. It's
astonishing how they endure."
"It's astonishing how I endure."
"You must—at any rate, till the Tuesday after the first Monday in
November. Did the pious gossip tell you any pleasant personal news?"
"She has heard talk that the Micks are sore and that Doc Crandall has
had an attack of virtue."
"You needn't lose sleep over the handful of Irish in our camp; they
know who butters their parsnips. And I'll take care of the doctor.
He's an innocuous mugwump. She didn't mention Volney Sprague?"
"Sprague," said Shelby, wearily; "what is that man up to now?"
Bowers rose, paced the room, and returned, big with news.
"The Whig has bolted," he announced.
CHAPTER IV
Shelby's amaze spent its force in an oath. In a moment he asked,
calmly:—
"What does he say?"
"Not much; mainly that the manner of your nomination debars his
printing your name at the head of his editorial page."
"Endorses the rest of our party ticket, doesn't he?"
"Yes; it's a personal bolt."
Shelby ruminated earnestly.
"It's only a one-horse country daily," he declared finally. "The
Whig! You'd think Henry Clay still above ground."
"Strikes you that way, does it?" Bowers emitted with a cloud of smoke.
"Why, yes. You don't consider such a paper dangerous?"
"All newspapers are dangerous in politics; there's none too mean to
have its following. The Whig has influence."
"It's a one-horse paper," reiterated Shelby.
"M-yes; it is a slow coach," Bowers admitted; "but it suits a lot of
people. They respect it because it keeps the old name and jogs along
in the old gait it had under Volney's father before him. It's been a
stanch party paper, too, and that without soliciting a dollar's worth
of public advertising or political pap of any description. The Whig
doesn't often kick over the traces. The Greeley campaign was its last
bolt."
"Well, the milk's spilt," said Shelby, with strenuous cheerfulness;
"we've one reason the more to make next week's ratification meeting a
rousing success. What did you think of our little welcome at the club
last night?"
Bowers grinned.
"Mrs. Hilliard managed it first-class," he said; "but I felt cheap when
we came in."
"So did I. The scheme seemed a good one when she suggested it, but
when it came right down to pulling it off I would have sold out for
thirty cents on the dollar. It takes lovely woman to do those things.
She has her uses in politics, eh?"
"M-yes," Bowers answered in half assent; "but she's an uncertain
quantity. Like grandsire's musket, she's as likely to kill behind as
before."
The vine-screened window in which they now talked overlooked the
neighboring Temple house, a dignified sentry at the point where the
leisured street forsook the chaffer of the town to climb amidst arching
elms and maples, above whose gaudy autumn masses rose the dome of the
courthouse and the spires of many churches. It was an old-fashioned
Georgian structure with white columns clear-cut against its weathered
brick; at either side of the low steps a great hydrangea, its glory
waning with the summer, lifted its showy clusters from an urn; while
walk and carriage drive alike sauntered to the street through hedgerows
of box. The mouth of the driveway at this moment gleamed white from
the kerchiefs of a knot of Polish children estray from the quarry
district, who, at a laughing nod from Ruth, swooped, a chattering
barbaric horde, on the fallen apples dotting a bit of sward with yellow
and red. Shelby smilingly watched the scramble to its speedy end, and
turned to the giver of the feast, who sat in a sheltered corner of her
veranda with a caller. The latter proved to be Bernard Graves, sunning
himself with a cat's content.
"Industrious young man," Shelby observed with the irony of whole-souled
dislike. "Inherits a comfortable property, goes to an expensive
college, dawdles through Europe, and then comes home to play carpet
knight and read poetry to girls. Why doesn't he go to work?"
Bowers made no reply to the gibe. He was watching Ruth. Presently in
his slow way he checked off her qualifications:—
"Handsome girl, good education, kind disposition, rich, no airs, and no
incumbrances, barring her companion, the old maid cousin, who could be
pensioned. Ross, she'd do you more good than a brace of married women."
Shelby threw off the laugh of a contented man.
"I'm not in the marrying class."
"Then you'd better enter." His hand on the door, Bowers asked, "Your
contribution for the county campaign fund ready?"
"Draw you a check any time," the candidate returned jauntily.
Nevertheless, when the county leader had gone Shelby gave a diligent
quarter-hour to his bankbook. By and by he took an opera glass from a
drawer and focussed it on the pair below. So his clerk came upon him,
compelling a ruse of adjusting the instrument.
"One lens has dust in it," he declared. Perceiving Bernard Graves pass
down the box-bordered path, he left his office for the day.
That evening Shelby took certain steps to prosper his coming rally at
the court-house, one of which was duly noted by Mrs. Seneca Bowers. It
was this lady's habit in summer evenings to discuss the doings of her
immediate neighbors from her piazza, but now that the nights were cool
she had shifted to the bay window of a room styled by courtesy the
library from a small bookcase filled with Patent Office Reports and
similar offerings of a beneficent government. This station embraced a
wide prospect of shady street flanked by pleasantly sloping lawns and
dwellings of various architectural pretence. Most proximate and most
interesting to Mrs. Bowers was the Hilliard house, and while she rocked
placidly over her darning, she contrived to hold this gingerbread
edifice in a scrutiny which permitted the escape of no slightest
movement of chick or child. She saw the newsboy leave the evening city
papers; Milicent Hilliard dance down the leaf-strewn walk to a last
half-hour's play; a white-capped maid sheet the geranium beds against
possible frost; and, finally, the householder himself emerge and light
a cigar whose ruddy tip winked for a second in the thickening dusk.
Listing from side to side, big Joe Hilliard tramped heavily down and
away to his nightly haunt in the billiard room of the Tuscarora House.
As the quarry owner's great bulk vanished Shelby entered the scene,
briskly crosscut the Hilliard lawn, and bounded up the steps just
quitted by the substantial Joe.
"There; he's done it again!" exclaimed Mrs. Bowers.
"Who has done what?" grunted her husband, from the lounge. He was
coatless and shoeless, and had spread a newspaper over his bald spot to
the annoyance of a few superannuated yet active flies.
"Ross Shelby. He's gone to Cora Hilliard's again!"
"Well, let him," said Bowers, from beneath the news of the day. "It's
a free country."
Mrs. Bowers smoothed a mended sock and rolled it into a neat ball with
its fellow by aid of an arc light which sizzled into sudden brilliance
among the maples.
"'Tisn't his going that's such a scandal," she discriminated. "All the
men run there. It's the way he goes. This is the ninth time I've
known him to wait till Joe Hilliard had left the house."
"Looks as if he didn't dote on Joe's society," chuckled Bowers. "I
can't say that I do myself."
"It's a scandal," repeated Mrs. Bowers, firmly. Her husband remaining
indifferent, she assumed her wifely prerogative to pass rigorous
judgment upon his conscience. "And it's your plain duty, Seneca
Bowers, to speak to him."
The old man flung off his newspaper with a snort.
"What call have I to set up as a censor of public morals?" he demanded
testily. "I'm not Shelby's guardian. He's of age. He's cut his eye
teeth. Talk sense, Eliza."
Mrs. Bowers essayed a flank attack.
"You're the Tuscarora boss, aren't you?"
"Yes, I'm county leader."
"What you say goes?"
"I suppose so."
She pushed her Socratic pitfall a step farther.
"When you say run so-and-so, he runs, doesn't he?"
Bowers permitted himself a dry smile in the dark.
"Most generally."
"Then you're responsible," she argued triumphantly. "You got Ross
Shelby into politics; you've run him for this and that; he's your
charge."
The Hon. Seneca Bowers turned his disgusted face to the wall.
"So you've the Sunday-school idea of politics," he threw over his
shoulder with heavy sarcasm. "I'm to teach a Bible class and pass out
dinkey little reward-of-merit cards to the prize pupils! Bah!"
His wife presently fetched her outdoor wraps and adjusted them before a
mirror in the dimly lit hall.
"I'm going to take a tumbler of jelly to poor lonely Mrs. Weatherwax,"
she announced from the door.
Bowers roused suddenly.
"I hope, Eliza, you don't intend raking them over the coals with her,"
he protested, rummaging for his slippers; but his consort was beyond
hail.
A literal transcript of the talk in progress over the way would have
confounded the evil thinking; to illustrate the blameless text with an
equally faithful record of Shelby's actions might salt the narrative.
He had a lawyer's perception of the values of words as words, and
through extended practice with Mrs. Hilliard excelled in that deft
juggling of pregnant trifles without which Platonic friendships must
die of inanition. He now thanked the lady for her successful coup at
the club without specifically naming it—to hint at prearrangement were
too fatuous; and Mrs. Hilliard admired his tact. Parenthetically she
reflected that Joe had no tact. Without specifically naming it, Shelby
contrived to suggest that she could do him yet greater service by
shepherding society at his ratification meeting.
"To be significant, that sort of thing should be broadly
representative," said he.
His words were impersonal, but there was no misreading his look.
Mrs. Hilliard offered her aid with equal thrift of speech and
prodigality of glance. She rejoiced in transparent subtleties. Joe
was never subtle.
"But I've no right to ask it of you—I don't ask it," Shelby deprecated
with his lips.
"You have every right, dear friend," she reassured. "Friend! We are
more than friends, you and I. We are spiritually akin. We fairly
speak without words."
"Exactly." His business despatched, Shelby prepared to go. "My time
isn't my own now," he explained. "It belongs to the party."
"Selfish party," she pouted. "I hate it."
CHAPTER V
By the night of the meeting it was clear that that bugaboo of
politicians, a general apathy, had blanketed the candidate's own
community. Shelby should have stirred local pride. Not for years, in
fact not since Bowers himself sat in Congress, had the nomination come
to Tuscarora County out of the several counties which the Demijohn
District comprised. Nor had the interval since the convention been a
time for folding of hands. Mrs. Hilliard rounded her social circle,
rallying the members of the Culture Club to stand by their own, and
appealing to such outside its membership as seemed desirable on the
ground of local pride. Shelby became all things to all men. To the
club people he was the Club Candidate; to the unclubbed townsfolk he
was New Babylon's Candidate; while among the quarry workers and other
socially impossible flotsam and jetsam of the voting public other
agencies than Mrs. Hilliard's heralded him as the People's Candidate.
Yet the fog of apathy refused to lift.
There can naturally be little of the herdlike crushing at the doors of
a political gathering in the country which marks the urban rally. The
rural citizen has elbow-room to take his politics sedately and order
his going with temperate pulse and judicial mind. Of such mettle
normally were the New Babylonians who took their leisured way beneath
the fluted columns of the court-house into Shelby's rally; but this
audience felt itself more than normally temperate and judicial.
Despite Mrs. Hilliard, despite the Hon. Seneca Bowers, despite Shelby's
own striving, it had come less to encourage than to try and weigh.
The high places were immutably fixed. The bench of the courtroom,
surmounted by a pitcher of ice-water and adorned by crayon portraits of
New Babylonians learned in the law, of course stood consecrate to the
speakers. The arm-chairs within the railed precinct set apart for
members of the bar were by unwritten canon the peculiar haunt of
citizens of light and leading, while the jury-box and its neighboring
benches by custom immemorial bloomed with the pick of feminine good
society. It was a privilege of the socially elect to enter such
meetings at the court-house by way of the court's own staircase behind
the bench, and so came Bernard Graves. Spying a vacant seat beside
Ruth Temple, the young man slipped into it as unobtrusively as Mrs.
Hilliard's acute sense of her responsibility as society's chief whip
would permit.
"The club has responded nobly," she confided in a stage whisper across
the intervening millinery. "That eccentric Volney Sprague is
positively the only recreant. And isn't the audience representative?"
She beamed impartially round upon the just and the unjust through her
jewelled lorgnon. Mrs. Hilliard rejoiced in her lorgnon. It
compensated fully for her defect of vision, and lent her a distinction
which she felt to be wholly cosmopolitan. She aspired to be
cosmopolitan.
The New Babylon Brass Band fell lustily upon a popular two-step at this
moment, and an usher thrust a bundle of campaign leaflets into Graves's
hands. One of these pamphlets contained a half-tone portrait of
Shelby, with an account of his career and a few phrases from the more
noteworthy of his public addresses. Graves gave these latter a caustic
scrutiny, and read aloud one of the italicized quotations.
"'It has been said, that Egypt is the gift of the Nile; Tuscarora
County is no less the gift of the Erie Canal!' Now what can you say of
a man who couples those two ideas with a sober face? He is
aesthetically dead."
"At least, he's enthusiastic," smiled Ruth, "which is refreshing
nowadays. The canal is his master hobby, the poetry of his prosaic
existence. Mr. Shelby is nothing if not practical."
"Offensively practical."
"Practicality achieves."
Graves thought he detected an implication levelled at himself, and
laughingly accused her.
Ruth made no denial.
"The world weighs achievement," she returned, "not barren cleverness."
Outwardly serene, the young man was inwardly ruffled. It was no new
thing for her to reproach him with napkined talents, and he was wont to
count it as an earnest of her liking. The novelty of this situation
lay in her presenting Shelby as a pattern of fruitfulness, and it irked
him. The agile leap of the brass band from the half-finished two-step
to "Hail to the Chief," suddenly put this out of mind, and he watched
the speakers of the evening file up the judge's staircase to the
rostrum. With the subsidence of the musicians the Hon. Seneca Bowers
aligned himself with the water-pitcher.
"How much he looks like Grant!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilliard, with
originality.
With soldierly calm Bowers waited for the applause to cease, and
submitted a slated list of officers for the meeting. It was
straightway manifest that he had made good his promise to take care of
Dr. Crandall. Speech-making was the breath of the worthy, if pompous,
physician's nostrils, and Bowers had shrewdly judged that to offer him
the chairmanship would clinch his wavering allegiance. The crowd which
always relished his grandiloquence, voted him into office with a shout,
and cheered his soaring periods to their peroration. A quartet of
young voters now proceeded in catchy doggerel to laud the virtues of
the party and the commanding genius of its candidates, thereby giving
the blown doctor a much-needed respite. He came up in good form
presently, winged another flight with Shelby's name as its climax, and
while Mrs. Hilliard split a new pair of gloves in ineffectual applause,
the candidate rose and faced his well-wishers and his foes.
"Mr. Chairman," he began, "men and women."
Bernard Graves was surprised into approval of his unexpected good
taste, never dreaming that a chance remark of Ruth's had moved Shelby
to discard the more hackneyed form of address. Before ever he
presented himself as a candidate for public office, Shelby had been
rated in the note-book of the Secretary of the State Committee as an
effective speaker on "canals, local issues, and currency," with the
further information that he was "strong in rural neighborhoods." This
entry foreshadowed the development of an art which he had since rounded
to high facility. He was considered a spellbinder of uncommon power.
"There are some among you who think harsh things of the way by which
the honor of a congressional nomination has come to the community we
love," he went on boldly. "I ask all such—my honest critics, I make
no doubt—and I ask my avowed supporters to listen to a story. It's an
old story, nearly as old as New Babylon itself, and many of you must
have heard it from the honored lips of the Tuscarora pioneers whose
deeds it chronicles. It is a story of our town in that rough-hewn past
before railroads were dreamed of, before 'Clinton's Ditch' had touched
our wilderness with its mighty wand and made it blossom like the rose.
We owe a vast debt to De Witt Clinton," he digressed to add. "He was
our Moses, and I can never think upon his great achievement without a
thrill of gratitude. I confess to a mania for the Erie Canal."
A man in the body of the audience whom Graves recognized as a canal
bank watch whose appointment Shelby had brought about, called for
three-times-three, but Shelby interfered, saying, "I'd rather you'd
listen than cheer."
"I speak," he continued, "of New Babylon before the coming of the canal
put an end to the log cabins, the spinning-wheels, the ox-sleds, the
corduroy roads, the miasmatic swamps, the wolves, the bears, the fever,
the ague, the blue pill, and all the rude makeshifts and backwoods'
evils which to your forefathers and mine were stern reality. These
were the days when men wore their coat collars high in the back and
small clothes were lengthening into trousers; when veterans of the
Revolution still walked the land hale and strong, and the second war
with the mother country was an uncicatrized memory. In short, I mean
New Babylon of the critical hour when the Legislature wisely saw fit to
erect Tuscarora County, and appointed a commission to choose a
county-seat. 'Then was the tug-of-war.' New Babylon coveted the
award, pined for it, panted for it as the hart for the water brooks.
But so did Etruria, our strapping rival."
A ripple of appreciation of his version of the familiar legend ran from
jury-box to door, and Shelby, a psychologist, like every real orator,
perceived it with stirring pulse. The instrument he knew best lay
attuned to his hand.
"How little could we boast," he said, adroitly identifying his
listeners with the past. "The surveyors assured us that the canal was
pointed our way, though no one was sanguine of its speedy coming. We
did occupy the geographical centre of the new county, and with that
ends the tale of our pretensions."
"We had Penelope Chubb!"
The suggestion came from an old man in one of the arm-chairs
immediately below.
Interruptions never disconcerted Shelby.
"I forgot Penelope Chubb," he admitted smilingly. "Yes, we had her,
the best dress-maker in Tuscarora, whom even Etruria was keen to
employ. But you wouldn't have had us offer Penelope Chubb to the
commissioners as an inducement," he added, and won a laugh for his
readiness. "It was far different with Etruria. It lay on the great
Ridge Road, and the stages from the East tooled and trumpeted straight
through its long main street. It had stores and shops and factories,
it had a grist-mill, a distillery, a tavern—"
"Two taverns," corrected the hoary critic below.
"Two taverns, a bona fide doctor, a licensed preacher, the only
academy, the only meeting-house, the only printing-press, and the only
newspaper within the county limits. The Etrurians were so cock-sure of
victory that they raised the price of village lots. Yet we presumed to
hope. Great emergencies focus on individuals; so with ours. New
Babylon found its saviour in Israel Booth."
Booth's name was the signal for an outburst. The older generation held
him in equal reverence with the fathers of the republic.
"It was Israel Booth who saw that our one hope lay in a natural
resource, and set himself to conjure one from Red Jacket Creek. Genius
has seldom worked with less promising material. Red Jacket Creek isn't
an imposing stream to-day as it skirts our town,—I am told few of the
historic streams are imposing,—and there was hardly more of it then.
It yielded adequate power to run the sawmills only during the spring
freshets when the swamps overflowed, and it was our ill luck that the
legislative commission decided to visit Tuscarora in dog-days while
Etruria's stage line was doing a land-office business and our poor
little resource was wasted to a long-drawn-out puddle choked with
cat-tails and lily-pads. But what dismayed other men seemed to spur
Israel Booth, and one night, a bare fortnight before the commissioners'
coming, his great conception saw its birth. Before he slept he took
counsel with the leading settlers."
Shelby broke off to address one of his audience.
"Your father was in the secret, Mr. Hewett," he said; "and yours, Dr.
Crandall—and my grandfather, and many another upright citizen."
The gentlemen singled out for reflected fame stirred consciously in the
effort to appear unconscious.
"Now Red Jacket Creek woke from its summer sleep. The spiders in the
mill yards were dispossessed; lumber that had been hauled away was
replaced and piled conspicuously; the dams and flumes were repaired,
and the water-gates were shut; the backwater began to flood the ponds
and agitate the colony of frogs; prominent men were heard to pray for
rain, and Israel Booth was seen carrying water by night from his well
to the raceway; New Babylon was big with mystery. You all know the
sequel. You know how the commissioners came to us hungry from Etruria;
how Booth and his helpers met them in Sunday butternut and shirt frills
without spot; how we flattered our visitors' distinguished yet entirely
human stomachs with the toothsome dishes of our grandmothers; how we
cracked dusty bottles of Madeira brought years before from New England;
and how we brewed a waggish punch from the output of our rival's own
distillery. You know how they were driven presently about our cleanly
streets, every dooryard raked spick and span against their coming, and
were brought at last to the mills. You know how the Red Jacket, pent
to bursting from a providential thunder-storm of the night, blustered
down through the race with the pride of a Danube; how the saws sang,
the logs rolled, the teamsters shouted, and the commissioners admired.
You know, too, that the guests left before the waters abated or the
punch-bowl knew drought; and that by the same token we won our fight.
Does any of you in his inmost heart censure the pioneers for their
stratagem? I think not. They worked with what tools lay to their
hands, and the profit is their children's and their children's
children's."
He wisely left it to his listeners to point the parallel, and turned to
discuss the larger issues of the campaign. His canvass chanced among
one of the several battles waged over the national currency, a thorny
topic at best, but Shelby threw a life into the juiceless principles of
his theme which roused the dullest. At the last, referring to the
hardships a depreciated currency might entail on the nation's
pensioners, he turned to the Hon. Seneca Bowers as if his Grant-like
figure typified the great war's heroism, and delivered an impassioned
eulogy upon the soldier dead. It was naturally, convincingly done, and
the audience was loath to find it his peroration.
There was no doubt of his sweeping triumph. With its formal close the
meeting transformed itself spontaneously into a reception, and, under
the spell of his eloquence still, men prophesied that his brilliant
career would halt not short of the governorship. Mrs. Hilliard would
be satisfied with nothing less than the presidency.
"The world his oyster," said Bernard Graves. He had pocketed a sheaf
of stenographic notes, with which he had busied himself during the
latter part of Shelby's speech, and mounted a bench with Ruth, the
better to watch the crowd surge round the foot of the platform. "Shall
we go now?" he asked at length.
Ruth turned from the scene with shining eyes.
"I promised I would tell him what I thought," she answered.
"You promised Shelby!"
"He called the other day—after you had gone. He talks well of
politics. I was interested."
Bernard Graves swallowed something unpalatable.
"And the speech?" he said. "What do you think?"
"That it was remarkable—even brilliant, as they're saying."
"Great is buncombe."
"Don't," she begged. "Why spoil it for me? If nothing more, it proves
him a born orator, who can do what he will with men. I believe in him."
Shelby approached them presently, with the melting of the throng, and
Graves had to listen to an antiphony of praise, sung by Ruth and Mrs.
Hilliard. In a lull he asked Shelby if he admired the oratorical
methods of General Garfield.
"Eh!" said Shelby, abruptly.
"Your manner suggests his at times."
"Yes—oh, yes. I see. Powerful speaker, Garfield. No bad model, you
know."
"Yes, I know," Graves answered.
Shelby turned again to the circle of women, and Graves left the
building. A few minutes later he entered the Whig office and made
his way to Sprague's cluttered sanctum.
"Volney," he announced, as the editor peered genially from underneath
the green drop-light, "I want to browse in your file of the
Congressional Record. And you've Garfield's Works down here, too,
haven't you?"
CHAPTER VI
Shelby stretched himself awake and contentedly surveyed his bachelor
bedroom in the Tuscarora House. He had boarded at this establishment
upward of five years, and his chamber had been decorated and, to a
degree, furnished in accord with his notions of elegant comfort. The
wall paper was a pattern which William Morris and his disciples would
have writhed to behold,—a hideous terra-cotta ground overrun with
meaningless scrolls and stiff garlands of roses of an unearthly pink.
There were stuffy maroon lambrequins above the window casements, and
two large blue vases, containing many-dyed plumes of pampas grass,
flanked like rigid sentinels a pseudo-marble clock upon the truly
marble mantelpiece which somehow suggested a mausoleum falling to
decay; while the blue motive was further emphasized by a plush
photograph album, with a little mirror let into its cover, standing in
a metallic holder on the bureau, whose sombre walnut matched the bed
and chairs. The pictures included a chromo, depicting an impossible
castle set in an equally impossible landscape, a print or two of race
horses, a lithograph of a poker game in supposably high life, and a
photogravure of a painting familiar to the habitues of a great
metropolitan hotel, popularly fancied in the country to be daring in
the extreme. At first sight of the original, over the rim of a
cocktail, Shelby had been fired with the resolve to own some sort of
copy, and even now, after several years of possession, he esteemed it
one of the world's masterpieces of pictorial art.
He dressed himself in the same content which had flushed his waking
revery. The plaudits of last night's mass-meeting still rang
harmoniously in his ears, and the praise of Ruth Temple and Mrs.
Hilliard was sweeter in retrospect than it had been in reality. This
happy serenity bore him company through the bare echoing corridors of
the hotel to the office, to be heightened by the gratulations of the
landlord and the help, who seemed to feel that a vicarious honor had
been done the house, a most insinuating form of hero-worship which
attained its climax in the homage of the true-penny who set forth his
morning bitters on the bar.
Extended notices of the meeting had been telegraphed to the neighboring
cities by local correspondents, and Shelby ran through the newspaper
accounts in the cheerless dining room, which he thought to-day by no
means comfortless. There was a flattering deference in the manner of
the waitresses, and the lessening of their pert familiarity told him,
more plainly perhaps than anything else, that he had become a
personage. He failed to remind them that the oatmeal was burned, the
rolls soggy, and the coffee reminiscent of chicory. He ate all that
was set before him, and was still content. The hotel barber-shop
seemed a blithe spot indeed, as he sat for his daily shave, and the
admiring barber a prince of good fellows. Sweet also were the
greetings of the market-place, as, cigar in mouth, he sauntered through
Main Street to his law office. All his paths were pleasantness and
peace.
The first discordant note was struck, oddly enough, by his faithful
satellite, William Irons, who, at his employer's entrance, abruptly
left off an attempt to coax his red shock into lovelocks, slid his
pocket mirror under a heap of papers, and fell to hammering the
typewriter with unnatural energy. Shelby accepted the subterfuge, and
wished him a hearty good morning.
"Did you attend the rally, William?" he inquired, as he slit the
envelopes of his morning's mail.
"Yep," said William Irons.
"Everybody seemed pleased?"
"Nope."
"No?" Shelby repeated, lifting his eyes. "And who was disgruntled?"
"The Widow Weatherwax."
"Ah! That's unfortunate," returned Shelby, blandly. "What is the
widow's grievance?"
"She's put out because you told a story makin' light of drinkin' punch.
She belongs to all the temp'rance societies doin' business, you know."
"No; I didn't know."
"And she says none of her church 'll vote for you after your
countenancin' such a cryin' sin."
"Her list of cardinal sins is extensive."
"Yep," agreed William. "Won't even let me play my fiddle in the house.
Says it's a vanity."
"I'd forgotten that you had gone to live with her."
"Do chores for my keep," explained the clerk. "Have codfish three
times a day, Monday morning to Saturday night, and no warm victuals
Sundays. Makes me keep my fiddle in the barn and play it behind the
woodpile."
Shelby laughed, and sought to woo back his mood of charity toward all,
but it was futile. The widow's mite of hostile criticism had leavened
the whole lump with bitterness. Nevertheless, he bridled his tongue.
Work came hard for the moment, and his eyes strayed past his papers
through an open window and spied Ruth Temple's slender shape in the
lawn below. The dewy freshness of the morning seemed to touch her
youth as it did the asters and belated hollyhocks of the quaint garden
into which she passed as he watched. Then Bernard Graves suddenly cut
into the picture, and drew a newspaper from his pocket, directing her
attention to something which amused him. But Ruth did not laugh.
Shelby clearly saw her color change.
A heavy step outside his door heralded the coming of the Hon. Seneca
Bowers. The county leader was in no mood for idle words, and looked as
Grant may have looked when about to pass judgment on a disgraced
soldier.
"Seen the Whig?" he asked curtly, when William Irons had been
despatched to the post-office.
"The Whig! No, I don't take it."
"I'd advise you to subscribe."
Shelby's face sobered with a premonition of misfortune.
"What's to pay now?" he asked.
Bowers struck open a copy of Volney Sprague's newspaper, and with
stubby rigid thumb guided the candidate's glance to an editorial.
"Read that, sir."
His tone was a new thing in their intercourse, but without remark
Shelby read:—
"AN ELOQUENT THIEF"
"Before a crowded mass-meeting last evening, Calvin Ross Shelby,
congressional candidate for the suffrages of an intelligent people,
stultified alike his hearers and himself. We shall not dignify his
specious appeal to local pride with the easy exposure of its fallacy;
the victory were too cheap; but since he glibly sought to establish a
parallel between his own questionable political methods and the
legendary deeds of the founders of our community, we too will frame
from his eloquence a parallel which we commend to the orator and to his
electors. In the newspaper business we call it the deadly parallel.
"Do you realize what this "When you can enlarge
talk about the dollar means, if your farm by changing the
true? It means that all you figures in your deeds; when
need do to increase the acreage your dairymaid can make more
of your farm is to change butter and cheese by watering
the figures in your title deeds; the milk; when you can have
it means that your creameries more cloth by decreasing your
will yield a better product if yardstick one-half; when you
you water the milk; it means can sell more tons of merchandise
that when the housewife shops by shortening your pound
she will buy more linen, or one-half,—then, and not until
gingham, or calico, if the then, can you increase the value
merchant moves the brass tacks of your property or labor by
of his counter yard measure decreasing your standard of
nearer together." values."
CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,
Faneuil Hall, Boston,
September 10, 1878.
"These fanatics say that if "But this is the first time I
foreign nations don't want the ever heard a financial philosopher
sort of money we choose to express his gratitude that we
coin they can go without, and have a currency of such bad
that we should be glad that repute that other nations will not
they don't. We've some receive it; he is thankful that it
other things that foreigners is not exportable. We have
don't want. We've peaches a great many commodities in
with the yellows, and weeviled such a condition that they are
wheat, and rancid butter, and not exportable. Mouldy flour,
ancient eggs, but I've yet to rusty wheat, rancid butter,
meet a farmer who wants to damaged cotton, addled eggs, and
corner the market. They spoiled goods generally are not
remind me of a town that was exportable. But it never
moved to build a gallows occurred to me to be thankful for
because all its neighbors had this putrescence. It is related
them. I don't need to add in a quaint German book of
that it was not an American humor that the inhabitants of
town. And one of the wise Schildeberg, finding that other
city fathers was so carried away towns, with more public spirit
by his patriotism that he tried than their own, had erected
to make the council pass a gibbets within their precincts,
resolution that the gallows be resolved that the town of
reserved for that town's Schildeberg should also have a
inhabitants exclusively." gallows; and one patriotic member
of the town council offered a
CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. resolution that the benefits of
this gallows should be reserved
exclusively for the inhabitants
of Schildeberg."
JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,
House of Representatives,
June 15, 1870.
"If each grave had a voice "If each grave had a voice
to tell us what its silent tenant to tell us what its silent tenant
last saw and heard on earth, we last saw and heard on earth, we
might stand, with uncovered might stand, with uncovered
heads, and hear the whole story heads, and hear the whole story
of the war. We should hear of the war. We should hear
that one perished when the first that one perished when the first
great drops of the crimson great drops of the crimson
shower began to fall, when the shower began to fall, when the
darkness of that first disaster at darkness of that first disaster at
Manassas fell like an eclipse on Manassas fell like an eclipse on
the nation; that another died the nation; that another died
of disease while wearily waiting of disease while wearily waiting
for winter to end; that this one for winter to end; that this one
fell on the field, in sight of the fell on the field, in sight of the
spires of Richmond, little dreaming spires of Richmond, little dreaming
that the flag must be carried that the flag must be carried
through three more years of through three more years of
blood before it should be planted blood before it should be planted
in that citadel of treason; and in that citadel of treason; and
that one fell when the tide of that one fell when the tide of
war had swept us back till the war had swept us back till the
roar of rebel guns shook the roar of rebel guns shook the
dome of the capitol, and dome of yonder capitol, and
re-echoed in the chambers of the re-echoed in the chambers of the
Executive mansion. We should Executive mansion. We should
hear mingled voices from the hear mingled voices from the
Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the
Chickahominy, and the James, Chickahominy, and the James,
solemn voices from the Wilderness, solemn voices from the Wilderness,
and triumphant shouts from and triumphant shouts from
the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, the Shenandoah, from Petersburg,
and the Five Forks, mingled and the Five Forks, mingled
with the wild acclaim of with the wild acclaim of
victory and the sweet chorus of victory and the sweet chorus of
returning peace." returning peace."
CALVIN ROSS SHELBY. JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD,
Arlington, Va.,
May 30,1868.
"Of these three passages, rightly thought by Calvin Ross Shelby's
audience the most telling of his speech, the first and second are
unmistakably plagiarisms of ideas, while the third, differing from its
original in but one telltale, damning word, is shameless, flat-footed
theft. Either of the first two offences committed singly might be
unconscious; conjoined they betray deliberation; united with the third
they 'smell to heaven.' It is high time for the voters of this
congressional district to ask themselves the question. Shall we vote
for a thief?"
"Well, sir, well?" exploded Bowers at last.
Shelby tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
"It's well done."
"Well done!" Bowers dropped one of his infrequent oaths. "Have you
nothing else to say?"
"Yes; it's true, more or less."
"You admit it?"
"Keep cool. It was this way: I was pressed for time when I prepared my
speech,—you know that,—and it occurred to me to adapt one or two of
Garfield's illustrations. I've studied him some, and he said many
things that fit in nowadays as well as they ever did. Plenty of
speakers quarry there I guess. I honestly meant to give him the credit
of that soldier business in my peroration, but somehow the quotation
marks were lost in the shuffle. There was but one chance in a thousand
that anybody would notice."
"Somebody did," growled Bowers, and spat our his mangled cigar.
"Yes; I ran against a man with a memory."
"It wasn't on the square, Ross. It'll hurt you."
Shelby eyed him shrewdly.
"You read speeches in Washington that I wrote," he reminded.
"That's different. Lots of congressmen do that,—even senators.
They're not posted on everything."
"No," Shelby agreed, with an irony too subtle for Bowers; "they
certainly are not. However, there's no need to borrow trouble over
this thing. People will laugh a little, say it was a good speech,
wherever I got it, and vote the straight party ticket despite Bernard
Graves."
"Graves," said Bowers. "What has he to do with it?"
"Everything; he's the little joker with the memory."
Bowers whistled.
"What is he after?"
Shelby jerked his head toward the Temple doorstep where Bernard still
lingered.
"After her."
CHAPTER VII
"Humor a silk stocking according to his crotchet, that's my maxim,"
submitted Bowers as they threshed the matter out in its latest aspect.
"I can't see its application to Graves. He's outside politics; hates
the very name, they say."
"Practical politics is applied human nature. If a rule is sound in
politics, it will work anywhere this side of the pearly gates. Graves
may not care a tinker's dam for politics, but evidently he does get
queasy when another man's ideas are misappropriated. Perhaps that's
his crotchet. Writes himself, doesn't he?"
"Some rubbish or other," returned Shelby, contemptuously.
"That's where he is susceptible, to my thinking. I don't cotton to
your woman theory. I say leave women out of politics. So conciliate
him; humor his crotchet."
"I can't see why I should kotow to him, or what further harm he can
do," said the candidate, but he deferred to Bowers's judgment. "I'll
look him up this afternoon," he agreed; "though I've no stomach for the
job. I never liked the cuss."
He abundantly appreciated this long-standing antipathy as he cast about
for some common ground of interest in the little reception-room of the
house shared by Bernard Graves and his mother. It seemed to the
waiting caller a drab and lifeless home, uninteresting in its
appointments, and out of keeping with the wealth known to have been
inherited by the widow and her son. The young man's study was visible
down the vista of a series of low-ceiled apartments, and Shelby saw
that it was crammed with books. None of the many pictures could cope
in dash and color with his own collection and, what seemed to him
singular in a Protestant home, they were chiefly of the Madonna; all in
all, a tame assortment beside his copy of the secular masterpiece in
the great metropolitan hotel. Over one of the crowded bookcases was
the cast of a winged woman. It was armless and headless, and Shelby
wondered by what accident it had become so damaged, and why it was not
banished to the attic.
The maid came presently to tell him that Mr. Bernard had gone for a
walk to the golf links.
Shelby was relieved. He felt ill at ease in this queer drab dwelling,
and doubtful of the course he ought to pursue with its tenant. It
would be another matter altogether in the open air. Returning to his
law office, he bade William Irons to telephone the Tuscarora House
livery-stable to send around his horse and buggy.
At the farm-house on the outskirts which served the golf devotees for a
headquarters Shelby was told that Graves had gone yet farther, taking
the direction of the Hilliard quarries—geologizing bent, the speaker
thought. Unassociated with practical results, this had always
presented itself to Shelby as a trivial pursuit akin to botany,
embroidery, and other employments distinctly feminine. He forebore
comment, however, and presently struck down a road which wound into a
little suburb peopled by Polish quarry-workers. It was essentially an
alien community in whose straggling streets and lanes one heard English
but seldom. Tow-headed children, shy elves peeping from odd
hiding-places, swarmed a half-dozen and upward to a house. Work was
the key-note of Little Poland, as it was called. While the men toiled
in the sandstone quarries the women did a man's stint in the fields of
the outlying farms, and bore more children. Childbirth was a mere
detail in these thick-waisted women's lives; some hours, a day perhaps,
and they were stooping in the fields again. And the children early put
shoulder to the wheel; those too small for the fields begged food in
the streets of the town. Little Poland was virtually a fief of Joe
Hilliard's. Men, women, and elves looked up to him as to a benevolent
feudal lord, and the naturalized males voted Joe Hilliard's party
ticket with mechanical precision.
The politician approached the quarries with an interested eye. Among
his many irons in the fire he had acquired part ownership in another
quarry to the westward, like this bordering the towpath of the canal.
Bowers held the controlling interest, though neither his name nor
Shelby's figured prominently in its management. They called it the
Eureka Sandstone Company.
Shelby tied his horse near the office, and, putting his head among the
morning-glories curtaining an open window, stated his errand to
Hilliard, whose vast bulk was humped ludicrously upon a high stool.
The big fellow stopped thumbing his ledger, greeted him with a jovial
shout, and directed him toward a stratum of rock which the workmen had
recently unearthed.
"Look it over," he called after him. "It promises to pan out
scrumptious. We struck A-1 rock seven feet below the surface."
"That discounts the Eureka," said Shelby. "We've never done better
than twelve."
He picked his way through the yards, the hammers of the stone dressers
clinking out a not unmusical chorus from every shed, and skirting the
docks where the ponderous cranes swung the great slabs to the canal
boats, scrambled down a rough roadway into the quarry proper amidst all
the hurly-burly of the teamsters and the hoarse steam drills. The
walls of sandstone rose sheer around him, sliced down by the blasts
like sugar with a scoop. Some of the formation was not unlike sugar
little refined; some, lighter, with streaks of grayish pink, like sides
of bacon; and some, a rich deep brown which architects specified the
country over, was said to have no equal the world around save only in
Japan. In the newly uncovered tract Shelby spied Bernard Graves
pecking about with a little hammer.
"Prospecting for gold?" he asked jocularly.
"No; fucoids."
"Eh?"
"Fossils, you know; a sort of seaweed. The only kind we can discover
in this formation."
"My little freshwater college wasn't strong on the sciences," said
Shelby, speculating whether this particular crotchet required humoring.
As the young man's own interest in the topic seemed languid, he decided
against this course and frankly told him that he wanted to talk with
him. "Suppose we move away from the clatter of the drills," he
suggested.
Graves assented, and they shifted from beneath the overhanging bank of
sandy loam to the shade of an unused derrick.
"Smoke?" queried the politician, affably.
Graves declined a cigar, explaining, "I merely take a cigarette now and
then, usually after dinner."
Shelby's contempt for cigarettes was boundless, but he dissembled his
opinion, and lit the strongest cigar in his case.
"It's up to me, Bernard," he confessed with a laugh. "It's my move,
and I'm right on the spot like a little man, though humble pie isn't my
favorite tidbit by a large majority."
"Meaning what?" asked Graves, without animation.
Behind the candidate's urbane mask rioted a lust to mar and maim, but
his political self explained blandly:—
"Meaning that your checkmate in this morning's Whig was well played."
"I didn't write that editorial."
"I know you didn't. It had the Volney Sprague earmarks. But you did
what is more important,—you inspired it."
"Well?"
"Just this: in a general way I admit its justness, and come frankly to
tell you so."
"Why should you trouble yourself?"
Shelby throttled his mounting ire.
"Because," he returned slowly, "I recognize your ability and want your
support. If you mean to interest yourself in politics, I can be of
service to you. I know, of course, you don't think politicians are
necessarily scamps."
"I judge no class of men so summarily," Graves opened his mouth to
protest. "That is too much like Burke's indictment against a whole
people, you know."
The allusion was not familiar, but Shelby said, "Exactly," with labored
calm. He fancied that he detected a note of condescension, and
resented it passionately.
"The average politician isn't such a bad lot," he went on. "His
methods don't always square with the Decalogue, but he means well, and
in the long run does well. I don't say this to pat myself on the back.
You know me. I'm a plain, practical man, and try to steer by
common-sense. If I'm elected to Congress, I'll do my best to make the
district proud of me, and I'll promise you personally, right here and
now, that I will deliver no man's speeches but my own."
Graves wished that he would make an end of his excuses and go away.
The whole episode bored him, and his mind wandered even while he
listened. He was thinking that that muscular Pole directing the
planting of a steam drill below the sand-bank a rather statuesque
figure for these prosaic days. The man had jumped upon the tripod of
the drill in ordering the work, and loomed large and competent. Graves
thought him in feature not unlike his great compatriot John Sobieski,
and tried to picture him in the Polish king's armor which he remembered
to have seen in some European collection. Shelby's silence recalled
him.
"Really, there's no necessity for you to explain or promise anything to
me," he rejoined coldly. "I'm not in politics, and I don't care to be."
Shelby had reached his last ditch.
"You think you're too damned good for it," he broke out. "It's the
lily-fingered people of your stripe who make reform a byword and a
laughing-stock."
Graves's face flamed, and he shrank inwardly with a scholar's
repugnance from the rencounter. Outwardly, however, he was truculent.
"Such bar-room personalities are characteristic of you," he retorted.
"Your place—"
But it was fated that Shelby should not learn his place. A sharp
warning cry from a workman heralded the crumbling fall of a great
section of the bank overhanging the drill which Graves had idly
watched, and, as idly, watched still. A dreamer of habit, his will
failed immediately to rally to the naked fact and its demands. It was
unreal, a picture, a play, a poet's conception of chaos—that was it!
The thing was Dantesque or Miltonic. The gaping rent, the jumbled
rocks, the thick spurt of steam issuing from the buried drill, it was
all tumultuous, primeval; and that grimy workman, heaving aside the
dirt and scrambling to the air, was suggestive of Milton's earth-born
"tawny lion, pawing to get free."
"Good God, man, wake up!" Shelby shook him roughly by the arm and
dragged him toward the scene of the catastrophe. "There are men under
that heap."
A little knot of Polish laborers forthwith congregated, ox-eyed and
inert. Shelby tore a shovel from a paralyzed hand and began to dig,
ripping out crisp oaths at their stupidity.
"Find shovels for these cattle," he commanded.
By signs Graves roused the unnerved men to action, but he could find no
sort of tool for himself, and stood empty-handed apart, conscious of
unfitness. The politician, burrowing like a woodchuck, showered him
with red earth.
"English? Anybody speak English?" he panted without stopping. "How
many are under here?"
One of the workmen understood, chattered excitedly with his fellows,
and held up one soiled finger.
"Ein," he said. "Kiska, he vork here."
Shelby's shovel grated on the cylinder of the buried drill. From
underneath its tripod protruded the booted leg of a man.
"Go easy, boys," he cautioned.
With his own hands he skilfully uncovered the victim's head and trunk.
Graves saw that it was the giant of his day-dream. The man's rugged
face was earth-stained and still; his great chest motionless. Shelby
mastered the situation with a glance, thrust his hand into the coarse
shirt, and felt for the heart.
"There's life in him," he announced. "Over with him into the shade."
Between them all they bore him to a shelf of level rock. "Off with his
shirt," said Shelby to his helper, and they two stripped the body to
the waist. It was the torso of a gladiator. Shelby rolled the garment
and thrust it underneath the bare back below the shoulders. "It's not
high enough," he decided instantly. "Something else—a coat—anything."
Kiska's compatriots could not have complied had they understood, being
coatless to a man. Bernard Graves took off a new golf coat which
Shelby ruthlessly crumpled and stuffed into place. An instant later he
was astride the Pole's hips, his hands grasping the powerful chest on
either side. Bracing his elbows, Shelby bore his whole weight forward,
counted three, sat back upon his knees, counted two, and so continued,
down "one-two-three," up "one-two," with the quiet assurance of a
surgeon.
The younger man watched his every movement with wondering respect. The
operator interrupted his meditations.
"Get hold of his tongue with your handkerchief," he ordered. "That's
right—hold it by the tip. On one side—on one side. Now take both
his wrists and pin them above his head—so."
All the while the steady pressure and relaxation went on, compelling
the lungs to their function. Presently came the faintest quiver of a
nostril, and Shelby smiled.
"Kiska will do his own breathing pretty soon," he said. Presently he
suggested: "Better fetch Hilliard now. And have him 'phone Doc
Crandall to come to Kiska's house in Little Poland. I'll take Kiska
home in my rig when his bellows gets well under way."
Graves did his errand, outlining the disaster and rescue as he hurried
with the quarry owner to the scene. Joe Hilliard was divided between
sympathy for Kiska, whom he declared was the pick of his men, and
admiration for Shelby's presence of mind.
"He's got gumption, that man," he exclaimed, "gumption, simon-pure."
Graves's own impressions were mixed, and the stress of the accident
passed, he resumed his ruined coat with a vague sense of personal
slight. Something of this sort prompted him to say rather
patronizingly to Shelby as they parted:—
"You made skilful use of that method of resuscitation. Where in the
world did you pick it up?"
"Every schoolboy knows it," returned the politician, shortly; "or every
schoolboy should."
CHAPTER VIII
Shelby's forecast of the effect of the Whig's exposure was
brilliantly fulfilled. People did laugh over it and say that it was a
good speech, whatever its source. In popular conception literary theft
is at worst a venial sin whose very iniquity is doubtful unless found
out. The culprit's average fellow-townsman accepted the incident as
fresh evidence of his acknowledged cleverness and promptly forgot it in
the nine days' wonder over his exploit at the Hilliard quarries.
The town's attitude mirrored that of the congressional district and the
state. Volney Sprague's editorial occasioned some little paragraphing
here and there among up-state newspapers and by brief mention in
Associated Press despatches roused a metropolitan daily of opposite
political faith to one of the satirical thrusts for which it was
famous; whereupon one of its more serious contemporaries found a text
for a thunderous jeremiad on the decay of political morality. Yet
where one person read of Shelby's plagiarism, a score devoured the
sensational accounts of his rescue of Kiska, while of those who read
both, an illogical but human majority considered his atonement complete.
Sprague himself was disposed to gauge Shelby's vogue with the
groundlings as greater than before, and lamented it to Bernard Graves,
who fell wholly into his mood for once and deplored the fatuity of
popular judgment with unlooked-for warmth.
His friend listened with unqualified approval.
"Thank Heaven, you're beginning to take an interest in politics!" he
exclaimed.
The young man flushed.
"There are some things in this man's canvass one can't ignore," he
carefully explained, and tried to think he meant plagiarism.
He had not discussed recent happenings with Ruth Temple. When he took
her the Whig article the morning after the mass-meeting she had
displayed a disconcerting willingness to cloud the vital fact and
excuse Shelby. Indeed, he finally left with the disgusted conviction
that she had pilloried not the sinner but himself,—a not uncommon
outcome in a clash of wits between a woman and a man. After that, he
told himself, she might form what fantastic opinion of this freebooter
she chose without let or hindrance from him, and at the same time he
resolved that she should see less of him. The latter resolution proved
as flimsy as a New Year's vow, but while it needed less than a smile to
whistle him back, the whole distasteful subject of Shelby became
tacitly taboo.
As Ruth was a very woman, often saying less what she really thought
than what she knew would stir dissent, her innermost opinions were less
stable than he fancied. She had not had speech with Shelby since the
mass-meeting, but he had found time that night to ask her to drive with
him, and she anticipated the outing with a zest whose disproportion to
its surface cause she did not analyze.
On the appointed afternoon she saw his horse and buggy brought from the
Tuscarora House and hitched at the curb below his office, and as it
lacked little of the hour set she thrust home the last hat-pin and
stood jacketed and gloved by a window, waiting his coming. The hour
struck and brought no Shelby, though punctuality was the first article
of his creed. Out in the drowsy thoroughfare a sprinkling-cart jarred
heavily past, spurting ineffectually at the yellow dust which rose
perversely under its baptism and surged beneath the awnings of the
shops. It was Saturday, universal shopping-day in the farmland, and a
ramshackle line of rustic vehicles—buggies, democrats, sulkies, lumber
wagons—with graceless plough horses slumbering in the thills,
stretched in ragged alignment down the curb. Shelby's smart turnout
seemed fairly urban by contrast, and Ruth saw that it met with the
critical approval of the loungers.
A quarter of an hour slipped by; no Shelby. His cob fretted at the
autumn flies and whinnied to be gone. A half-hour elapsed, unfruitful;
an hour. Then did Queen Ruth, on whose imperious nod a little world
had hung from babyhood, perceive the recreant come calmly down from his
law office in company with some creature of relatively common clay,
shake hands, chat further, shake hands again, take up his reins amid an
interchange of badinage with the bystanders, and so, gossiping still,
jog deliberately on—to her!
She spun on her heel as he turned in at the drive and rang for her maid.
"If Mr. Shelby should call," she directed, wrenching at her gloves,
"say I'm not at home."
Shelby's occupations in the meantime had been absorbing. In the course
of an earnest conference at the Tuscarora House the evening of the
quarry accident, the Hon. Samuel Bowers had removed his cigar to let
fall a sententious observation.
"As long as an all-wise Providence saw fit to dump that sand-bank on
one of the Polacks," said he, "I call it a piece of downright Ross
Shelby luck that it fell on Kiska."
"I should have worked as hard over a dago," rejoined Shelby; "or a dog
either, I guess."
"M-yes; I reckon. But you're not complaining that it wasn't some dago
who doesn't know a ballot from a bunch of garlic? No, I reckon not."
His eyes twinkled, and Shelby flickered a responsive grin. "Note a
rule for candidates: When about to effect the spectacular rescue of one
of the toiling masses which are the bone and sinew of this fair land of
ours, pick a man who holds a block of the foreign vote right in the
pocket of his jeans."
It was perhaps appreciation of this aphorism's significance, perhaps
sheer abundance of the milk of human kindness, perhaps a harmonious
blending of both, which inspired Shelby's warm welcome to Kiska as he
was about to leave his office to join Ruth Temple.
"You shouldn't have come out so soon, Kiska," he protested, urging the
big Pole to a chair, and bringing him a glass of water. "Did you walk
all the way from Little Poland to see me?"
"I valked," answered Kiska, simply, his face working. "I vould like to
haf roon, Meester Shelby."
"Oh, I wouldn't run much just yet," laughed Shelby, kindly, trying to
head off the man's expression of gratitude. "Have another drink?
Perhaps you'd prefer some whiskey?"
Kiska declined, and harked back to his message.
"I vould like to haf roon to tank you, Meester Shelby. I got vife to
tank you. I got mooch cheeldren to tank you. I no taalk good. Dat
Eengleesh hard,—so? Eef I no taalk, I tink. I tink all day: Tank
you, Meester Shelby, tank you, Meester Shelby."
"You speak English very well," said Shelby, patting him on the
shoulder. "But you mustn't say any more about the matter."
He led him presently to talk of the quarry-workers and their families,
their wages, their hours, their recreation, their parish church, their
priest, their school; for Little Poland was sufficient unto itself; and
Kiska saw that he questioned with sympathy and understanding, and was
pleased. On the dial of his office clock Shelby noted the hour of his
appointment come and go, and from his window he caught a fleeting
glimpse of Ruth at hers. She wore his favorite hat, with a gleam of
red, which became her dark hair so well, and he divined that she had
put it on because of him. He longed to be out and away with her
between the autumn hedgerows, but there sat Kiska, garrulous of Poland
over seas and Little Poland by the quarries, and to Kiska the
politician inclined a patient ear.
The Pole rose at last, after a delighted hour, and Shelby saw his eye
light on a package of campaign lithographs of himself, which had come
that morning from the printers.
"Want one?" he asked.
Kiska exploded in incoherent gratitude.
"Take several," said Shelby, snapping an elastic band around a sheaf of
the pictures. "Give 'em to your friends to hang in their front
windows. That's what we do with 'em in town, you know. It's American.
You're all good Americans in Little Poland, aren't you?" A thought
struck him, and from a roll of banknotes, destined for campaign uses,
he extracted a ten-dollar bill. "I dare say Joe Hilliard will pay your
doctor, Kiska," he went on, "but there'll be other things you'll want.
Winter's coming; buy the yellow-haired kids some shoes; get the wife a
warm dress. You can pay me when Poland gets its independence."
Kiska took the money. "I vould like to vork for you," he exclaimed.
"Would you?" laughed the politician. "I think perhaps you may some
day."
The minor social conventions, which, after all, are possibly the major
ones, were consistently ignored by Shelby.
"Not at home?" he repeated after Ruth's maid. "I guess you're
mistaken. I saw Miss Temple at the window as I drove in the gate.
Just look around a bit, and you'll find her."
He walked calmly past the bewildered girl to the drawing-room. In the
centre of the apartment stood Ruth, her cheeks waving crimson, like a
poppy field astir.
"Angry?" said the man.
Ruth waited till the open-mouthed maid had retreated down the hall.
"I'm furious," she answered, and looked the part.
"Think I'm a boor?"
She could not trust herself to reply. Had he dared smile then, she
would have swept by him, but he was wholly grave.
"I'll tell you what you're thinking," he said quietly. "You are
thinking that I have fallen short of your notion of me. You listened
the other night at the court-house and thought kindly things. Then you
were told by my enemies that I had used in part what was not my own.
You were vexed, for it impeached your judgment of character. Then I
failed of my appointment, and did you a more grievous wrong—I piqued
your woman's vanity."
Ruth gasped.
"Your effrontery is—is fascinating."
Shelby's eyes hinted a smile. She had said what she thought.
"I shall not defend myself to you against the charges of the Whig,"
he went on. "I doubt even if I shall answer them publicly. Greater
men than I have had their names blackened in a campaign, and deemed
silence the wisest answer. People don't ascribe many virtues to the
politician, but even he occasionally turns the other cheek. As for my
tardiness to-day—well, I could have avoided it."
"You admit it?" blazed Ruth.
"Yes. I had my choice."
"And you chose—" The shabby figure she had seen descend from Shelby's
office visualized itself sharply.
"Yes—poor devil—I chose Kiska."
Her mood veered, and she whirled impulsively toward him, all
womanliness and contrition.
"Forgive me. How could I know? I thought—I thought—"
"That it was some heeler with a vote to sell?"
Her face betrayed her.
"Forgive me," she repeated. "You would have done wrong to turn him
away because of me. I know of your noble deed—who does not? I am
proud of you, and wished to tell you so. I wanted to see you for
this—to praise your heroism. I've been your friend in that—that
other thing. I could see how the crowd, the exhilaration, the sense of
mastery, might lure one on. I looked at it dispassionately—with a
friend's eyes. I was loyal till I thought you held my friendship
lightly, and put politics before it. I own my mistake—my injustice."
Shelby had not dreamed of vindication so sweeping, and, with a word of
modest disclaimer, led the talk to pacific commonplace. It was too
late for the promised drive, and indeed neither of them thought of it
again till the door had shut between them.
In leaving, the man's glance was arrested by an object on the piano.
"What is that called?" he asked abruptly.
"The cast? That is my Victory—the famous Victory of Samothrace, which
suggested the poem everybody's reading. It's my despair. I've failed
at drawing it for years. The original is in the Louvre, and towers
gloriously over a staircase. I can shut my eyes and see it perfectly."
"Pretty old?" ventured Shelby.
"Oh, yes; it's an antique. See how ruffian Time has dealt with it."
The man walked slowly round the goddess, surveying her from every side.
"A day or two ago," he said simply, "I saw that image in a house, and,
in my ignorance, thought a servant had broken it. I wondered why the
people didn't pitch it out."
His tone went straight to her sympathy.
"Many are strangers in the kingdom of Art," she returned gently. "Most
of us must come to it like little children."
Shelby was silent for a moment. Then he said:—
"In Bernard Graves's opinion I am aesthetically dead—I believe those
were his words."
The girl started.
"I never repeated them," she protested.
"What," laughed Shelby, grimly, "has he told you that, too? He's
evidently fond of the phrase. Perhaps he is right. Yet I hope not.
I'd rather think I'm merely unborn. I am not a voluntary Ishmaelite.
I simply haven't had the chance to learn."
CHAPTER IX
A fault recognized, it was Ruth's nature to be lavish of atonement, and
by way of further expiation she consented a day or two later to make
one of a driving party of Mrs. Hilliard's to hear Shelby speak in a
village located "down north," as the local vernacular had it, near the
shore of Lake Ontario. Ruth cared little for Mrs. Hilliard. She saw
her through feminine eyes, and Mrs. Hilliard was not popular with
women. But Shelby had privily told her of the project and begged her
to accept.
"I had planned to rent the Tuscarora House tallyho and go with some
éclat," the lady lamented at the eleventh hour, "but the way people
have disappointed me is positively harrowing. There was Bernard
Graves—I pinned my childlike faith on him; but he sent regrets. And
Mr. and Mrs. Bowers. Wouldn't you think that they, of all people,
would wish to go? But no; Mrs. Bowers said it did her rheumatic
shoulder no good to traipse around nights,—that was her
expression,—and Mr. Bowers actually told me that he was too busy
organizing political meetings to want to attend them. Isn't he droll?
Then Mr. Hewett had a sermon to prepare; and Dr. Crandall had a case of
diphtheria to watch; and Volney Sprague—well, I really did not dare
ask him, he was so horrid in his paper about Mr. Shelby's splendid
speech. So one and all they began to make excuses, as the Bible says,
till it has simmered down to you, dear Ruth, and Joe, and Mr. Shelby,
and me."
"Oh," said Ruth, with misgiving.
"A sort of survival of the fittest, don't you know, as somebody or
other says. Was it Shakespeare? He really seems to have written all
the clever things."
"No," Ruth replied with gravity; "it wasn't Shakespeare."
"Really? I thought it sounded Shakespearian. Well, as I was telling
you, it has come to a jolly little company of four in my surrey, which,
after all, is perhaps nicer than a dozen in a tallyho, though of course
it won't impress the voters as much."
Ruth's eyebrows arched.
"Is that the object of our going?"
"What an idea, my dear!" Nevertheless, she colored. "We'll start
early enough for a fish supper at the Lakeview Inn," she rattled on.
"You know how good their fish suppers are. And perhaps we shall have
time to stop at the camp-meeting of those ridiculous Free Methodists
which is in full swing at the grove behind the hotel. Joe says that it
will be the last night of the camp, and equal to Barnum's Three Rings
and Mammoth Hippodrome. Doesn't that sound just like Joe? I'm sure we
can manage to see something of it. Mr. Shelby's meeting won't begin
till eight-thirty and Eden Centre can't be ten minutes' drive from the
grove."
She sowed without conception of the harvest. The pleasuring so idly
planned, the religionists whose vagaries provoked her laughter, were in
time to bulk huge in a clairvoyant light of revelation.
It fell a ripe autumn day with the haze mantling the orchards like the
purple of a plum, a day in whose magic atmosphere even common things
wore an air of poetry. The very canal was transfigured.
"There is a bit of Holland," said Ruth, as they crossed the waterway on
the ragged hem of the town. "If this were Europe and the courthouse
over there could triple its age and take another name, this bridge
would swarm with the 'personally conducted' admiring the view. I don't
wonder that artists are beginning to paint the canal."
"They say a house-boat party came through last week," Mrs. Hilliard
remarked.
"Tied their scow near my place," put in her husband. "Had the hold all
rigged up with a piano and curtains and rugs. Harum-scarum looking lot
of men and women you wouldn't trust to paint a barn. They overran the
quarries and made pictures of the Polacks."
"Bernard Graves met them," Ruth added. "They told him that Little
Poland was a second Barbizon for peasant models, with an 'Angelus' or a
'Man with the Hoe' around every corner."
Joe Hilliard guffawed.
"Guess they meant the woman with the hoe; she's the agriculturalist in
the Polack matrimonial team."
Shelby was discreetly backward in these quicksands which the quarry
owner did not fear to tread, but the canal stirred his imagination,
too, and in a characteristic way.
"It takes seven figures to express last year's tonnage down the Ditch
to tidewater," he told them; "stone, lumber, food. Why it dumped over
three-quarters of a million tons of food alone into New York City's
maw. Yet they say it's antiquated and can't compete with the
railroads. What else has kept the railroads within bounds? Ask any
Tuscarora shipper what happens yearly when navigation closes. Abandon
it! We'll see. The canal counties swing a pretty vote in this state."
Hilliard laughed.
"Think you're addressing the Legislature, Ross?"
"I heard you address the Assembly once," Ruth said. "I was a Vassar
girl then, visiting Albany friends. You spoke about the canals, and
the other members stopped gossiping and writing letters to listen."
"The canal is a part of my religion," Shelby answered.
They crossed the ancient shore line of the lake, the Ridge,
so-called,—successive highway of the Iroquois, the pioneer, the
stage-coach, and the ubiquitous trolley,—and caught presently the
distant shimmer of Ontario, sail-dotted, intensely blue. That first
glimpse of the inland sea always stirred Ruth to the depths. It was
not the romance of New France alone which it evoked—that picturesque
procession of redmen, coureurs de bois, friars, Jesuits, soldiers of
fortune, La Salle, Frontenac, the conquering English, the
conqueror-conquering American—but the mystery of the vaster tidal sea
toward which it drew, whose supremest witchery none may know save the
yearning inland-born.
"Calm as a puddle to-day," said Joe. "You can almost hear the Canucks
singing 'God Save the Queen.'"
Dusk had set in when they left the deserted piazzas of the summer hotel
for the camp-meeting in the grove. The flare of torches wavered afar
between the tree boles, and above the lapping of the waves walled a
drear hymn.
Mrs. Hilliard skipped girlishly in the woodland path.
"They've begun, they've begun," she exulted. "We shall see the fun
after all."
"It's too early for the meeting in the big tent," Shelby told Ruth;
"but if you've never seen anything of the kind, the scene which goes
before will be quite as curious."
Skirting a makeshift village of tiny tents and shanties they issued to
a torch-lit clearing in the wood whose central object was the greater
tent, which, frayed, weathered, and patched as it was, yet stood to
these zealots of an iron creed as the chosen tabernacle of a very God.
Its rough benches were empty now, but before its dingy portal swayed
and groaned a rapt circle of men and women, hand in hand, in whose
midst an old man with a prophet's head and a bigot's eye was gyrating
like a dervish as he mouthed the hackneyed phrases of the sanctified.
As the new-comers pressed among the bystanders hemming the inner circle
of the faithful, the performer with a last frantic whirl dropped
exhausted, and rolling down a slight declivity lay stark and deathlike
at their feet, his white beard and hair strewn with russet leaves.
Ruth recoiled with a shudder. The swaying circle redoubled its
incantations, and left him to his envied beatitude. Their indifference
seemed inhuman to the girl, and she would have stooped to the prostrate
figure but for Shelby's detaining hand.
"Merely the 'Power,' as they say," he whispered, adding cynically,
"Epilepsy can be feigned, you know."
She desisted, and a new actor waltzed rhythmically into the glare of
light. Her short rotund body writhing not unlike an Oriental dancer's,
the Widow Weatherwax had assumed the centre of the ring. The
sanctified were without sense of humor, but the unregenerate onlookers
were not proof against the comic aspects of emotional religion, and
from the dark outskirts rang a ribald laugh.
"Why doesn't that dreadful woman wear a corset?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard
in a stage whisper of Ruth, whose face went suddenly aflame.
"The widow would make the fortune of any Midway, Ross," Joe Hilliard
chuckled, digging Shelby in the ribs.
"Woe, woe, woe," chanted the widow, spurred to anathema by derision.
"Woe upon scorners! Woe upon them that sit in the seats of scorners!
'Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in
yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.'"
Scripture-quoting was reckoned among the fine arts in the widow's
circle, and an applauding chorus of Praise Gods and Amens greeted her
dexterous use of the beloved weapon. She rounded the chain once more
in her grotesque dance; then, suddenly spying the little group of her
neighbors peering through the girdle of the sanctified, she halted,
directly fronting them, and, singling out Mrs. Hilliard, who was
conspicuous in a red tailor-made gown, she transfixed her with her
beady eyes.
"Woe, woe, woe," she wailed again, rocking to and fro. "Woe upon
Babylon! 'Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the
habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of
every unclean and hateful bird!'"
The brethren thrilled at the well-understood allusion to the speaker's
abiding-place, while the outsiders, scenting a veiled scurrility,
craned to listen and to watch.
Secure of her audience, the widow paused as if waiting the descent of
the prophetic afflatus. Then:—
"'And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my
people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not
of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath
remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and
double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she
hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself,
and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she
saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no
sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and
mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire.'"
Ruth vacillated between fascination and disgust. The flickering
torches, the soughing wind, the lapping waves, the old, old words, lent
the denunciation a solemnity which transcended the bizarre mouthpiece.
She shook off the impression, however, and asked Shelby to take her
away.
"Yes; it's time to leave for the rally," he acquiesced. "I'll speak to
the Hilliards."
As they turned, they saw that Mrs. Hilliard's eyes were riveted on the
widow's in an hypnotic stare. In shrill singsong the woman was
declaiming:—
"'So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a
woman sit upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy, having
seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and
scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls,
having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations—'"
Whereupon Mrs. Hilliard suddenly stopped her ears and grovelled on her
knees full in the light of the torches, her shoulders quivering with
hysterical sobs. There was a ripple of sensation at the prominence of
the convert, and triumphant peals of "Saved by His precious blood,"
"Saved by the Lamb," "Look to Him, sister, look to Him," and the like.
Then big Joe Hilliard stolidly thrust himself into the ring, and,
raising the stricken woman, bore her away into the outer darkness.
Apart from the crowd, Hilliard shook his wife with rough kindness.
"Wake up, girl," he said. "Nightmare's over. I guess you need a dose
of camomile."
In the inky outskirts she presently threw off the obvious marks of her
hysteria, but by little signs another woman might read, Ruth saw hours
afterward that the spell possessed her still. Its gloom seemed to
overcast the entire evening. Either through insufficient advertising,
or the crass stupidity of the enfranchised of Eden Centre, who thought
less of their political enlightenment than the noisy saving of their
souls, Shelby's meeting proved a pitiful fiasco. Hardly a score had
gathered in the low-ceiled schoolhouse, fetid with reeking kerosene
lamps and wilting humanity; and of this beggarly handful two-thirds
were women. Shelby assumed a cheerful front, declaring that a small
audience so assembled was deserving of his best, but hewing to this
line was another matter. Womankind are proverbially indifferent to
politics; and a stouter resolution than his would have flagged in the
presence of that preoccupied feminine two-thirds, whose eyes were
centred on Mrs. Hilliard's tailor-made gown and Ruth Temple's fall hat.
Used as he was to easy victory, this first disappointment of his
campaign seemed bodeful of evil days to come.
CHAPTER X
Yet when mischief speedily befell, it wore so curious a guise that
Shelby missed its import and laughed it aside for a random fling of
jocund Fate. It began with a publisher's announcement of a volume
containing the collected poems of the author of the admired, imitated,
parodied, and derided ode on the "Victory of Samothrace," anonymous no
longer, but the avowed offspring of Bernard Graves. Dazed,
incredulous, and slow to do him honor, the prophet's own country
advanced a theory of mistaken identity. But reluctant New Babylon had
soon to recognize the young man's vogue. Through its supposed advocacy
of woman suffrage the poem had all but founded a cult, and the
disclosure of its true author, after months of guesswork and
silly-season gush, bounced and ricochetted among the newspapers with
astonishing ado. With the Whig in the forefront the local press
began to echo the gossiping paragraphs and character sketches which,
true, half true, and of whole cloth, padded the lean columns of a
mediocre literary season, and New Babylon had faith. The last doubting
Thomas yielded when it became necessary to convey the celebrity's mail
to his home in a special bag; not even the ensuing plague of special
correspondents, biographical dictionary solicitors, photographers, and
worshipping pilgrims so stirred the local imagination; this surely was
fame!
To Ruth Temple, who by some sorcery guessed his secret before its
public revelation, Graves went with his laurels thick upon him.
"How does it feel to be a celebrity?" he said, meeting her volley of
questions collectively. "Much like a breakfast cereal, a patent
medicine, or a soap. Byron said that the first thing which sounded
like fame to him was the tidings that he was read on the banks of the
Ohio. It's different nowadays. The first taste usually comes from
seeing your name placarded on a dead wall between some equally
distinguished rolled oats and a new five-cent cigar. Personally I
think I first saw the 'gypsy' face to face when the Hon. Seneca Bowers
told me that save 'Betsey and I Are Out' he had read no poem but mine
in twenty years. That was my 'Ohio,' though of course Mrs. Hilliard's
request for an author's reading at the Culture Club was an annunciation
in itself. Am I becoming fabulously rich from my royalties? Alas! no;
I must buy too many presentation copies for people who fancy that I
obtain gratis really more than I know what to do with. Shall I write
for the stage? I could as easily write a cook book. Do I give my
autograph? Always, if a stamped envelope is enclosed. One of our
hardest-working presidents daily set apart a time for autographs; why
then should a popular writer pretend that it bores him? He is secretly
tickled, and probably collects autographs himself."
Ruth laughed, but denied that he had exhausted her questions.
"Why did you withhold your name from your masterpiece?" she asked.
"Partly because it was my masterpiece,—it would be false modesty to
deny that I know it,—and I had some notion of digging a pit for the
critics. But the main reason was to confound my Uncle Peter."
"I didn't know you had an uncle."
"I haven't in the flesh. 'Uncle Peter' is generic—a polite lumping
together of my chronic fault-finders within the family and without.
You know him. Both masculine and feminine, he's eternally an old
woman. Everybody knows Uncle Peter, the first to censure and the last
to praise. Now, as I've been his especial tidbit and awful example for
years, I had to school myself to the thought of snatching the daily
morsel of gossip from his mouth. The murder out, Uncle Peter's grief
is pitiful. How much sharper than a serpent's tooth is a prophecy of
evil unfulfilled! It's not that he considers I've gone to work,
incorrigible vagabond that I am; it's the fact that my intolerable
idling has produced money which sets his teeth on edge—money, the
golden calf of Uncle Peter's narrow idolatrous soul."
Ruth had no liking for his moments of acid mockery.
"Don't let Uncle Peter overshadow your friends," she warned.
"I'll not," promised the man. "And you—by what witchery of friendship
did you find me out?" He shifted his seat, seeking her eyes. "Ruth,
was it love?"
She did not answer immediately.
"Be my wife, Ruth," he said.
"It was not love," she replied simply.
It was one of the oddities of his temperament that at this moment he
saw himself objectively. What a subdued neutral tinted thing was life!
By all the canons of romance it was now his cue for perfervid speech.
"What then?" he asked quietly.
"Liking—a real liking."
"Will it grow warmer?"
"I cannot tell."
"I will teach you to love me," he declared, his artistic self nudging
him meanwhile that he had dropped into the worn formula of the ages.
Ruth did not deny him the attempt, and he undertook a lesson on the
spot, pointing out that they saw life through similar eyes; that art,
music, literature spoke with a common voice; that if true marriage were
perfect companionship, the auguries were not uncertain in their happy
omen; so on till he wearied her with argument.
"All those things refine love," she put in at last, a little wistfully;
"they are not its essence. A man may be a barbarian and yet lovable."
He desisted at that, and presently went away. Out of doors her words
clothed themselves with a personal application. Shelby—lovable
barbarian!—was entering the gate.
Of what immediately followed neither man retained a clear recollection.
It was a clash of temperaments hopelessly at odds, in which the spoken
word weighed little beside the mute antipathy jaundicing the mind. Yet
the word played no small part in the sequel. Graves assured Shelby
that he should spare no effort to compass his defeat; while Shelby in
his turn suggested that the zest of the campaign would be doubled if
Graves were only his ridiculous opponent.
Puzzling how the quarrel could have begun and hurried to its climax so
swiftly, Bernard Graves swung up the street heedless of his steps.
Then the bland colonial facade of the public library confronted him
like a smirking face and, as his vagrant fancy trifled with the
conceit, its lips opened to emit two chattering girls.
"I was the tenth on the waiting-list," said one.
He saw that she spoke of his own volume which she held in a triumphant
embrace with a box of caramels, and was filled with a nauseated disgust
for his handiwork. Retracing his steps he climbed to the Whig
office, and finding Sprague at his desk, he swept a pile of exchanges
from a chair and drew it to the editor's elbow.
"Volney," he asked, "does this talk of an independent movement against
Ross Shelby amount to anything?"
Sprague's eye lit.
"It's gathering headway every minute," he declared. "We require just
one thing—a candidate of prominence and backbone."
Graves reached past the paste-pot to capture a fugitive match.
"What do you say to me?"
"What do I say!" Unwinding his long legs from his chair rounds the
editor dealt his friend a clap between the shoulders which sent his
cigarette spinning to the floor. "I say you're a trump."
Sprague had not a little in common with the type in the political
cosmos which is contemptuously styled cloistered. Of New England
stock, like most of Tuscarora, he had been born of a later migration
than the pioneers', and was hence less tempered by New York influences
for good or ill. Begotten a generation earlier, he would have tended
transcendental pigs at Brook Farm. His earliest political
recollections were associated with heated quotations from Garrison and
Wendell Phillips, and the sharpest-etched memory of his childhood had
to do with a runaway slave harbored in his father's garret. As a man
he was given to printing Emersonian nuggets in the editorial columns of
the Whig, his favorite sentiment being, "Hitch your wagon to a star,"
whose practical application led him over highways which knew not
macadam. He now perceived nothing grotesque in Bernard Graves's
proposal, nor did it astonish him. From his office window he had
chanced to overlook the stormy meeting of the suitors, but he gave
Graves no hint.
"With any other candidate I can think of," he declared, "this movement
would merely signify the protest of a self-respecting minority; with
you, the author of the famous Samothrace ode,—gad! I think it augurs
victory by a handsome majority."
Graves colored.
"I had forgotten the ode," he confessed. "Couldn't we eliminate that
from the campaign?"
"Eliminate it! Why, boy, it's half your platform."
"Is it?" said the novice, drearily. "Oh, very well. I thought I
should like to run on the moral issue. Shelby is corrupt, and the
other party is certain to name some creature who would out-Shelby
Shelby if he got the chance. That seems to me issue enough for a third
candidate without dragging in my verses. I'm sick of them."
"Do you find your royalties a nuisance?"
"Don't be banal, Volney. You understand me. I don't want to be the
one-sided artist merely; I want to do things as well as write about
them, and I want the provinces separate."
Sprague laughed paternally.
"If I'm not to be banal, neither must you be impracticable. It's the
ode that makes you available and enables you to do things, and there
can be no question of dividing your personality as King Louis
something-or-other tried to do. You have placed yourself in my hands.
Very good. I assure you that I can nominate you. You should therefore
defer to my judgment. You owe me that."
"Of course."
"Yes; well, then. Congressman Graves that is to be, here is the
situation in a nutshell: In Tuscarora Shelby has gained ground because
of the Kiska affair. Little Poland has his lithograph in every window.
Elsewhere in the Demijohn I've reason to know that he's in exceedingly
bad odor, and that a third ticket would draw no end of support from
thinking voters who like Shelby little, but the other party less. At
present, you see, it's frying-pan or fire for them." The editor paused
to charge a discolored corn-cob pipe. "Now your coming changes all
that," he continued, tilting back in the wreathing smoke. "I tell you
it warms my heart to think of you opposing Shelby; it's a draught of
Falernian, no less. It's logically, it's romantically, fitting that
you who unmasked his plagiarism should battle with him at the polls.
Moreover, your discovery puts such a feather in your cap at the outset.
You've proved your political acuteness; you've won your spurs. It's
town talk that the credit is yours,—I acknowledge it whenever
asked,—and now that you are to enter the field, I'll blazon it to the
four winds."
"If the world takes it as placidly as New Babylon, it will do us little
good."
"Ah, but the world isn't so stupid," retorted Sprague, beginning to
rummage his chaotic desk. "There, sir," he went on, dragging a bundle
of newspaper clippings to the surface, "there is the world's opinion of
the exposure. Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy—you'll find the comments of every important city in the state
voiced by reputable journals; New York—why, New York gave it three
editorials, not one of them less than two sticks. No utterance of the
Whig ever attracted such attention. I tell you, man, that, your poem
aside, your advent in politics with this thing to your credit makes you
a figure of state importance; with the ode—gad, sir, your canvass is
of national concern."
"It sounds like a dream of Colonel Mulberry Sellers's," laughed Graves,
but he warmed to the editor's mood. "You're sure I can have the
nomination? We're flying in the face of the Boss and all his works."
Sprague flung out his thin hands impatiently.
"I have told you that it rests with me."
The tyro dropped an acute, if indiscreet, observation.
"It seems to me," said he, "that you are something of a boss yourself."
"Every cause must have a leader. I have been the consistent head and
front of the protest against Shelbyism, and the independent movement is
of my creating. Why shouldn't I name the candidate?"
Bernard Graves retreated hastily from this ticklish corner, and put
forward a vague supposition that there would have to be "caucuses,
conventions, and things."
"Independent nominations are made by certificate."
"Oh," said the young man, meekly, "I see;" which was disingenuous. He
silently debated whether this meant a species of letter of
recommendation, but was shy of asking.
Sprague mercifully enlightened him.
"I've the law right here," he went on, tapping a calf-bound manual
which Graves eyed with profound respect. "An independent nomination
for Congress requires at least a thousand signers who must be electors
of the district. We've ample time; it's a good three weeks before we
need file our certificate with the Secretary of State, and a fortnight
would answer to secure the minimum. But we'll not content ourselves
with the minimum; the greater our list of signers, the stronger our
argument in the campaign. Voters are gregarious, you know."
"I've noticed the importance of bell-wethers," Graves remarked dryly.
"Oh, but don't asperse the intelligence of the flock," deprecated the
reformer quickly. "I've been thought to idealize The People; perhaps I
do, but it is good for a man to keep sweet his faith in humanity.
There's a saying of Emerson's that fits the case if I could remember
it." He scoured his memory absently for an interval. "Well, no
matter. It occurs to me that we'll need an emblem for our ticket. The
law requires us to select some device. The eagles, ballot-boxes,
roosters, stars, and the like have all been preempted, and aren't
strikingly significant anyhow. We want something telling—a graphic
symbol of our aim. You are a man of imagination; what is your notion?"
The man of imagination considered, and the editor's excess of nervous
force spent itself in idle forays about his desk, one of which brought
forth a foot-rule; whirling in the eager fingers, it proved an
inspiration.
"Why not—" Graves began; "no, not that—a square, a carpenter's
square. It symbolizes everything we stand for."
"Bravo! It's a slogan to win with. Square issues, square dealing,
square men! We'll placard every fence and barn door in the district.
A woodcut will cost next to nothing, and I'll run the posters off right
here on the premises."
The suggestion bruised Graves's sensibilities.
"Is that necessary?" he protested mildly. "I'd really prefer to leave
all that sort of vandalism to the other side; it's so philistine, you
know."
BOOK II
CHAPTER I
Volney Sprague's flaming posters in black and red menaced Shelby from
the selvage of the district to the threshold of his door. The State
Committee had despatched him on a brief stumping tour, embracing a
handful of canal counties, a section of the grape belt, and certain
strategic points in the Southern Tier, and he had kept in fairly
regular communication with Bowers; but while that leader's letters were
usually as terse and meaty as Caesar's campaign jottings in Gaul, they
somehow failed to impress the candidate with the actual condition of
his political fences. It was therefore with the shock of almost
complete surprise that he entered his proper bailiwick to find Bernard
Graves's opposition regarded seriously. Saloons, cigar stores, street
corners, the billiard room of the Tuscarora House, all his familiar
haunts, buzzed with the vote-getting possibilities of an independent
ticket in a community where regularity had become well-nigh a fetich.
Bowers was rudderless and irritable.
"I advised you to conciliate young Graves," he fretted. "And what
have you done? Stroked him the wrong way ever since. I hope it's a
lesson to you to keep politics and petticoats apart."
Shelby jeered at his inconsistency.
"You were good enough to suggest that I make up to the woman in the
case."
"Not in the thick of a campaign."
Shelby's optimism was not easily dashed and he laid an energetic
shoulder to the lagging wheel. His associate's rebound from depression
was less elastic, and the candidate's thoughts furrowed a channel they
had frequently taken of late. It was plain to him that the older man
was no longer equal to the requirements of his leadership. Sound in
judgment, shrewd in the reading of men, vigorous in action as he once
had been, and on occasion could be still, he was nevertheless of an
earlier and more leisured school of politics than the present lively
generation which knew not Joseph. They knew other things—the
youngsters—strange methods of the city ward; and the philosophic
observers, who on all sides think they descry evidence of the
corruption of the country by the city, would have glibly explained to
the Hon. Seneca Bowers the causes of his inefficiency. He had come to
rely more and more on his sprightly deputy, till now, virtual county
leader and his party's candidate, Shelby, double-weighted, prepared to
wage the battle of his life.
The demands upon his time were incessant. He would rise in his
unlovely room at the Tuscarora House, leaden from insufficient sleep,
to be buttonholed before he breakfasted—sometimes, even before he
dressed; this man must be placated, that threatened, the other
convinced by reason; another must be visited in sickness, another found
work, for yet another must gratuitous lawyering be done—all this with
jovial front and a camel's capacity for drink. This was his
domesticity, amidst which must be sandwiched conferences and
journeyings in Tuscarora County and the other counties of his district,
and speeches on behalf of the party outside the Demijohn, entailed by
too successful stumping in the past. Capping all was the perverse
closet-reformer, Sprague, and his figurehead, Graves.
Shelby was a believer in short campaigns, and the time left the
independents for attack was brief. They retrieved the handicap by
added vigor, and subjected his every public act to merciless scrutiny.
Sprague formulated the case against him in an early issue of the
Whig:—
"We are asked," he wrote, "to publish our specific reasons for
rejecting this candidate. We gladly comply. The counts of his
indictment are many; we select five:—
"We refuse to support a candidate of any party whatsoever whose
nomination issues from dishonest primaries. It is notorious that the
caucuses preliminary to this man's nomination were packed. Can you
gainsay it, Mr. Shelby?
"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination never so spotless,
who degrades himself and the office to which he aspires by the theft of
another's intellectual property. Can you deny your plagiarism, Mr.
Shelby?
"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination irreproachable,
his sense of mine and thine otherwise undulled, whose legislative
record is tainted by traffickings peculiar to the Black Horse
Cavalry—wanton blackmailers of corporate rights. It is of common
knowledge that this man introduced in the last session a bill aimed at
the legitimate profits of a great surface railway system, which he
withdrew for no reason of public record. Can you make affidavit that
the subsequent sale of a block of that same railway's stock by your
business associate was without relevance, Mr. Shelby?
"We refuse to support a candidate, be his nomination unimpeachable, his
intellectual honesty unchallenged, his legislative record without
stain, who, posing as the champion of our canals, nevertheless lends
himself, through connivance at fraudulent contracts and the appointment
of needless officials, to the squandering of the moneys set apart for
their use. We invite you to disprove your complicity in the wasting of
the state's millions, Mr. Shelby.
"We refuse, lastly, to support a candidate, be his nomination as
unsullied as his personal integrity, and his legislative career as free
from 'strikes' as his advocacy of our pirate-infested waterways is
disinterested, who is yet so slavishly the henchman of his party
machine that no measure it may propose is too unsavory to enlist his
Dugald Dalgetty loyalty. By your closed lips you countenance the
land-jobbing steal which your great state Boss failed by the merest
fluke to saddle upon the River and Harbor Bill passed by the last
Congress, and purposes to press anew;—dare you vote against your
owner, Mr. Shelby?"
To all of which, reiterated and emphasized in pamphlet, broadside,
poster, and stump speech, Shelby said publicly never a word, professing
himself a believer in the policy of dignified silence. He touched the
matter after an impersonal fashion with Bowers, however, as they read
the onslaught.
"Give me the liquor habit, the tobacco habit, the opium habit, singly
or all together," said he, "but preserve me from the vice of rhetoric."
Bowers had not this fine detachment.
"I don't wish to nose into your private concerns, Ross," he began, with
visible embarrassment, "but this third count implicates me. I'd like
to ask whether that stock I sold for you in Wall Street last winter was
yours by—by—"
"By bona fide purchase?" whipped in Shelby. "Yes, sir; out and out.
Do you think me as big a fool as this dream-chaser pretends I am?"
"No, no."
"Nobody should know better than you why that bill was introduced. You
brought it to me from the Boss. Those railway people forgot that their
party can't run campaigns on wind, and in his own way he jogged their
memory. I saw that. As for the stock—your skirts are clear. You
merely sold in a rising market what I bought in a falling one. If my
position gave me a speculative advantage, it's my own business—nobody
else's—not even the Hon. Seneca Bowers's."
The county leader's working features did not resemble General Grant's.
In that unhappy moment he experienced the pangs of unhonored parenthood.
Presently he put out his hand.
"I'm sorry I offended you, Ross. I supposed myself too seasoned a
campaigner to mind mud-slinging."
Shelby laughed apologies away and they parted friends. On the
threshold it occurred to Bowers to ask:—
"Who is this Dalgetty fellow Sprague mentions? I never heard of him in
politics."
"Nor I. Some ward heeler he thinks I resemble, I guess."
"He'd have made his point stronger by taking somebody that the plain
people know. That's something mugwumps never learn."
"And there's another thing they don't grasp," Shelby added. "One
personal talk with the average voter will outweigh enough high-toned
editorials to sink a ship. When the reformer begins to rub shoulders
in all sorts of places with all sorts of men his halo won't be so
luminous; perhaps he won't call himself a reformer at all—just
politician, perhaps; but he'll saw wood."
CHAPTER II
As a matter of fact, the independent candidate did give the
shoulder-rubbing process a trial. Within the by no means contracted
limits of Volney Sprague's paper-and-ink horizon the flurry of the
attack on Shelby threw its ripples far, but Graves shortly damped the
editor's professional delight by the remark that he had been assured of
no man's vote because of it.
"There's the pity of our lack of time," frowned Sprague. "An
educational campaign can hardly be too long. Many a demagogue has
failed of election because we vote in November and not in dog-days."
"You'll have to admit that you've merely revamped old material. It's
no news that Shelby has packed caucuses, stolen speeches, blackmailed
corporations, jobbed canal contracts, and grovelled to the Boss."
"True," admitted Sprague, ruefully.
"We need the concrete to convince. Take this canal scandal: we've seen
contracts go to Shelby's adherents on unbalanced bids, and the Ditch
swarms with his useless inspectors at four dollars a day; but can you
bring wrong-doing home to him?"
"To prove the Champion of Canals' complicity—what a master stroke!"
The morning after he popped into the young man's study, to the lasting
detriment of a triolet.
"We can prove it," he exclaimed. "Gad! We can prove it!"
Graves regretfully dropped a blotter over his manuscript and advanced a
chair.
"I've suspected that there were men in this town who could lay Shelby
by the heels, were they to tell all they knew. The problem was to draw
them."
"You can't expect his understrappers to quarrel with their bread and
butter."
"No; that has been the stone of stumbling precisely, but we've got
around it. In this blessed case, Shelby himself did the quarrelling,
and thereby delivered himself into our hands."
Bernard Graves sat up.
"What have you found out?"
"I've found a man who seems to know of Shelby's crookedness, and is
willing to tell what he knows."
"Well?"
"Jap Hinchey."
Graves's face lengthened.
"That beast," said he.
"Did you expect a Sir Galahad for such a service?"
"What would the word of such a man avail?"
"As much as any informer's; it isn't a chivalrous office."
"Nor is ours in employing it, to my thinking; informer and reformer
sound perilously near alike. Still, as you delicately imply, we're not
Knights of the Round Table. What has the sot had to say to you?"
"Well, the fact is he hasn't told me anything specific," Sprague had to
admit. "The matter is still under negotiation, as one may say. Jasper
is coy."
"Oh!"
The lukewarm monosyllable voiced disillusionment. With a partial
return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly
told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was
trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, not to say
Micawberesque; and that his own wisdom in venturing for such a cause,
with such a pilot, on such uncharted seas, was questionable to a degree.
Sprague was not devoid of intuition.
"I'm not rainbow-hunting this time," he put in quickly. "The fellow
knows something interesting, and he's ready to out with it. He was
employed in the Eureka quarries during the canal improvement, and saw
things, he says, that we would like to hear."
"You talked with him?"
"Yes; he accosted me in a side street late last night."
"If he's anxious to inform and reform, why doesn't he? I don't like
the look of it. What does he want?"
"You."
"He wants me?"
"He said he would speak plainly with you."
Graves's revulsion was fairly physical.
"You manage it, Volney," he entreated. "You will know how."
Sprague shook his head.
"He was positive on that point. It must be you or nobody."
"I doubt if it's worth while."
The editor lost patience.
"It was you who reminded me that we lacked the concrete. Now I offer
it to you."
"But in such a shape!"
"Can you quibble over that—and in politics?"
"No one who knows Jap Hinchey's character would believe him under oath."
Sprague's reply was astute.
"I'm thinking of those who don't know him," said he. "The district is
wide."
"And an affidavit is an affidavit?" His smile was sardonic. "Very
well. I'll see him. What is Jap's At Home?"
"You will find him fishing on the dock behind his shanty, probably.
I'd follow this thing up promptly, Bernard."
"Yes," promised the candidate, listlessly. "I will."
Alone, he fingered his manuscript, read it drearily, and of a sudden
tore it into little bits, the mood which gendered it gone beyond
recall. The sordid necessity of seeing Hinchey taught him afresh the
folly of his dabbling in politics at all, and his whole being revolted
against the contact with humanity in the raw which even mugwumpery
seemed to entail. Left to himself, Sprague might have headed his own
John Brown raid into the established order of things; led it with
brilliancy perhaps, in any case with honest zeal. Yet the root of his
discontent struck rather deeper than Jasper Hinchey and the cold
waterish zone of reform; Ruth had her part in it. He somehow reasoned
that his course merited her approval and encouragement; it had met with
banter. So gyved, lagged the hope of the independents to his task.
Few towns, however small, lack their moral plague-spot, and Graves's
errand bent him toward New Babylon's, a web of alleys styled the Flats,
spun behind the business centre among the docks and rotting warehouses
of a vanished commerce. The Flats had its business too—groggeries and
a music hall where "sacred concerts" were given on Sunday nights and
men had been stabbed on pay-day; groggeries, the music hall—and worse.
The young man threaded gingerly into its dingy precincts, and by dint
of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be
oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the
amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from
the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a
many-complexioned brood of children,—they seemed a very dozen,—and in
the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's
mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the
alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without,
and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was
fishing from the dock in the rear.
"Good afternoon," said the caller, affably, he thought.
Jasper grunted without lifting his eyes from his float.
"What do you catch here?" pursued the candidate, beaming
good-fellowship.
The line suddenly drew taut, and a muddy fish whipped through the
sunshine within a scant inch of Graves's nose.
"Bullheads," answered the laconic Hinchey.
The visitor was disconcerted.
"You—er—eat them?" he remarked blankly, eyeing first the
beery-looking water and then the ugly fish.
"Naw," sneered Jap. "I'm foundin' 'n 'quarium." He tossed the
bullhead into a pail, and, spying a piccaninny scudding round a corner,
called: "Here, you chocolate drop, take this yer fish ter yer mammy.
Two mor,' 'n' I'll hev 'nuff fer supper. Set down," he added to his
guest.
"Thanks," said Bernard, hunting vainly for a clean spot on the
string-piece. He lit a cigarette as a sanitary precaution, and
bethought him to offer one to Hinchey.
"None o' them coffin-nails fer me," declined the Spartan. "I smokes
men's terbacker."
Graves gave him a cigar which he chanced to have about him.
"I don't seem to have a match left," he observed, fumbling in his
pockets.
Jasper Hinchey calmly relieved him of his cigarette, lit his cigar with
it, and restored the costly importation, malodorous of fish. At the
earliest opportunity Graves dropped it in the canal, a transaction duly
noted by Jap.
"I've been told you have something to say to me," the young man said
briskly, his social obligations seeming fully paid, and his eagerness
to be gone swamping diplomacy.
Jasper rebaited his hook, impaling the wriggling earthworm with a
solicitude worthy of comparison with Isaac Walton's refined martyrdom
of frogs.
"Yes," he drawled; "I kind o' 'magine I hev."
Bernard curbed his impatience while Jap spat with deadly aim at an
eddying chip.
"S'pose you know I've knocked round in pol'tics some?"
The young man said that he did. He thought "knocked" a felicitous
word. Jasper Hinchey's public services had been heavy-fisted, relating
chiefly to voting blocks of drunken Poles and Italians in warmly
contested town elections.
"I've helped 'lect mor'n one feller t' office in my day. Take Ross
Shelby now: both times he run fer th' 'Sembly I worked like a nailer.
'Cause why? He done right by me. Why I luved that cuss like—like—"
he hesitated for a simile—"like my own son," he added, with the
passing of one of his brood, and forthwith whacked the youngster for
overturning the bait can. "Jes' like my own son. An' so I should
still ef he hedn't done me dirt; ef he'd ben square. Now, you're
square."
"I try to be," returned Bernard, ravished by the tribute. "That's my
platform in this campaign, you know."
"Yes; jes' so. An' I rather 'magine I'll vote yer way."
"Thank you."
"Pro-vi-ded," Jasper added, "pro-vi-ded we c'n 'range things."
"Arrange things?"
Jasper's eyes wandered musingly over his interlocutor's face.
"'Range things, I sez, an' I sez it again."
He abandoned something of his drawl. "I 'magine I c'd tell sumpin ef I
tuk a notion."
Graves brooked his tone with difficulty.
"I shouldn't be here if I didn't think so too," he answered coolly.
"Jes' so," agreed Jasper, absorbed in a sinker. "I c'd tell sumpin
erbout a party thet I 'magine you'd cock yer ear t' hear."
"Shelby?"
"I 'magine I didn't jes' quite say. No, I 'magine not."
"If you will exercise your imagination less, Mr. Hinchey, and say
plainly what you have to say, I shall be obliged," retorted Bernard,
exasperated by his shiftiness.
Jasper was unmoved.
"Easy t' see you ain't ben in pol'tics long. Wall, whut I've got t'
say is this: I used t' work fer this party off 'n' on,—this party
whose name I ain't a-mentionin'. He wuz in pol'tics too. Likewise run
a quarry an' s'm'other things t' num'rous t' mention. 'Twas in the
quarry I worked, mostly erbout 'lection time. Cur'ous, ain't it, whut
good pay a feller'll git fer light work erbout 'lection time? Wall,
this year I ain't hed proper treatment. This party 'lows money is
tight, an' he's filled his quarry up with dagoes, damned dagoes." He
paused to scowl over the shanties of his immediate neighbors and at the
industrious washerwoman up the dock. "Wouldn't it make you sick th'
way furrin labor's a-crowdin' out th' true 'Merican? I jes' despise
dagoes."
Graves was too disgusted to reply. He recollected having heard a negro
speak contemptuously of Jews, but this case seemed yet more extreme.
"Wall," pursued the true American, "I wuz with this party a spell when
th' state tuk a notion t' sink a few s'perfluous millyuns in this ole
ditch."
The listener became all attention.
"Queer doin's I seen long erbout then. Contractors is a scand'lous
lot. Many's the load o' dirt I seen hauled out thet easy, whut th'
state paid fer ez blasted rock. My, yes. But my party wuzn't workin'
at contractin'; he wuz workin' at contractors, an' he knew 'em, lock,
stock, and bar'l. He jes' owned th' whole blim pack. Thet's where his
rake-off come in. 'Twant all dirt them daisies tuk out. There wuz as
fustclass sandstun ez my party ever shipped f'm his quarry, an' f'm his
quarry docks it went."
"You mean that this man connived with the contractors to misappropriate
state property?"
"I 'magine I do."
"And your party is Shelby?"
"Never said no sech thing."
"It's what you imply clearly enough. Now, if you wish to help us, as
you told Mr. Sprague, you must say precisely who and what you mean, and
swear to it before Mr. Sprague, who is a notary public."
Jasper straightened.
"Fer nothin'?" His tone was inimitable.
Bernard Graves looked him coldly in the eye.
"We're not bribing people."
The loafer raised his hulking body and leered over him; the young man
got upon his feet, half expecting assault.
"Anything we can do for you in a legitimate way, we will do," he added
steadily.
"I want t' know."
"You can find me at Mr. Sprague's office any morning between ten and
twelve."
Jasper Hinchey surveyed him with scorn as he turned to go. Fumbling in
his rags, he extracted a greasy card.
"P'r'aps you'd buy a twenty-five cent ticket fer th' Jolly Rovers'
picnic," he insinuated. "Mebbe it's not too stiff fer yer purse. They
say ez how 'tis well lined, Mr. Graves."
"Do you know that the Penal Code makes soliciting a candidate to buy
tickets a misdemeanor?"
Hinchey smirked.
"A party whut I know buys 'em without askin'," said he.
Jasper Hinchey did not call at the Whig office any morning between
ten o'clock and twelve. It developed that he was engaged in some not
too arduous labor at the quarries of the Eureka Sandstone Company.
CHAPTER III
Had the fantastic bolt of the Sprague clique been left to its own
courses, Shelby would have borrowed no further trouble, but a
fortuitous matter of radishes and ice-water suddenly put the quarrel on
an altogether different level. About the hour when Bernard Graves
hobnobbed with Jasper Hinchey, the third factor in the Demijohn
District's political muddle sat down to dinner in a neighboring city.
"Chuck" O'Rourke was fond of his dinner. A childhood of squalid
poverty had taught him the joy of a square meal. The story of the
years linking the famished boy to the pudgy red-faced man of the
restaurant is unessential,—an everyday story, sordid, and barren of
romance. The present knew him for a prosperous contractor and
politician whose most conspicuous public service had been the adroit
fashioning of Tuscarora County's minority party into a compact
organization, to which the majority party found it expedient to cast an
occasional sop of patronage. He had lived and thrived in an atmosphere
of deals. Only within the fortnight had he aspired to hold office,
since his party had for years lacked the fighting chance which the
revolt against Shelby created. Tempted at last, he abruptly resolved
to enter the congressional race himself, and this same day had effected
the last dicker with other county leaders which would insure his naming
in to-morrow's convention.
The day had gone unwontedly sultry, with a sudden flushing of autumn
with dog-day heat, and his active morning had been fraught with
physical discomfort. He had consumed quantities of beer and whiskey in
his rounds, and had looked upon the wine when it was red. His heavy
fall suit was a weariness, and as he entered the restaurant he loosed
his checked waistcoat, unveiling a row of diamond shirt studs which
galvanized the languid waiters to buoyant life. He was escorted with
pomp and circumstance to a seat in the shadiest window, swept by the
torrid breath of an electric fan.
O'Rourke gulped a glassful of ice-water as he studied the menu card,
and motioned for more. Two other glassfuls went the way of the first,
and the negro refilled the carafe. The man pulled angrily at his limp
collar and discussed his order. Vacillating for a time between broiled
lobster and porterhouse steak with mushrooms, he cut the matter short
by taking both, and buttressed the main structure of the meal with side
dishes of banana fritters and griddle-cakes. He decided that peach
short-cake and tutti-frutti ice cream would stop the gap for desert
[Transcriber's note: dessert?], and expressed a preference for "fizz"
as he scanned the wine list. With a happy afterthought he recalled the
fleeting waiter and ordered him to fetch a cocktail as an appetizer.
The ice-water carafe was within easy reach, and, pending the coming of
the cocktail, it lowered steadily. Hard by, also, stood a dish of
radishes, out of season, but succulent. He cleared the dish, and
meditated assault on its fellow at the table adjoining. However, the
brave advance of the lobster, the porterhouse, and the champagne bucket
diverted him, and he tucked a napkin under his flabby chin with a
genial smile. Then the smile shrivelled; waiters, porterhouse,
lobster, champagne, winked out in utter blackness, and Chuck O'Rourke
slid heavily to the floor.
The dead man's associates met the emergency with a sharp move. The
following morning Shelby caught a persistent rumor that the convention,
wanting its slated candidate, proposed to indorse the candidacy of
Bernard Graves; which same thing, after a moving tribute to the fallen
leader, the convention with cheerful promptness did.
The Hon. Seneca Bowers was unnerved. He had had to cope with no such
outrageous problem in the whole of his honorable career, and in a state
of mind bordering panic he packed his grip and posted to New York for a
conference with the Boss, leaving Shelby to temporize as best he might.
Nor was Shelby inactive. The O'Rourke crowd had been placated in small
matters times out of mind, and he went about the present task in the
usual way, directing one of his people to inquire what they wanted.
These hitherto insatiate gentlemen replied that they wanted nothing,
adding pleasantly that they were well content with what they had. The
possibility of a victory in a gerrymandered district, however won, was
without price. Shelby appreciated their point of view and addressed
himself to measures more feasible. If he could not shake their
allegiance to Graves, he might succeed in preventing Graves from taking
up with them, and the agencies for influencing public opinion which he
could control began accordingly to ridicule the idea of a reform
candidate's accepting such an indorsement.
Graves refused to be drawn, and for forty-eight hours held his peace
with the aplomb of a veteran. Then Bowers came back.
"Has he accepted?" The words were out before he could take Shelby's
hand.
"Not yet."
"Thank heaven. Tell me what you've done."
Shelby recapitulated.
"That's right," approved his senior. "There's nothing more to be done
with Chuck O'Rourke's bandits just now. Graves is the man to consider.
Is he still mum?"
"As a cigar sign. How does the Boss take it?"
"Urbanely, as always. He's silkier every time I see him." Bowers's
memory lingered upon the soft-spoken interview with the great state
leader.
"Well?" Shelby jogged him crisply.
"He knows all about Graves—as he knows about everybody. Says he has
met the scholar in politics before. Do you remember how he took care
of that kid-gloved aggregation which tried to run him out of business a
year or so ago? He dumped this distinguished kicker into the cabinet,
had another made a plenipotentiary, foisted off number three into some
windy commission on the other side of the planet, and so on down the
list. They said it seemed to be in the air that harmony should
prevail."
Shelby laughed.
"The Boss is the smoothest made," he owned. "What does he advise in
this case?"
Bowers leaned forward importantly.
"What do you think the young man would say to an author's job—some
French or Italian consulate?"
"I'll tell you what I say: if the Boss advised that, he's growing
senile."
"I didn't say he advised it. He merely suggested that literary people
bit at that kind of bait. As a matter of fact, he didn't advise
anything. He said if we couldn't fix things with the O'Rourke crowd,
that the situation would have to develop a bit."
"Queer sort of talk," Shelby commented. "I wonder what he wants?" He
puzzled over it a moment. "Well, whatever develops, don't talk
consulate to Bernard Graves. The Boss is a pastmaster at side-tracking
soreheads, but there's a point involved in this case that he doesn't
grasp. Disappointed lovers are probably out of his line."
Bowers shifted his cigar to reply, but thought better of it. His hold
on the wheel was weakening, and he remarked to his wife that night that
this should be his last active campaign. Shelby entertained a similar
opinion.
When the two men met on the morrow the situation had indeed developed.
Persuaded against his own judgment by Volney Sprague, Bernard Graves
had consented to assume the mantle of Chuck O'Rourke, deceased. To the
repressed amusement of his new allies, he stipulated that the
employment of questionable methods should be left to the common foe,
and that they must accept him absolutely unpledged.
Shelby ran a gauntlet of chaff to his law office that afternoon, and
found Bowers awaiting him in bilious mood. He was hazing the rooms
with gusts of tobacco smoke, a sign of nervousness in so deliberate a
smoker. They nodded curtly without words, and Shelby ran perfunctorily
through his mail. Presently he raised his eyes and met Bowers's gloomy
scrutiny lowering through the fog.
"You look like a hired mourner," he remarked, swirling the smoke.
"I feel like a real one."
"Well, don't wear your weeds so conspicuously. The enemy will imagine
they have us scared."
Bowers swore listlessly.
"They have."
"Don't include me. I've a little sand left, I hope."
"It's the most serious fight we've ever had in the district. It's so
unexpected. And I can't see how we are to blame. The organization
backed your nomination cordially. We couldn't foresee that Volney
Sprague would make trouble, any more than we could know that O'Rourke
would gorge himself to apoplexy. And who, for the love of heaven,
would have thought Bernard Graves would step into Chuck O'Rourke's
shoes! I've been in politics for thirty years, Ross, with my fair
share of good luck and bad, but I've never been up against the equal of
this. It's—it's—" He broke off in despair of adequate
characterization.
"Brace up, brace up. You need a brandy and soda."
"I've had two."
"Then take a glass of milk," rallied Shelby; "paregoric, boneset tea,
anything. I'm ashamed of you."
Bowers smiled wanly.
"You're a younger man, Ross. You can rebound. I can't any more. I'm
too old. I—I've lost confidence in myself."
"I haven't lost confidence in myself," ejaculated Shelby. "No such
alliance of thugs and goody-goods shall down me. I'm in this game to
stay and to win."
His stout words in some degree bolstered the discouraged veteran, and
they turned presently to a discussion of ways and means. The outlook
was not cheering. The fusion of the opposition had fallen at a time
when the funds collected to meet the exigencies of an ordinary campaign
had been mainly expended.
"The State Committee must help," declared Shelby. "There's no valid
reason why they shouldn't. The corporations have given them everything
they asked this year."
"I sounded the Boss. He was not encouraging."
"Damn him," said Shelby, "what does he want?" That question would
recur.
"We have raised everything locally that our people will stand, and you
may say that of the Demijohn generally. If there's more to be got, it
must come from those most concerned."
"You mean me, I suppose?"
"It's your political future that's at stake."
Shelby drummed his desk. By and by, taking his check-book, he began to
run through the stubs, jotting figures on a pad.
"I've spent three thousand dollars already," he said at last. "Three
thousand legitimate dollars. I've never footed it up before, and it's
rather staggering. Of course, the big items—the assessments of the
local committee and the other county committees—I had kept in mind.
What I have not realized was the constant drain of small amounts for
this and that,—printing, lithographs, bands, flag-raisings, you know
what. And treats—why, I spent over seventy-five dollars in bar money
alone the day of the Pioneers' picnic, while the County Fair meant the
price of a good horse. It's a good thing for me that the torchlight
idiocy has gone out. Still, the 'Shelby Base-ball Club' is as big a
nuisance. Three thousand legitimate dollars," he repeated. "We now
come to the illegitimate."
The older man winced. Shelby was too frank for him at times. While he
recognized that vote-buying was of occasion necessary for party
success, he made it his boast between his conscience and himself that
he had never directly taken part in it. So now he hemmed, and merely
said:—
"We're fighting a mercenary foe."
Shelby bent for an instant to his figures. Then, with offhand
abruptness:—
"There's something I never told you. When I went into this campaign I
mortgaged my real estate holdings here in town. I tell you now because
I must negotiate a loan on my share in the Eureka, and of course you
are the man to approach."
Bowers started.
"Is it that bad, Ross?"
"Yes; it's that bad. Money's the argument now."
"Suppose—suppose you lose?"
Shelby considered the possibility.
"Then I'm ruined. But I shan't lose. I shall win."
There was less buoyancy when Bowers had left; more studying of the
check-book, much reflection and calculation. Money, money, money; the
thought hounded him.
Down in the Temple carriage drive the worried man could see a boy
holding a mettlesome saddle horse, caparisoned for a woman's use. In
fair weather it stood there at this hour every day. To-day it was
suggestive. Shelby sprang to his telephone.
CHAPTER IV
With the stable boy's assurance that within ten minutes his horse would
stand at the curb, Shelby locked his door against surprise, and, with
an eye on the Temple driveway, made a rapid change to his riding
clothes, which he was accustomed to keep by him for emergencies. As he
finished, Ruth, lissome in her black habit, cantered daintily out with
a laughing nod to Volney Sprague, who was watching her from the Whig
office over the way. His clerk was absent serving papers in Etruria,
and, hanging a mendacious "Back-in-1-Hour" sign on his outer door,
Shelby leaped down the stair.
In the public eye he grew more sedate, and trotted soberly out of the
business district in a direction contrary to that taken by his
neighbor. Then, of a sudden, he shamed John Gilpin with a right-about,
and, circling by side streets and quiet lanes the course he had just
covered, galloped countryward in pursuit. The manoeuvre was not new to
him. He had employed it on occasion to hoodwink Mrs. Grundy for Mrs.
Hilliard's sake, scrupulously meeting and leaving the lady outside the
corporation limits, a ruse which deceived nobody save the deceivers.
Nor was it effective now. Ruth passed Mrs. Bowers's argus-eyed bay
window, as did Shelby, and Mrs. Grundy had her speculative pickings of
the event.
Ruth spied pursuit where the turnpike elbowed sharply from the
outskirts. For a demure girl her smile was mischievous. Walking her
wiry little pony till the footfalls of Shelby's chestnut cob beat the
'pike a scant hundred yards behind, she flicked her animal ever so
lightly with her riding crop. The man saw a puff of dust, a twinkle of
little hoofs, and a lithe figure outlined for an instant against the
autumn sky as it sped over a hill and far away. The cob labored to the
crest and pondered his defeat. A half-mile down the unkempt old toll
road, where the goldenrod dropped stately bows to the purple aster, and
Bouncing Bet viewed their livelong philandering with scorn, was the
impertinent runt—walking! Down thundered the cob. No evasion now.
Two hundred yards, one fifty, one hundred yards, seventy-five, sixty,
even fifty—and again the pursued was spirited away in a cloud.
Shelby bore it thrice, and raised his voice. Ruth's surprise was a
delightful thing to see.
"I've tried these three miles to overtake you," he scolded. "You must
have heard me."
Ruth surveyed the smoking cob.
"We did hear a noise. My pony is so restive."
"The little beast looks as demure as yourself. I believe you knew it
was I."
Ruth's glance swept a neighboring field.
"Have you ever associated cabbages with beauty?" she asked. "Just look
at that reach of blue-green."
Shelby admired obediently. Then, the occasion seeming to demand a
certain finesse, he said:—
"There's a man out this way I must look up—a kind of farmer, drover,
and jockey rolled in one. He influences a bunch of votes. It's very
pleasant to find you riding the same way. I'm glad we met—that is—if
you—"
Her smile stopped his limping improvisation in mid-career.
"You needn't invent anything more," she said. "You're not good at it."
"There really is such a man," he defended, with a contented laugh; "but
he can wait. I'd like to be quit of the political grind for a while.
May I rest?"
"Yes; you may come," Ruth decided.
His appeal struck a womanly chord.
October was spendthrift of its pigments. Every isolated copse was a
mimic forest fire, each bivouacked corn-field a russet foil, the air a
heady wine. Shelby thrilled with dumb pastorals and a vague longing to
do and speak in keeping with the spirit of the scene. A tuft of oxeye
daisies in the shelter of a ruinous worm fence attracted him, and he
reined the cob from the highway to fetch them. To his bewilderment
Ruth's face shadowed at the gift.
"Poor things—what made you?" she lamented. "I've watched them there
for a fortnight. What clumsy florist could have grouped them with the
tall grasses so exquisitely, and set the little red vine clambering
over all in the fence corner, so satiny and lichen-gray?"
Shelby was mystified.
"I thought that they would look smart in your belt—that all women
wanted to pick flowers when they saw them—" he stammered. "I'm afraid
I know little of women's ways."
Her laugh was a caress.
"Don't put my rudeness upon the sex," she said. "It's because I dabble
in paints and things that I thought of these flowers first as a
picture. But I assure you I'm just as much given to plundering them to
set off my hair and dress as any daughter of Eve," wherewith she placed
his offering, as he would have it, in her belt. He seemed to her
always a kind of shorn Samson when afield from politics, and now, as
she had often done, she drew him to speak of what he knew best.
"I used to think you cared little about such things," he told her
presently. "The average woman doesn't care greatly. If she had the
ballot, she'd probably vote for the handsomest man—if the candidate
was a man."
"I'm afraid I should," owned Ruth. "For instance, I never could vote
for a candidate with mutton-chop whiskers. And fancy having to decide
between two women!"
"Vote-buying would have a scope which staggers the imagination."
The comment set her thoughts running on the accusations of corruption
which were bandied from lip to lip during this campaign.
"Are many votes really bought?" she asked.
"Yes, many," Shelby answered frankly. "I shouldn't care to have you
quote me, but I'll admit that I've sometimes bought them myself."
She was dumfounded at his candor, and half regretted it.
"Is it—is it quite necessary?"
"I think it is—sometimes. And so it will be till the reformers show
the practical politician a better system, or human nature changes its
spots. Indiana was bought for Lincoln in '64. It would take an
unpractical man, even an unpatriotic man, to deny that the crisis did
not justify the step."
"Every candidate is not a Lincoln."
"Nor every year a '64. Timid people compound with their conscience by
calling that Indiana affair a war measure. But we're talking of our
own state, whose political name has justly or unjustly become a hissing
among the nations. I don't deny there's some reason for it. We are
big, with big opportunities for corruption, and the tradition of sharp
practice is of long standing. We bribed, intimidated, and filibustered
in swaddling clothes, and stole a governorship as early as 1791. The
tricks of to-day have all gone stale with handling, for the patriots we
honor were politicians too."
"That is a novel point of view for me," Ruth admitted. "It's so easy
to think the old time the best time." This was the pleader of the
court-house rally, and she forgot the gaucheries and limitations of a
moment since.
"All in all, the Catilines meet their Ciceros," said Shelby; "the
Tildens undo the Tweeds. General Jackson once said he was not a
politician, but if he were, he should be a New York politician. You
see the state is an eternal riddle—'pivotal,' as the saying goes—the
mother of parties, the devotee of none; and there lies half its
fascination for the politician—I might say for the statesman. What
passes for mere politics here might well figure as statesmanship
elsewhere. We don't call our commonwealth the Empire State for naught;
its interests are indeed imperial, and it is no mean office to shape
its destinies. It is the man in politics who does this, whether you
will or no. A free government requires parties, parties require
politicians—in last analysis the mouthpiece of the sovereign people.
I dare say you're wondering what all these generalities have to do with
vote-buying in Tuscarora. I'll tell you. It's true that not every
candidate is a Lincoln, that not a few men are personally unworthy of
the offices they hold or seek; but this also is true, that many an
unworthy man is worthy of election, even by bribery,—I say it
deliberately,—because of his party's sake, for that party's success
may signify the country's salvation. You have, of course, heard sad
things said of me. You will hear more, and I shall not run around
among my friends to deny them. Worthy or unworthy, I merge my
personality in that of my party, in whose ultimate patriotism I have
enduring faith."
Ruth was no logician.
"I don't believe you unworthy," she said.
"That's better than a hundred votes," laughed the man, vastly pleased.
"Let me promise you something. If I'm elected to Congress, I will do
and say everything a new member can to wipe out the tariff on objects
of art."
It was her turn for mystification; if he had his shallows, he also had
his depths.
Shelby did not ask if she were pleased; he saw it.
"You wouldn't have thought it of a practical politician—one of the
'aesthetically dead,'" he smiled. "Yet it is the politician you should
seek to interest in these things. He'll see their value if he's
taught. You opened my eyes—did it in a social way, which is the best
way. It's through his social side, be it in barroom or drawing-room,
that the politician is most easily reached, for he's a human being.
Reformers don't see that; they aim at the intellect direct. You didn't
dream, in talking about art to me now and then, that you were doing a
possible public service. That's the key-note of woman's best influence
in politics, I've come to believe—unconscious argument, not
speechmaking. You have influenced me more than I can tell. I've
grown. You have broadened my horizon. Will you make it broader? I
ask you to marry me."
It was a little moment before she took his meaning, so much did his
blunt proposal seem a part of the staccato chat of politics from which
it issued.
"I cannot," she said at last.
"Why?"
It seemed ridiculous to speak of the affections to this businesslike
creature who apparently counted them not worth mentioning; so she
answered that they were unsuited to one another.
Shelby shook his head emphatically.
"I can't agree with you. Are you engaged to marry any one else?"
Ruth colored under his cross-examination, but replied that she was not.
"We'll let the question lie fallow for a time," Shelby arranged.
"Think it over impartially."
She tried to bid him put the thing wholly out of mind, but he adjourned
discussion as summarily as he might a committee meeting, and spoke of
other topics.
It was sundown when they neared the town, returning by way of Little
Poland and the successive quarries bordering the canal. Shelby dropped
a careless glance at the docks and yards of his own company, now quiet
with the day's work done. Then he looked again. Outlined against the
sky a man climbed to the tow-path and walked away. Shelby recognized
Bernard Graves.
"Ride on slowly," he directed. "I'll join you in a minute. There's
something needs looking after in the Eureka."
CHAPTER V
The intruder wheeled at the hoof-beats and waited. Purpling with rage,
Shelby thrust the cob's nozzle fairly in Graves's face.
"You're a damned spy," he taunted.
Graves went pale, but his jaw set.
"You know better, Shelby," he answered, without passion. "I am here
openly. I came before the quarry shut down for the night, as your men
will tell you."
"You're a spy," repeated Shelby, fingering his whip. "Come how or when,
you're a spy. I know your back-door tactics. You sly into other men's
private business, as you're trying to sly into politics."
"I care nothing for any private business of yours which doesn't besmirch
your public character."
"Besmirch!" Shelby pounced upon the word. "I know your kidney—you pure
souls who shirk jury duty and whine down taxes."
Graves backed from the nervous whip.
"I want no words with you," he said.
"I dare say; but you'll have them." He reined the cob to block Graves's
further retreat, forcing him well upon the string-piece of the dock.
"You're here to smell out canal scandals," he charged. "You want to know
what became of the marketable stone that was taken from the canal prism.
You'll get your wish right here and now. I took that stone, my pattern
of civic virtue; sold it, my pink of reformers. You needn't have screwed
Jap Hinchey for that knowledge. I would have told you the truth any
time, and much good may it do you. Are you ass enough to believe that
the contractors went outside their specifications to dispose of the
spoils banks to my company? They had their warrant from Albany in black
and white. Every act was within the law."
"The more shame upon Albany and the law; it is the letter of the law
which shelters you."
Shelby rasped a laugh.
"I know something of the spirit of laws."
"I doubt not. You've helped make enough disreputable legislation to
qualify an expert."
"What right has a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded,
the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You
have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics
with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and
blood fact. Party fealty means nothing to you. You've not voted a
straight ticket twice in your life."
"I know where that shoe pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've
consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow
your assumption of divine right to hold office all the time."
Shelby's fingers knotted round his whip-handle.
"I'd like to trounce you," he menaced. "It's a hiding you need."
"For presuming to run against you? Let me make it plain that I'm not to
be intimidated by you or any of your creatures."
"I'd like to trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with
the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your
pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy
goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted
none of you. If Ruth Temple—"
Graves wrenched the whip from Shelby's grasp, and struck with all his
might. The warded blow spent itself on the pommel of the saddle.
"Stung, eh?" Shelby leaped from his stirrups and closed with him. The
cob took fright at the reeling men and pounded off up the tow-path toward
the town.
Then another horse loomed of a sudden from out the dusk, and Ruth herself
rode straight upon them, enforcing a separation.
"How dare you drag my name into a low political quarrel—either of you?"
No one answered her. "Give me the whip." Shelby, who had regained it,
obeyed without a word. Ruth flung it far into the canal. "Now if you
will be brutes, use brutes' weapons." Wherewith she turned an indignant
back and galloped an exit from the scene as spirited as her entrance.
"You knew she was there," accused Graves.
"I left her in the road, damn you. I couldn't know she had seen."
Standing on the dock's sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes
through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out
giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glancing with
fitful gleams of steel and copper from the sunset's last saffron
afterglow. The yellow headlight of a low-lying grain boat stole nearer,
unheeded till the straining mules toiled by.
"I don't know what keeps me from—"
Shelby's lips were tardy of framing what his heart lusted.
"Fear, perhaps."
"If you think that, then—"
A rain of oaths from the driver warned them too late of the trailing
tow-line. They tripped together, and in an embrace of self-preservation
together fell into the cool still waters which ever draw unruffled,
though their banks smoulder with passion and political intrigue from the
Niagara to the Hudson.
Shelby rose first, half-strangled, and laid hold upon the wall. Still
cursing fluently, the driver pulled him to the string-piece, and both men
peered out over the watery blackness, now cut with a widening shaft of
light from the boat's lantern. Graves seemed to have vanished utterly,
and Shelby made the banks echo with his name, but the canal returned no
answer. The man was now as ready to save as a moment since he had been
ready to destroy, but before he could slip again into the water, the boat
glided past, discovering Graves in dim silhouette against the gray
timbers, swimming at ease.
With a parting curse, indicative of relief, the driver set off down the
tow-path after his mules, while Shelby waited on the brink till the boat
went by, intending aid if the swimmer's strength should fail. But Graves
was of no mind to cause him the lifting of a finger, and to the watcher's
bewilderment cut directly behind the great rudder into the swirling wake,
headed for the heel-path, which he attained with a dozen vigorous
strokes, and clambering the sloping embankment, disappeared in a clump of
willows.
The autumn frosts nip Tuscarora betimes, but Shelby sat staring in his
sodden clothes, till he fathomed his rival's motive, and chattered forth
a laugh. Then he hurried across the dock to the little tin-roofed office
of the Eureka. He was without a key, but he rummaged a pick from one of
the neighboring sheds, forced the staple of the padlock, and, popping
into the oven warmth of the cabin, mended the fire in the tiny sheet-iron
stove. His first precaution was to drain his pocket flask, which had
somehow come through unscathed, and, as he peeled away his clinging
garments in the flickering light, he telephoned the Tuscarora House for a
change of clothing. In the reflective half-hour before the coming of the
messenger he felt a genuine regret that Graves had gone his own way. The
affair had dropped already into humorous perspective, and it seemed to
him that, had they stood side by side in this cabin, every barrier must
have fallen and the outcome been wholly good.
Nature's reaction from the too tense hours of that crowded day was at its
utmost swing as he gained his hotel room and smoothed the roughness of
his quarry toilet. The familiar chamber revolted him; its warring colors
jarred; the nymphs of his favorite picture were devoid of blandishment.
Nor did his cronies of below stairs attract, and the liquor he had taken
left him no appetite for solid food. He craved nothing so much as rest
and human sympathy.
Mrs. Hilliard was at home.
"You never fail when I need you," she said, as Shelby couched his jaded
body in the cosy library before an open fire. "Joe is always out, of
course. I don't mind that—now. Milicent too is gone to-night,—a
children's party. I've been lonely—depressed. Since you came—ah,
well, see for yourself what I am."
A maudlin self-pity, born of alcohol, dimmed Shelby's eyes.
"It's like a home to me," he confessed, his voice uncertain. "It's like
a home."
"And some call you hard!" Mrs. Hilliard extended both plump hands to
him. "How they misjudge you."
"Everybody misjudges me, Cora," Shelby declared, not backward in manual
demonstration himself; "everybody but you."
The lady released herself adroitly, and fluttered the music at a piano
just beyond the half-drawn portière of the adjoining room.
"Shall I play?" she asked.
Shelby nodded like a sultan from his cushions.
"Ragtime," he directed. "Something with a tune." The other woman had
surfeited him with classicalities.
He built air castles as he watched and listened; fabrics furnished after
the manner of the Hilliard home and peopled by two kindred souls. If
this insidious luxury were his—the warmth, ease, leisure, Cora! He
considered the turn of her neck, her profile, the famous shoulders, now
clothed yet not concealed. She was handsome still; ripe, but not
over-ripe, ambitious, capable. They were singularly congenial, he and
she. He could have blundered worse than in marrying her, had not burly
Joe forestalled. He—inappreciative hulk!—was no fit mate for her.
She needed sympathy, coöperation, the fellowship of her mind's true
complement: in fine, himself. If the other woman should not—if Joe—!
He clipped the revery of its conclusion.
In that evening's long intimacy—how long or how intimate neither
realized till afterward—the man bared his financial necessity.
"God knows why I blab this," he ended. "I've told nobody else the whole
truth, not even Bowers."
She lagged short of his meaning at first.
"But you'll have plenty in time," she said. "There will be your
congressional salary and all the new opportunities."
"Without money I may never draw that salary."
"You don't mean you'll fail! You don't mean that, Ross?"
He bowed gravely.
"But it's impossible. Why, everybody will vote for you—almost
everybody. Joe alone will give you two hundred votes."
"It will require more than Little Poland's good-will to elect me," he
smiled grimly.
"You must buy votes?"
"Yes."
"And you have nothing?"
"At this moment I haven't enough ready cash to give me a decent burial."
"Don't speak like that." She rose impulsively, and unlocked a cabinet in
the chimneypiece. "Here is a little—not much—a hundred dollars
perhaps. I want you to take it; it's mine—some of my allowance. I want
to give it to the party. And there's more. I've a mortgage—my very
own. You shall have that too—for the party."
Shelby leaped to his feet as she thrust the bills in his hands.
"My God, Cora," he cried, "I can't take this—your pin money!"
She caught the notes from his protesting fingers and forced them into his
nearest pocket.
"You shall," she pleaded; "you shall—for the party."
He seized her hands and bent to meet her eyes.
"Cora, Cora," he whispered hoarsely, "you're not doing this for the
party! It's not for the party! It's for me, Cora, for me—"
"Such a nice party—party—" A fragment of Milicent's treble good nights
drifted in from the sidewalk like an echo.
CHAPTER VI
Shelby waked from a restless night to confront a restless day, in
truth, an anxious week. Two things he set about instanter; he wrote a
manly letter of apology to Ruth, and he returned Mrs. Hilliard's money.
All day long he parried and laughed down fatuous comment on his
supposed cropper into the canal, for the cob had returned to his manger
and founded a theory that his master let gossip accept as true. He
dissembled with greater ease as the hours lapsed, finding reasons why
the inner history of the incident would remain secret; neither Ruth nor
Bernard Graves was likely to tell—he certainly should not. In the
evening it was bruited that Graves was sick, and the morrow's Whig
diagnosed his malady as influenza. Shelby thanked his practical stars
that the ducking had had no such issue for him. By the second evening
he was doubly thankful, for the press despatches were ticking out to
whom it might concern that the distinguished author of the ode on the
"Victory of Samothrace" and other poems lay low with pneumonia.
In common with hundreds, Shelby sent a message of regret, which, like
its fellow-hundreds, nobody at the Graves cottage found time to read.
Many of these notes and telegrams, however, found their way into the
Whig, but Shelby hunted its despised columns in vain for his own.
This seemed to him and to Bowers a deliberate attempt by Sprague to
stamp him as unfeeling,—to coin party capital,—and with the notion of
righting himself in the public eye Shelby determined upon a personal
call at the house. By a piece of good fortune, as unexpected as it was
welcome, he was received by Ruth, who had volunteered to lighten the
burden of the sick man's mother in ways like this. She was
unembarrassed, courteous, even kind in a formal fashion, telling him in
subdued accents what he knew she must know he knew already from the
newspapers. The patient's case discussed from every point of view, the
caller burned to forward his own concerns, to renew his apologies, to
make his peace; but he could find no opening, and shortly went away.
Yet his silence did him better service than speech. Ruth mistook his
unrest for contrition, and pitied him.
As Graves's disease neared its crisis, with hurried summoning of
consulting physicians and rumors of a resort to oxygen, Shelby found it
impossible to avoid an occasional glance into an immediate future in
which Graves figured merely as a memory; but whatever his speculations,
he was decently chary of voicing them. Some of his party associates
were more outspoken, and the opinion was advanced over the Tuscarora
House bar that, the loss to literature aside, the young man's
taking-off could not but simplify the political situation. The Hon.
Seneca Bowers, being of the old school, quaintly declined both
speculation and discussion.
The day of the crisis Shelby saw Dr. Crandall step from his phaeton to
his little sham Greek temple of an office at the foot of his lawn, and
followed him. The bluff physician greeted him with a scowl.
"Well, sir?" he jerked out, fumbling and smelling among his bottles.
"I wanted news of Graves."
"I doubt not."
The words of themselves were innocuous, but the doctor's hammering
emphasis was formidable.
"I resent your tone," protested Shelby.
"And I, sir, resent your inquiry."
"You must have received many like it. However, you may keep your
bulletins. Those of the consulting physicians are probably more
reliable."
With this shaft he turned, but Dr. Crandall was beforehand and closed
the door.
"Not yet, sir, not yet," he said grimly. "I have a bulletin for you,
deem its worth what you will. And I have more. I must administer some
nasty medicine. My patient will recover, sir, and no thanks to you."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Yes, you do."
"You accuse me of lying—"
"Bah, sir, stop your ruffling. Now for your physic. At the instance
of my lifelong friend, Seneca Bowers, I consented against my better
judgment to preside last month at your ratification meeting, and so
lent you, as I may say, my public indorsement. I shall not publicly
stultify myself by repudiating that action, but my vote, thank Heaven,
I never pledged. I warn you, sir, that, as sure as I see the sun rise
on election day, I shall cast my ballot for your opponent, or my name's
not Crandall."
"Very well," sneered Shelby, coolly. "If your political allegiance
follows your fee, there's no more to be said."
"I am stoically indifferent to your slanderous imputation," fumed the
doctor, his manner a very Judas to his words; "but I assure you there
is more to be said, and that I purpose to say it. I have yet to tell
you that you are a blackguard, sir, a violent blackguard, whose proper
level is the ward cesspools of the metropolis where crime and politics
stalk hand in hand. Medical science will save the man you would have
done to death."
Shelby passed the vituperation, puzzling how much the irate doctor knew.
"Is your patient's delirium contagious?" he asked.
"Ha!" cried the doctor. "You do take my meaning."
"It's clear enough that you are hinting at foul play on the flimsiest
of evidence."
"Evidence, evidence! I want no surer evidence of your intent than poor
Bernard's wanderings; there's method, sir, even in delirium. If I
wished further proof, the fact that you too were in the canal that
night would suffice."
"Fevered maunderings and a coincidence!" Shelby laughed him in the
face, too contemptuous to set him right. "Keep your vote, you pompous
ignoramus," he jeered, and left him sputtering.
Worsting the choleric physician in argument was a mere matter of
keeping one's own temper, and Shelby took no pride in his victory. It
was a relief to know that he knew so little, but the possibility
remained that, in the weakness of convalescence, Bernard might let fall
details more damaging than Dr. Crandall's tissue of half-knowledge and
inference. Ruth and pneumonia eliminated, the quarrel might have
become public property and welcome, with a likely chance of its working
to his advantage; but, alas, he himself had dragged Ruth into it past
all elimination, and now Bernard's sickness had whipped up a sea of
maudlin sympathy which exposure might easily precipitate in a political
tidal wave.
From this day forth, event crowded event. The news from the sick-room
was the signal for renewed activity all along the line of battle, and
the spectre of his great need haunted Shelby with added terrors.
Bernard Graves's allies, apt disciples of the late Chuck O'Rourke as
they were, jumped at the shining possibilities laid open by their
candidate's condition, and, abetted financially by their State
Committee, set a pace in corruption unprecedented in the checkered
history of the Demijohn. Volney Sprague was powerless. The
freebooters listened sedately to his protests and redoubled their
offending, well aware that in their candidate's chamber politics could
have yet no place. Far from the turmoil, the celebrity ate the jellies
of his idolaters, and spent his waking hours in the impractical
companionship of a certain Shelley and one John Keats.
The beset leaders strained the machine's every cog to meet the
emergency. Out from a corner of the Chairman of the County Committee's
safe came a pudgy manuscript book which few eyes ever saw,—a book made
up of voters' names, their party, and at times their price set down in
strange symbols which the initiated might translate into terms of
dollars and cents. Probably every county committee in the Demijohn
Congressional District could show the like. There was earnest thumbing
of these volumes, with changing of symbols to fit changed conditions,
and the call went out for money. Little came. The State Committee was
deaf to argument or entreaty, and the Demijohn seemed drained. Shelby
and Bowers personally did what they could. For reputation's sake, the
old leader went down deep into his pocket, while Shelby tossed into the
breach everything he realized from his mortgaged quarry interest which
long outstanding debts did not require. Nor were these latter
inconsiderable. Involved in innumerable schemes which sapped his
capital without prospect of ready dividends, it seemed to him that
every land syndicate, stock company, insurance policy, what not, of
them all was demanding instant propitiation. Brave it out with Bowers
as he might, Shelby walked none the less in the shadow of a mighty
fear; and had not Mrs. Hilliard left town for her annual autumn round
of the shops of New York, he could have gone to her prepared to accept
her supremest charity.
In his blackest hour the distracted man encountered the Widow
Weatherwax. Since her sibylline performances at the camp-meeting he
had seen little of her, the fascination of will-making being
temporarily eclipsed by a local temperance crusade led by Mr. Hewett,
which enlisted the full energy of her not inconsiderable powers for
conscience-guided meddling. The parson had deemed the time ripe for a
war on the groggeries of the Flats, with the outcome that most
bar-rooms of the town, including that of the Tuscarora House, were
found to be violating the Sunday closing law. In the legal
unpleasantness which followed, Shelby's name figured as attorney for
the hotel proprietor, one of the lawyer's regular clients. It was a
purely formal service, without moral implication of any sort, but it
bared Shelby's whole legislative record on the liquor question to
pin-prick attack, and cost him, as he now learned from her shocked
lips, the invaluable political support of the widow.
Buttonholed while crossing the court-house lawn, and backed into a
corner between the county clerk's office and the jail, Shelby had to
listen with what patience he might to her denunciation of what she
called his vile concord with Belial.
"Yes, yes, Mrs. Weatherwax," he wedged in finally; "but we can't all
think alike. Now if you were a liquor dealer's wife, you would sing
another song."
The widow shuddered.
"Me!" Another shudder. "Me marry a saloon keeper! Me!—a W.C.T.U.
and a I.O.G.T.!"
Shelby grinned.
"They say I.O.G.T. means 'I Often Get Tight.'" Somehow he could not
resist the ancient rural fling.
"You know well 'nuff 'tain't," retorted the widow, indignantly. "It's
the Inderpendant Order ov Good Templars, and I'm an orf'cer with
regalyer. It's purple, and has gold lace."
"I'm amazed at your wearing such fripperies," teased the man; "but you
must look simply ravishing."
The widow was bomb-proof against humorous attack. Drawing herself to
her full height, as she might clad in full regalia of purple and gold,
she mouthed:—
"'I loath, abhor, my very soul with strong disgust is stirred, when
e're I see, or hear, or tell ov the dark bev'rage ov hell.'"
The dumpy little figure, swelling like a pouter pigeon's, was so
irresistibly ludicrous that Shelby forgot his troubles and threw back
his head in a gust of laughter.
"Think it's funny, I s'pose." Her face was vinegar. "'Tain't to be
expected a boy brung up in a distillery 'ud know better."
Shelby sobered.
"Confine yourself to facts, please," he interposed. "My grandfather's
entirely respectable distilling business was closed out before I was
born."
"'Twa'n't b'fore your pa was made a drunkard, Ross Shelby."
He went red with impotent anger.
"By God!" he swore. "If—if you were a man—"
"There you go a-swearin' at a poor weak female."
"Let me pass," he choked. "Let me pass. I don't know what I may say
to you."
She stepped aside.
"Go," she said, with a fat little gesture. "Mebbe you've got pressin'
business. Mebbe you want to write billy-doos to Mrs. Hilliard. Mebbe
them opery glasses needs dustin' off s'more."
He fled lest she say worse.
Clearly William Irons had been wax in the widow's hands, and on his
auburn head would have fallen the accumulated spleen of weeks had not
the youth met his employer at the office door with a telegram whose
portentous message engulfed all lesser cares.
CHAPTER VII
Shelby read, pondered, and finally roused from his preoccupation to
meet the bovine stare of his clerk.
"Railway guide, William," he ordered sharply.
"Yep."
"And call up the station agent. Have him wire for a lower berth on the
Lehigh to-night."
William Irons waited.
"Go on, go on," called the politician, crossly, glancing up from his
time-table. "Have you foundered halfway?"
"Nope. You didn't say where to."
"New York, New York."
"Yep," said William, placidly. "What train?"
Shelby left off staring at his blotter for an instant, to fling him the
information. William Irons rubbed one long leg against its fellow as
he leaned to the telephone and ruminated the mystery of this impending
flight into what was for him the great unknown. This air of suppressed
excitement had never attended Shelby's departures.
"Goin' to use it yourself?" he inquired.
"Is the station agent aching to know?"
"Nope," returned William, frankly. "He didn't ask."
"Then you needn't. Now get Mr. Bowers's residence, and ask if he is
there."
"Got him," announced the clerk presently, as if he had trapped a rat,
and stood expectantly aside. To his disappointment Shelby merely made
an immediate appointment at the Bowers's home. More bitter still, he
took the message with him.
"Lightning has struck," Shelby greeted the old man ten minutes later,
handing him the telegram. "I've been ordered down to the Boss. This
means make or break."
The Hon. Seneca Bowers unslung his glasses and slowly read the summons.
"I guess it had to come," he commented.
"Oh, yes. Things have reached lowest ebb. In fact, they're so low
that you must put up my car fare."
Bowers assented readily.
"Whatever you need you shall have, Ross. You must go in good style."
Shelby pocketed the sum which he thought would meet his travelling
expenses and listened to his friend's rather dolorous words of
encouragement.
"I think he'll do right by you," Bowers concluded feebly. "I think
he'll do right."
Shelby jerked a grim smile.
"The Boss always does right—when it pays."
In the smoking-room of the Pullman that night the traveller was
accosted by an unctuous person who looked like a race-track tout. He
would have described himself as a man "interested" in legislation; he
had been described by other people as a lobbyist, but that was in the
days before the machine absorbed the lobby.
"And how does the Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby find himself?" beamed the
new-comer, dropping into a seat alongside. "Busy days in Tuscarora,
eh?"
"Yes; busy days, Krantz," assented the harassed man, concealing his
annoyance under a cordial greeting. If ever he had needed a quiet hour
it was now, and he had sought the smoking-compartment because with a
carful of women and children it seemed to promise solitude.
"Shall miss you around Albany this winter," Krantz said feelingly,
exploring the pockets of his horsey waistcoat for a cigar. "We always
got along so well together."
Shelby was silent under this moving reminiscence.
"I'll have some of my Washington friends look you up," pursued the man.
"They're good fellows, all of 'em."
"Thanks," said Shelby, without enthusiasm. "Better wait till I'm
elected."
"My dear sir, can you doubt? Your resplendent gonfalon, if I may so
express myself, has ever been Victory's chosen perch."
"I've pulled a majority hitherto."
"And you will, you will. In fact"—his voice fell—"we think it such a
foregone conclusion that one of my friends who is looking over the
prospective House wants to make your acquaintance. You're sure to
jibe. He's interested in the unlucky River and Harbor scheme."
"Oh."
Krantz looked out at him from underneath his saurian lids, and blew a
smoke ring toward the rococo ceiling.
"Through an option or two I'm rather interested myself," he continued
smoothly. "I'd like to see every good man indorse a good thing. I
haven't been told what your opinion is." Getting no answer, he added:
"Of course we expect to pull the thing off in this winter's session.
If not, then the fight goes into your House. Between ourselves, just
where do you stand?"
"You don't need to be told that it's a gigantic job."
Krantz's benevolent features expressed blandest regret.
"Now isn't it a pity that misconception should be so widespread?" he
exclaimed, apparently to the writhing ornaments of the ceiling. "Isn't
it a pity? But it's so often true! Take that street railway bill of
yours last winter: how that enlightened measure was denounced!"
Shelby scowled.
"We're talking of Washington."
"They've a lot in common, Albany and Washington."
"I don't want them to have for me."
Krantz laughed.
"How reform does drop its gentle influence round! Has the fusion
movement in Tuscarora converted you?"
"No," Shelby answered. "I've grown."
Krantz looked bewildered, laughed a little, and asked point-blank,
"Shall you come out against us?"
"You'll know in Washington."
"If elected," qualified the man.
"Naturally."
Krantz rang up the porter to ask if his berth were ready, rose, yawned,
and shed a benevolent smile.
"From things they're beginning to say about Tuscarora down at
headquarters," he remarked impersonally, "I venture to predict that
we'll know within twenty-four hours. Good night."
The River and Harbor bogy wove the pattern of Shelby's troubled dreams.
In a way, he had grown, as he liked to think, and by this touchstone he
knew it best. Whatever his practice, his quickened ideals were loftier
than of old, and across the future's broader field, should it be his to
till, the man was honestly ambitious to trace a straighter furrow than
his ploughshare had ever turned. But his past and the insistent
present seemed to hamper every forward step. It was an open secret
that the disciplining of the man he hoped to succeed had issued
directly from his refusal to stand with his colleagues in this
question, and Shelby in his heart approved his course. He did not
anticipate that he should meet a like dilemma; the winter session of
the old House would doubtless settle the matter, as Krantz had said;
but Volney Sprague had harped upon his possible action so incessantly
that he could easily see why the organization might wonder at his
silence. Was the time for speech, then, so near as this creature
warned?
Yet he took a certain comfort in Krantz's companionship in the morning,
as from the crowded ferry he watched the city's sky line detach itself
from the mist. Notwithstanding his legislative career, New York was
almost an unknown country, and this battlemented mystery overawed him
like a frowning bastion. It challenged the alien to do and dare, but
it quenched his individuality. Krantz, obviously, was hardened to its
lesson. He elbowed the jostling pack in the ferry slip as one of them,
called the elevated road the "L," and was otherwise enviably
sophisticated. Shelby imitated at a distance, but the hall mark of the
outsider was too deep for ready erasure. He would persistently
apologize to people with whom he collided, and surrender his car seat
to standing women.
He had mentioned a Madison Square hotel as his destination, and on
Krantz's saying that he meant to stop there briefly, too, it fell out
that they approached the room clerk together, and that Krantz
registered for both. So it chanced that, unknown to himself, the
candidate was entered with a fine flourish as the Hon. Calvin Ross
Shelby. The two men breakfasted together, and Krantz presently went
about his business, leaving Shelby in some quandary how he should
employ the interval before the hour appointed by the great leader for
their meeting. For a time he loitered in a window overlooking the
restful oasis of the square, a place of fountains and pleasant leafage,
dominated by a graceful tower which served as footstool for a shining
goddess on tiptoe to greet the morning. His eyes were not long bent
upon the goddess,—he did not "live with the gods,"—nor yet upon the
greenness, since he had lived all his days with shrubs and trees; he
watched the commingling ride of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, watched till
it dizzied and saddened him. What did he count here?
Presently he returned to the desk with an inquiry concerning his room.
There had been a shift of clerks since his arrival, and the newcomer
asked his name, his impassive scrutiny travelling from the man to the
signature, and from the signature back to the man. A youngish person,
looking the successful broker or lawyer, who had been chatting with the
clerk, saw the movement and imitated it as Shelby walked away.
"And you said there were no celebrities," he bantered.
The clerk shrugged listlessly.
"The 'Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby,'" read the reporter. "There ought to be
a story in a man who has the nerve to subscribe himself like that in a
New York hotel. What do you know about his pathetic case?"
"Stranger to me," the bored one unbent to say.
The questioner spied a fellow-reporter whose specialty was politics.
"Billy," he demanded, pointing to the register, "who is the Hon. Calvin
Ross Shelby?"
"Candidate for Congress in the Demijohn District," returned the
political expert, promptly, smiling at the signature. "Rather
picturesque fight the honorable is having. He's bucking a fusion
opposition headed by the author of that popular poem about a statue.
Where is he? I want to see him. There's nothing else doing here."
They pursued the stranger down the corridor, overhauling him at the
entrance of the cafe.
"The Hon. Calvin Ross Shelby, I believe," said the political reporter,
lifting his hat, and naming the newspaper he represented. His
companion, who looked like a broker, but whose present mission was to
screw copy out of hotel arrivals, followed his example, and the group
was almost immediately increased by three more well-dressed
cosmopolitans with ingratiating manners and a scent for news.
Five New York reporters hanging on his words! To achieve this giddy
pinnacle on the heels of calling himself an atom seemed to Shelby
almost to pass belief. Somehow he rallied.
"Gentlemen," he beamed, "I'm glad to see you. Have a drink."
No liquor distilled could add to Shelby's intoxication. It was not
reporting, this swift interchange of trenchant thought between men of
the world; or if reporting, a sublimated sort, free of note-books and
the disconcerting trademarks of the guild as he had known it elsewhere.
"I can't understand the hostility felt by some public men for the
press," he remarked, thumbs in armholes, coat lapels thrown benignly
back. "Our relations, I take it, should be confidential."
Practice followed precept, and in that delightful atmosphere Shelby's
confidences flowered like young May. Tuscarora County was put through
its paces for a gaping world; Clinton's Ditch—"well-spring of New
York's commercial supremacy, gentlemen"—shown in rosiest apotheosis;
the Empire State pedestalled imperially among the nations. Nor could
his versatility be bounded by politics alone. The inevitable allusion
to Bernard Graves's poem involved literature, and to stand, as he did,
under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his
pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed
championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire
by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in
obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy
ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of
distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby
voiced opinions more vigorous than discreet.
"There was a time," he confessed apropos of the nymphs, "when I thought
those ladies the best ever. Young eyes won't hesitate between a plump
Venus and a lean Madonna."
"And now?"
"Well, I haven't altogether renounced the world, the flesh, and the
devil, but my taste has changed. A good animal picture fetches
me,—something like Rosa What's-her-name's 'Horse Fair' you've got
up-town in Central Park. I call that big art."
"Big art; that's the word," agreed the cherub, shaking hands. "It
measures 197 x 93 1/2," he murmured to his cigarette.
CHAPTER VIII
The Boss was an awesome figure to up-state politicians, and Shelby
approached his place of business with a trepidation not wholly owing to
his tangled fortunes. It was his first visit. There had been meetings
between them at Saratoga conventions, and more times than a few he had
furthered the leader's indirect ends in the Albany committee-rooms and
on the floor of the Assembly; but greater than Shelby had found it
impossible to penetrate the great man's inner circle at Saratoga, and
their subterranean dealings in Albany and elsewhere had usually been
transacted by way of Bowers. The Boss's methods were circuitous, cog
fitting smoothly to cog till the remote agent rather than himself
seemed the prime mover. Only in emergencies was he direct.
His apparent aloofness multiplied his power. He held no office; he
made no speeches; he had no obvious axe to grind. He seemed to count
politics his diversion, not his business, and emphasized this attitude
by a strict supervision of the huge commercial enterprise whose head he
was. He arrived in this company's offices punctually at ten o'clock,
and here he was readily accessible throughout the working day, a figure
as politically unprofessional as one could imagine. Yet politically he
was as absolute as a boss ever is. At once the most abused, hated,
dreaded, liked, and respected man in the state, fables without number
clustered round his elusive personality. One account would paint him a
church deacon, frock-coated, smug; another with cloven hoof. He was
said to be a Hedonist, a Marcus Aurelius; a glutton, an ascetic; a
satyr, a pattern of domestic virtue; an illiterate Philistine, a
collector of book plates and first editions. A legend, widely current,
ran that he played chief bacchanalian at dinners whose vaudeville
accompaniments were too gross for a bill of particulars; while another,
equally plausible, had it that he lunched daily on a red-cheeked apple
raised on the farm which had cradled his undistinguished infancy. He
was popularly known as Old Silky.
Shelby's card barely preceded him into the Boss's presence. It was not
a sumptuous throne-room; an austere chamber rather, one might without
exaggeration say a roomy cell, with puritanic chairs and khaki-colored
regiments of letter files. There were two concessions to a softer
scheme of life,—a lounge and a bowl of red chrysanthemums, both with
associations. On the lounge, which parenthetically had lesser though
not less interesting memories, a President-to-be had sat a suppliant,
while the bowl, always flower-heaped, recalled an hour when a
tempestuous petticoat, his protégé, had swept straight from operatic
triumphs to shower roses at his feet. This ruddy bowl lit a broad, low
desk from which now advanced a gray-haired man of a certain shy
friendliness and modulated tones.
"This is right obliging of you," he said over the hand-clasp. "Don't
tell me you've already lunched?"
Shelby had, but dissembled, his tone dropping in unconscious imitation
of the leader's. Every apprehension forgotten, he yielded instantly to
the charm of his unassuming friendliness.
"Then you must honor me. Five minutes with these papers and I'll be
with you." He turned to a pile of type-written letters awaiting his
signature, his whole demeanor a graceful protest against this retarding
of their pleasure. "Here are the afternoon papers if you care to look
them over; they come upon us before the ink is dry on the morning's
batch. No, no; not that uncomfortable chair, Mr. Shelby. Take the
lounge, I beg of you. Stand on no ceremony here. This is Liberty
Hall."
Somebody should write the philosophy of chairs. One may retain
convictions in furniture which is palpably vertebrate; lapped in
billowing upholstery it is a moot question; and like many a caller's
before him, Shelby's brain tissue became a jelly of flattered
complacency. It sufficed merely to simmer in a sense of equality with
the silver-haired gentleman at the desk. The Boss! He had heard that
the great man loathed the homely title his leadership entailed. It was
not pretty; but its rough forceful Americanism had never struck Shelby
as inept till this moment. Applied to this suave yet virile creature
it fell grotesquely short, missing the key-note of his supremacy. Set
back some centuries, this Boss would have been his Eminence the
Cardinal.
It may be doubted had the Boss actually worn the red hat whether a
procession of liveried messengers could have impressed Shelby more than
did a small desk telephone half concealed by the chrysanthemums. Its
bell tinkled incessantly, and with infinite patience the leader
interrupted his work again and again to answer it, seeming from
Shelby's vantage point to murmur secret messages into the petals of the
flowers. The dismembered half of a telephone conversation is not
ordinarily illuminating, and the Boss's words in themselves said
little. How tremendously much they might connote, the visitor as a
business man and a politician thoroughly appreciated, and his
imagination did the occasion something more than justice. Desk
telephones were unknown in the simpler Tuscarora world.
Thus the five minutes were lengthened out to ten, and then with
apologies to a quarter of an hour. Shelby's eyes dropped to the
newspapers on his knee and fastened on a headline—
"SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN."
It required a second reading. The absorbing present had for the moment
sponged the morning's happenings from his thoughts. To remember
explained without cheapening the sensation. He was used to a relative
prominence in the rural press, but neither this nor the talk with the
reporters had prepared him for inch-high capitals on the first page of
a metropolitan newspaper. What New Yorkers thought of this particular
newspaper was a detail.
SHELBY AND THE DEMIJOHN.
A Sidelight on the Storm Centre of
the Most Picturesque Political
Fight in the Empire State.
The Opponent of the Author of the Ode on the
Victory of Samothrace talks of his Rival
for Congressional Honors and his Book.
MR. SHELBY'S VIGOROUS VIEWS ON THE
ISSUES OF THE CAMPAIGN.
There followed a well-spiced "story" in which Shelby, with his diction
chastened and his colloquialisms omitted save where they lent a racy
strength, was made to say the things the reporter concluded he ought to
have said—it was a party organ—and to sparkle after a fashion which
is actually attained by few in the presence of the interviewer. Even
at his weakest he was caused to shine. A kindly platitude he had let
fall anent Graves's book astonished him as he met it again; the merest
crust upon the waters, under the reporter's manipulation, it returned
to him a filling loaf:—
"But," said Mr. Shelby, "is the production of literature, however
delightful, the fittest school for official life? This, I conceive, is
the whole issue between me and this gifted youth whose illness I
deplore."
It would have been well had he stopped here; but he turned to the other
papers. There was no repetition of the first page glory, his
eulogist's contemporaries entertaining other ideas of space; but he
found his name in most of them.
"MR. GRAVES'S OPPONENT HERE"
"That virtuous spellbinder of county fairs, the "Hon." C. R. Shelby,
reached the city to-day arm in arm with the notorious Jake Krantz. The
character of this aspirant for congressional preferment in the
so-called Demijohn District may be readily judged by the company he
keeps."
Shelby needed no plainer signpost than the style to warn him that he
had fallen foul of the caustic journal which had flayed his plagiarism.
He stole a glance toward the desk, wondering whether the Boss had read
these things. Then he ran hastily through the scurrilous perversion of
his words. Could nothing curb this tyranny?
Yet a greater indignity was in store. His cup brimmed at the discovery
that in the cherub also he had cherished a viper. His mortification
was too keen for the perusal of more than an occasional phrase: "Art's
New Patron"—"The Champion of Canals couches a lance against the tariff
on art"—"his naïve canons of criticism"—"judges a picture by its area
of canvas—the bigger the better."
"Scoundrels!" he suddenly rapped out, crumpling the papers in his
disgust.
"I beg your pardon?" said the Boss, gently, peering over the
chrysanthemums.
"I beg yours. These—these reporters have misrepresented me."
"Dear me! Do you mind that? You shouldn't. One has to be Jekyll or
Hyde. There's no happy medium. But luckily the public takes care of
that. Trust the public to guess, Mr. Shelby, that you're neither an
art critic nor an ass. And don't be rough on the reporters," he added,
getting up. "They work hard for a living, poor boys. Caricature is
the press's peculiar tribute to the significant."
Outside the door of the private office Shelby's face suddenly froze.
Several newspaper men had gathered to question the Boss, and among them
the victim recognized one of his detractors. The impulse was strong to
snub, but taught by the leader's example, he smiled instead and dropped
a friendly nod.
"Seeking whom you may devour, gentlemen?" inquired the Boss. "So am I.
It's past my lunch hour, you know."
With a dozen words he outlined the matter over which they were
exercised, called one and another by name, shunted an inconvenient
question, told a little story, and had slipped out of the building with
Shelby before the pupil realized that the interview had fairly begun.
"I like the boys," he declared. "They slate me, but we're good
friends."
The incident impressed Shelby only less than the desk telephone, and
the walk to luncheon intensified his respect. The Boss explained that
he ate at a mid-air club rather remote from his place of business
because it compelled a chestful of fresh air; and Shelby underwent the
unique experience of promenading busiest Broadway with a man to whom
people bowed on every hand. The Boss took it all as equably as the
country lawyer might his morning salutations between his office and the
Tuscarora House; but to Shelby, from Trinity to St. Paul's, and from
the City Hall to the granite sky-scraper, whose elevator shot them
story after story to the roof, was a splendid triumphal progress. It
was a democratic people's homage to power.
The big green and white club dining room in the sky took up the
wondrous tale. Greetings everywhere, and jovial beckonings to join
this group and that. At the great man's instance, however, they were
placed at a table for two, whose outlook seemed to the stranger to
embrace the kingdoms of the earth. Life, pulsing life, as far as the
embarrassed eye could carry; life in the mazy streets below; life in
the forking estuary's tide; life, eager red-blooded life, to the crest
of the horizon's hills! Nerve ganglion of a continent, market-place of
a world! Shelby swept the panorama again and again as his host gave
his quiet orders to the waiter, tracing the Hudson from the
shipping-crowded bay till its blueness melted in the haze beyond which
lay the commonwealth, the empire, whose political destinies seemed to
rest in the hollow of this man's hand. It drugged the senses to
attempt to gauge his power.
The Boss was speaking of Tuscarora and the Demijohn. Out of painful
experience he had come to believe that the truest privacy is the
privacy of the crowd, and indeed the mounting chaff and chatter of the
lunch hour insured isolation most complete. He was speaking of
Tuscarora and the Demijohn, and it had begun over the salad, apropos of
Bowers.
"His political usefulness is at an end," said the leader. "There was
nothing tangible to be got from him at our last conference, and I
determined to send for you."
Shelby essayed a middle course between expectation and regret.
"He says it's his last campaign, poor old chap."
"Yes," concurred the Boss, without sentiment; "we talked it over. It
was our opinion that the organization requires younger blood—in fine,
your own."
"Mine?" The query was perfunctory.
"You logically succeed—on a condition."
"A condition?"
"Your election to Congress."
After a moment Shelby said:—
"It's an incentive to work."
"It's the least you've to work for, if you will permit me to say so."
"I don't understand."
The Boss was silent while the servant changed the course. Then he
searched the younger man's eyes.
"Let me point out what your election may mean," he went on. "It has
been an unusual contest. Mr. Graves's candidacy has interested an
audience which is fairly national in its scope. If victor, you will
take your seat a marked man, equipped with a prestige uncommon to
newcomers in Washington. You will have defeated a celebrity, and you
will stand accredited one of the party leaders of your state."
Shelby's eyes widened.
"One of the leaders?"
"I mean that I like you."
While the waiter brought the finger bowls the significance of the
simple words burned into Shelby's brain. The two men lit cigars and
waited; Shelby's was gnawed to shapelessness. Left to themselves
again, the Boss said softly:—
"Two years from this fall the governorship should go to your section."
Shelby's color mantled and ebbed, leaving him white.
"Our choice,"—the Boss's purring note sank—"our choice, if my poor
opinion should carry weight with the convention, our choice will be
you."
Before Shelby could force a broken word of acknowledgment from his dry
throat the Boss had plunged into a keen analysis of the situation in
the Demijohn. Local statistics, finances, patronage, men's names,
habits, and characteristics, the minutest details, were at his
finger-tips, and the conclusion of the whole matter drove home like a
sledge.
"Your election hangs on money; on your election hangs your future."
"I've spent every cent," returned Shelby, with slow distinctness.
"Yes; I know," was the quiet rejoinder. "I have hoped that the State
Committee would do something. The circumstances are, as you say,
unusual."
The Boss leaned across the table with a smile.
"Why mince matters, my dear fellow? You shall have any sum you ask if
you will assure us of one thing. You have left your friends in doubt
as to your attitude toward the River and Harbor unpleasantness. Not
even Bowers could enlighten us. Now as far as the enemy is concerned,
it doesn't matter, but it does matter to the organization. The project
was abused beyond all reason—though that is neither here nor there.
Whatever the captious may call it, the thing has become an organization
measure, and as such a test of loyalty. Are you loyal?"
Shelby turned his drawn face toward the window. Truly he had been
brought up into a high place and shown the kingdoms of the earth.
"Yes," he answered; "I'm loyal."
CHAPTER IX
In leaving his party headquarters up-town two hours later, Shelby trod
air. Accustomed to eschew a too nice scrutiny of means if the end
seemed meet, he merged every doubt and queasiness in the recurring tide
of hope. Everything ministered to his profound content—the great
leader's parting assurances, the flattering reception at headquarters
which followed, the leap from need to affluence. It was another
atmosphere, another sun, another city.
The afternoon gayety of the streets was wholly to his mood. One need
not be an atom here. To concede a little, to dare a little—that was
the Open Sesame. He held his head sturdily erect. He looked the
impudent city in the face, its equal. With the sense of equality
budded a tolerant liking, a Go-to-Old-Ant-Hill frame of mind, with
admixture of charity. He must study the Ant Hill, find out its
interests and its needs, since from the chrysalis of the country
legislator was shortly to evolve the statesman whose constituency was
the state. The thought was broadening—surely he had grown!—and
fertile of large sweeping views of things and men. Why be petty? A
human signboard advertising Bernard Graves's volume for ninety-eight
cents, with the privilege of return, evoked no unkind thought against
his rival; and from this loftier plane he could see even the morning's
rencounter with the reporters in an indulgent light. He bought later
editions of the afternoon papers that he might rehearse the episode
from his new point of view, and was disappointed to find that where
some fresh sensation had not crowded him from print altogether, he was
dismissed to out-of-the way corners which nobody read. Yet this, too,
he met with a statesman's broad philosophy.
"Lady in hansom wants to speak with you, sir."
Shelby had drifted into the shopping district with some vague notion of
visiting a wax-works museum, dear to the rural heart, and was loitering
among the novelty fakirs who lined the crowded thoroughfare. He turned
to confront the liveried carriage attendant of one of the great
department stores, who, indicating a cab at the curb, repeated his
message. With the hansom's doors thrown wide to display her gown, sat
Mrs. Hilliard, smiling.
The man strode to her side and caught her outstretched hand.
"Cora," he exclaimed, in undertone, "you're the handsomest woman on the
street!"
If there had been anything more remote from his purpose than this
meeting, it was this speech. He knew of her presence in the city, he
knew her address; but from prudential motives he did not precisely
formulate he had determined not to go to her.
"Get in," she murmured, her pleasing color heightening. "We mustn't
block the way."
Such superior tact in the face of urban conditions impressed him,—he
would have stood gossiping, as in New Babylon's sluggish streets,—and
almost without volition he obeyed.
"The Avenue," directed Mrs. Hilliard.
"Which?" asked cabby, his florid face filling the trap.
"Fifth, of course," said the lady, with annoyance.
It has been remarked that Mrs. Hilliard aimed to be cosmopolitan, and
it is pertinent to add that one of the chiefest delights of this, her
annual pilgrimage, was to ride the livelong day in hansom cabs. People
in the sort of fiction she was fondest of "called a hansom" at least
once a chapter.
"You never came to see me," she accused, as they drove on.
"You can't know how busy I've been." This was well within the truth, as
was his further statement that he knew no good could come of calling at
the Waldorf at this hour. "You have proved that I should have missed
you."
"But your card wouldn't. It would have had its silent message. Do you
realize that we haven't met since—"
"We've met now," he interposed hastily; "and I'm another man."
"Don't tell me the old one's wholly gone."
"Never fear. I forget nothing. I appreciate what you wanted to do for
me—what you have done; but the necessity is past, thank God! The load
is lifted—there's money to burn—I'm free, free!"
"Dear friend," said Mrs. Hilliard. "You make me so happy."
"And I've been honored," he exulted. "I lunched to-day with our great
leader—and, Cora, whatever they say against him, he is indeed
great—and he was more than kind." It was near his lips to hint of the
rosy future, but he spoke instead of a lesser, though nearer prize,
which the day had assured. "He believes in me, and he has asked me to
return home by the governor's own special train!"
"I knew it, I knew it. I was sure that they would appreciate you at
the last. I've seen the papers, too, and I'm so proud. I want the
people at home to know that the big outside world is awake to your
importance. Even New York journalism pays its tribute."
"Did you—er—read all the papers? One has to be Jekyll or Hyde, you
know," he added, appropriating the Boss's illustration without
compunction. "Some of them were—facetious."
"Indeed I did not. I only skimmed the horrid ones; but the others I
read through and through, and sent them home. I threw the spiteful
ones away. They were jealous of your success."
He smiled a little at this.
"Not rabidly jealous, I guess."
"The governor's train!" She made him as elaborate an obeisance as the
hansom's contracted limits would permit. "And yet you condescend to
take the air with humble me."
He laughed joyously.
"I feel like a boy with a holiday," he confessed. "I'm free—free!"
He kindled at her suggestion that they make it a holiday in truth, and
repeating, "I'm free," gave himself to the spectacle of the street.
Mrs. Hilliard suddenly remembered to be cosmopolitan, and bringing her
lorgnon into action, returned stare for stare as their driver threaded
his dexterous way through the clattering, glittering maze of four
o'clock Fifth Avenue.
With bewildering facility, she named the owners of the great
houses—usually striking amiss, though Shelby could not know—and from
some little experience with New York horse shows, could recognize an
occasional carriage occupant. Her adaptability abashed him, setting
her mysteriously apart from the woman whose past had been so intimately
linked with his, and not until they tacked across the plaza into the
wooded entrance of the park, which somehow suggested Tuscarora, did he
pluck up the old sense of comradeship. There were still glittering
equipages in plenty, and at every turn benches black with sightseers,
for the day was a bit of summer gone astray; but this and that
bright-liveried copse or shining pond or meadow cropped by sheep evoked
the familiar setting of their other rides without effacing the city
towering beyond.
"I guess you were born for this kind of thing, Cora," he broke the
silence.
The woman gave a flattered little laugh which tapered to a sigh.
"You, too, were meant for something wider than Tuscarora," she
returned; "and you will get it,—get it here, perhaps. The great New
Yorkers are usually country-born, you know. You'll find your niche—no
small one; find it and fill it; while I—? Ah, well; this isn't the
talk for your holiday."
He brushed her sleeve with a light pressure.
"Make it your holiday, too. Let yourself go."
"Our holiday, then," she assented; "no past, no future, just here and
now."
Copying nature's lead, the character of the park changed by and by; the
way rose from a sun-shot ravine and wound a wooded hill full of forest
scents and subdued surf-like echoings of the city's roar. Strange rock
upheavals with writhing strata flanked the by-paths, a mystery and an
invitation, and the man and woman left their hansom to shuffle, a pair
of children, in the fallen leaves. A squirrel, tame to familiarity,
pushed his nut-begging little nose fairly into their fingers.
"How perfectly Edenic," murmured Mrs. Hilliard. "I feel as if there
wasn't another human being besides you on earth."
Paradise before the Fall had its dinner problem to discuss, as witness
the apple affair, and so presently had Shelby and Mrs. Hilliard. But
it was the man, not Eve, who put the idea forward as the fitting climax
of a memorable day, as perhaps did Father Adam, though she it was who
ran the garden's resources through, and decided which to choose. The
talk had ranged from Sherry's and Delmonico's to Chinatown and the
Ghetto, when Mrs. Hilliard recollected a place ideally suited to the
occasion.
"It's on Riverside Drive, and overlooks the Hudson," she explained.
"I've heard Ruth Temple speak of it, though I can't remember the name.
The driver will know; it's historic."
The driver did know, and whipped them smartly out of a park exit where
the heights fell abruptly away and the elevated railroad far overhead
twisted a wriggling S into Harlem's sixth story. Then the land again
rose sheer on gray curtains of masonry, splashed red with October ivy,
lifting city on city. A cathedral's beginnings, looking a ruin, now
cut sharply against the sky, neighboring a hospital with the facade of
a chateau. Then they skirted a pink and gray university grouped about
a dome, and a great man's tomb which might have been a Titan's
pepper-box, flourishing presently between files of waiting hansoms and
automobiles to their destination.
The restaurant was crowded, but they luckily succeeded to a just
vacated table by a northern window which swept the valley. A sunset of
myriad tints and opalescent fires made molten copper of the river and a
carnival float of every craft.
"We have it clear to-night," said their waiter, as if the establishment
somehow deserved the credit. "You'd not think that big cliff to the
left was opposite Yonkers. That's Fort Washington nearer on the right.
A fight came off there up on the heights, you know. Washington had to
look on from the Palisades and see the Hessians bayonet his troops.
They say he wept."
Mrs. Hilliard considered him through her lorgnon, but the man was busy
with the napery and escaped punishment.
"The house is pretty famous, too," he went on. "Joseph Bonaparte lived
here for a while, you know, and when Fulton tried his steamboat—"
"Yes," interrupted Mrs. Hilliard, icily, "we know."
"Beg pardon," returned the servant, taking the order slip. "Out of
town people generally like to be told."
"It's no use, Cora," rallied Shelby, at the first opportunity. "You're
handicapped. You'll never pass for a native while I'm along." He
divined that she was vexed, and shifted instantly. "Thank you for
bringing me here. After this day of ours we couldn't have picked a
finer sundown."
"Sundown—and the end."
Shelby threw her a glance, and beckoning the waiter, added champagne to
his order.
"We'll not let the celebration peter out in the dumps," he declared.
She demurred faintly. She was unused to wine with her meals, she said;
Joe had old-fashioned ideas about women and wine, and so on; but in the
end they shared the bottle equally, and the holiday took a new lease of
life. Night set in before they finished. The river went black and
mysterious, the shipping lights winked forth like glow-worms, and the
illuminated walking beam of a ferry-boat minced a fantastic progress
from shore to shore. The sometime home of the ex-King of Spain
flowered within and without with electricity, and life simplified
itself to cakes and ale.
From the steps they watched their hansom detach itself from the long
line of yellow-eyed monsters waiting in the outer gloom.
"It must end now," sighed Mrs. Hilliard. "There's the theatre,—why
not? New York is so big."
"I must not."
"Nothing heavy. Say burlesque or vaudeville?"
"If I dared—"
Shelby put her in the hansom and gave the driver the name of a music
hall. The lights of the theatrical district charmed the last prudent
doubt away.
There was a moment's embarrassment at the ticket-office. The little
theatre they had chosen enjoyed a considerable vogue, and the man at
the window could offer nothing less than a box. Shelby was staggered,
but recalling his affluence, flirted a bill through the opening and
neglected to count his change. Not until the usher had brought them to
their box did Mrs. Hilliard comprehend the situation. She whispered,
"Oh, Ross!" hesitated an instant, then entering, laid aside her wraps
under the opera glass inquisition invited by her blond hair.
"How could you?" she murmured, as the house darkened.
"I wouldn't back down before that ticket-seller with you there behind
looking so handsome and swell."
"We should never have come."
Shelby caught her fingers in a reassuring squeeze.
"Don't you worry," he enjoined. "This isn't the Grand Opera House of
New Babylon."
Perceiving that other men smoked, Shelby lit a cigar, and as the
plotless play began to unfold its tuneful fooling Mrs. Hilliard forgot
to be apprehensive. She observed in the audience another woman with
blond hair sipping something from a glass, and wondered if she were
missing an opportunity to be cosmopolitan. If so, she deemed it the
part of wisdom to remain provincial, for it had not escaped her notice
that since dinner her mental processes had undergone some subtle
change. For one thing, her sense of humor had quickened. Joe had
often maintained she had none. If Joe could see her now! No; that was
not her meaning precisely; but at any rate, it had quickened. How
every antic of the comedians appealed to her! The excessively tall and
the excessively short Germans who talked into one another's teeth; the
young person who sang coon songs in a fashion not negro, but all her
own; the giant with a boutonniere which a midget mounted a step-ladder
to spray; the famous plump beauty whom Shelby whispered she
resembled—all the merry-andrew company won her laughter and applause.
Once Shelby laid a restraining hand upon her arm, but she laughed the
more. When the curtain fell on the first act and the lights went up,
she was laughing still. She wondered why New Yorkers stared so.
Perhaps they, like Shelby, who had oddly shrunk into the shadows of the
box, thought she resembled the plump beauty for whom cigars were named.
She stared back at them collectively, for somehow they seemed to wear
one face. It was a thin, clean-shaven face, with keen eyes behind
glittering glasses; a familiar face—the face of the editor of the
Tuscarora County Whig.
CHAPTER X
"You had better walk to the hotel," Shelby suggested. With the darkening
of the theatre for the second act he had piloted his companion to the
street. "It's but a little way."
It proved a great way as he contrived it. Striking across town to one of
the quieter avenues they paced block after block in the teeth of a wind
which smacked of salt. At length Shelby brought their steps to a right
about and headed for their destination, just short of which his charge
abruptly halted with an hysterical in-take of breath.
"Not yet," she protested. "I can't go in yet. I must think it out here
with you. I daren't alone. I'm afraid of something—of myself—I don't
know what—"
The man bent a critical glance upon her.
"No; I guess you're not quite fit," he decided. "On we go."
"It's awful! He, of all people!"
"Bad mess."
"He could ruin me."
Shelby readily pictured a few ruins of his own, but chivalrously
refrained from their presentment. His predicament occurred to her,
however.
"And he could defeat you—"
"Never mind me."
"I can't stop minding; it's too late. I've minded so long—too long and
too much. I've put you before Joe—before Milicent even. I've—"
"Don't say anything you'll be sorry for," he interposed, turning into a
side street. "You're on your nerves—flat on your nerves."
She promptly proved his assertion by slipping without warning from his
side. They had chanced abreast of a rambling little church tucked with
its trees and shrubbery and greensward amidst buildings which dwarfed its
tower to a pretty toy. Some droll giant might have plucked it out of
Trollope and set it here to throw off its atmosphere like a fragrance
from rectory to chantry. Its lich-gate held an image before which Mrs.
Hilliard melted in a welter of devotion.
"Tommyrot," fumed her guide, nonplussed at this new vagary.
Ignored, Shelby braced himself patiently against a pillar in the dusky
recess while the penitent knelt and pattered in deeps of contrition which
the ministrations of her low-church rector in New Babylon had never
plumbed. But patience vanished at the sound of footsteps up the street.
"Quit it, that's a good girl," he begged, reconnoitring.
Despite the lively devil's deputy at elbow the appeal wavered on.
"It's a policeman coming. He'll think—" Shelby broke off his
conjecture to utter some banality about the moon, to drown her
invocation. Wayside prayers were no more a novelty than wayside curses
in this region, and the officer rolled indifferently by. "Now go back to
your hotel, and get to bed," pleaded the man, gasping like a criminal
with a reprieve. "Things will look brighter in the morning. I'll be in
to see you before my train leaves."
Her devotions at an end, she issued docilely to the pavement, saying,
"You can't know the comfort."
"It's a pity it isn't contagious," commented Shelby, grimly; but before
they quitted the shadows for the lights of Fifth Avenue he added gently
that he begrudged her nothing.
Directly he saw the elevator whisk her to her room, the man posted back
to the music hall in search of Volney Sprague. What he should say to him
was not clear, but see him he must. Out of the jumble of his thoughts
that idea beset him like an obsession. The audience had begun to trickle
into Broadway, and as the stream broadened to fill the doorway he was
hard put to it to scan every face, but he persisted till the last
loiterer had left. Then an attendant told him that the place had yet
another exit upon another street, which, beyond all doubt, the editor had
used.
Baffled, but not without resource, he turned again to the newspapers and
rummaged the lists of hotel arrivals for Sprague's unnoteworthy name.
Naturally too obscure for mention! Yet in the same breath it started out
at him from miscellaneous political gossip as one of the day's callers at
the headquarters of a local revolt against the machine. Shelby construed
the visit as a still hunt for funds, and, in the light of his own
financial rebound, meant to have his chuckle from it, should he ever
unhorse the worry by which he was hag-rid. Consulting a city directory,
he set forth on a fagging tramp from hotel to hotel—a quest barren of
result for the excellent reason that Sprague, according to his custom,
had registered at the Reform Club.
Late to bed, and after persistent sheep-counting, much later to sleep,
Shelby woke with the morning far advanced and the hour of his departure
near. It was necessary to eke out his wardrobe with a purchase or two
against the journey with the governor, and between his shopping and his
breakfast, the deliberate talk he had meant to have with Mrs. Hilliard
bade fair to dwindle to a handshake. As the morning brought no grounds
for optimism, he was not altogether sorry that the interview must be
short; indeed, by daylight his own necessity seemed the more pressing;
but he faced his obligations, and prepared himself for the rôle of Sturdy
Oak to Mrs. Hilliard's Clinging Vine. His astonishment, therefore, was
doubly great when he learned that the Vine had developed a backbone of
its own, and left the hotel, bag and baggage, upward of an hour ago.
Being a practical man, Shelby promptly made friends with the baggage
agent, who recalled that the "blond lady's" belongings had been forwarded
to the Grand Central Station,—Shelby's own destination,—whose
waiting-hall the perplexed candidate was shortly scouring in pursuit.
The sequel was unexpected. He did not find Mrs. Hilliard, but he did
stumble fairly into the arms of Volney Sprague.
Startled, but outwardly self-assured, he half offered his hand.
The editor gave him a perfunctory good morning, but his own right hand
made no movement to free itself from the magazine whose leaves he had
been turning at the news-stand.
Shelby slid his extended fingers forward haphazard to a learned
periodical, which fell open to a discussion of cuneiform inscriptions.
"Are you bound for Tuscarora, too?" he inquired.
"I'm going home."
"Which train?"
Sprague named his train after a leisured moment's study of an
illustration.
"That's my own—or will be, rather, till Albany, where our car gets its
own engine. I'm in for a day or two's campaigning with his Excellency;
rear end speeches, and that sort of thing, you know."
The editor was unimpressed.
"If you care to drop in, I'll introduce you to the governor."
"Thanks, no. We've met."
Shelby's color mounted under repeated rebuff, and his self-respect was
nil; but a sincere desire to shield the woman whose folly he had abetted,
rose beside the spectre of defeat to drive him on.
"See here, Sprague," he said abruptly; "that was an awkward thing last
night—"
"To see me?"
"The general look of it," came laboriously. "You understand I—she—"
"Excuse me," put in the editor, dropping his magazine and backing off.
Shelby anchored him by a lapel.
"We've got to have this out. I want you to understand that she was
unwell—despondent—malaria, you know—and resorted to—"
"Laughing gas is your plausible defence."
Shelby went brick-red.
"Be a gentleman," he said.
"Gad!" Sprague quenched a wry smile. "And from you! What are you
after?"
"Are you going to use this?"
Volney Sprague started, glared, and fell to violent polishing of his
eye-glasses.
"After all," Shelby blundered on, "she has been your friend—entertained
you—the club and all that—and you couldn't—"
"Did she send you to me?" broke in Sprague, fiercely.
"She? No. I'm responsible. I thought perhaps you—it's been a bitter
political fight—you might be tempted—I admit it is a temptation—to
make capital—"
"Gad!" The editor spat out his favorite ejaculation as if it were a toad.
"We ought to spare her—to spare a woman."
"Don't, don't, don't," protested Sprague. "Can't you see—can't you see
that no decent man—no; you couldn't see that. Use a thing of this sort?
Faugh!" He swung on his heel and plunged through a nearby doorway to the
open air.
The result was tangible, but he had paid for it with the most abasing
quarter-hour of his life, and Shelby, too, craved another atmosphere.
And he obtained it. The governor, his private secretary, one or two
members of his staff, a state senator popularly known as "Handsome"
Ludlow, and the newspaper correspondents who were to accompany the party,
were clustered sociably in the observation compartment of the private
car, and on Shelby's entrance every man jack of them got upon his legs to
welcome him, as if the Boss had twitched them by unseen strings. His
Excellency clapped him graciously on the shoulder, the staff officials
and the secretary reflected and passed on the gubernatorial warmth, the
senator pressed cigars, and the newspaper people, whose habit was to lump
all personages as frail humanity, went through their introductions like
the good fellows that they were. It was unlooked for, delightful,
insidiously flattering—a plain intimation that he had become a star of
greater magnitude.
"We're due to pull out in three minutes," the governor told him. "I was
really worried about you."
In their several echoes the secretary and staff conveyed that they too
had known alarm.
"Fact is, we bank on you to mesmerize the rural vote," put in Handsome
Ludlow, jocosely. "You'll work your passage all right, all right."
The jest carried a covert truth. They did count on Shelby, and Shelby
did work his passage in sober earnest. The governor who sought
reëlection was a mediocrity of means—a barrel, as the phrase goes—whose
function in campaigning was to draw checks, shed radiance on cheering
crowds, and make way for speakers who had something to utter besides hems
and haws. No one could be less fitted for the five-minute give-and-take
talks from the rear platform than this amiable figurehead, and no one of
his company was so much at home in it as Shelby, on whom the brunt
swiftly fell. The senator, the staff officials, and even the poor
governor were passable in the deliberate evening meetings for which they
were billed in this town and that—though here, too, Shelby frequently
snatched the honors; but the heady victory over the chaffing, brawling,
even missile-throwing packs surging round the car wheels and up the
steps, was always his and his alone. Suggested to fill an unexpected
vacancy, he was quick to appreciate that chance, and the Boss had given
him the opportunity of his life; and with an eye on another campaign two
years hence, and with the heartening thought that by now the State
Committee's dollars were implanting convictions throughout the Demijohn
District's fertile soil, he put forth the impetuous best that was in him.
Nor was Shelby's best contemptible. The charge up the canal counties had
not measured half its course before the increasing crowds, the space
given his doings by the correspondents whose good graces he seduously
[Transcriber's note: sedulously?] cultivated, the deference of his
Excellency and his chameleon staff, all told him that the glory of what
the party organs courteously styled the "governor's brilliant dash" was
his and not the governor's.
"What we didn't count on," observed Handsome Ludlow, with a touch of
envy, "was campaigning with a whirlwind."
CHAPTER XI
So Shelby came in triumph to his own people, the governor at his
chariot wheel, and fought the last stubborn week of his campaign. His
mail was now burdened with invitations to speak, but he made few
speeches.
"The voter a speech will influence has made up his mind," he said to
Bowers. "The heart-to-heart talk is the trump card of the eleventh
hour."
To play this card required a prodigious amount of travelling about the
district; and between these activities and the speaking engagements he
was in promise bound to fulfil, Shelby saw little or nothing of New
Babylon till midnight of Saturday, which was the virtual end of the
canvass. Seen again, as he viewed it now, the town would look raw and
provincial despite patriotic throes of self-deception. On moonlit
nights the New Babylon Electric Light and Power Company hoarded its
energies, and an inky pall accordingly lay over the muddy streets which
the pale melon rind in the clouded zenith did nothing to dissipate.
The contrast between this niggardliness and the midnight brilliance of
up-town Broadway was inevitable, and the jolting Tuscarora House free
'bus came readily into unflattering comparison with a certain
rubber-tired hansom cab. Naturally midnight, a jaded body, and the
Tuscarora House free 'bus might well jaundice any scene; but the
returning native recognized these as accidents merely in the phenomenon
of his changed vision.
The hotel bar-room was boisterous with the usual Saturday night
gathering of the set which in its innocence supposed itself fast, and
the maturer poker crowd, Shelby's own cronies, was in protracted
session elsewhere in the building; but he managed to evade them all and
lock himself in his ugly room. For some sophisticated weeks he had
suspected the household gods here assembled to have feet of clay. Now
he knew it; but with the feeling that the place was a temporary husk at
best, he avoided a too particular inventory of the pseudo-marble clock,
the vases of pampas grass, the album, and the garish pictures against
their background of pink roses blushing in a terra-cotta field, and ran
drowsily over the little pile of accumulated mail.
With one exception he found a politician's budget, and the exception
brushed its fellows imperiously aside. It was a tinted intriguing
thing, faintly odorous of patchouli; its contents without date,
superscription, or signature, though for the reader the scent was Mrs.
Hilliard writ large; a single straggling line of characterless script.
"Why," it inquired, "have you forsaken me?"
The man yawned.
He awoke refreshed and lay in snug indolence listening to the rival
sextons pealing first bell for Sunday service. Whatever their
doctrinal disputes, the churches of New Babylon made a shift for
concord when it came to bell-ringing, whose stately performance was
regarded by no less a theological expert than the Widow Weatherwax as
"spiritoolly edifyin' and condoocive to grace." Drifting between
cat-naps Shelby usually found it a fillip to the fancy. He would
detect infant damnation and argument for sprinkling in the deep boom of
the Presbyterian bell, and instant dissent in the querulous note of the
Baptist, whose echo droned "i-m-m-e-r-s-i-o-n" to infinity. This was
the cue for a jaunty flaunting of apostolic succession on the part of
the Episcopalian sexton, only to be himself reminded by the First
Methodist that there were bishops and bishops. So on, assertion,
rejoinder, surrejoinder, and rebuttal, till the dispassionate
philosopher in the pillows wearied of his conceit and directed his
thoughts toward breakfast.
From breakfast Shelby ordinarily turned to the sporting columns of the
Sunday papers, but today he found his thoughts reverting to
church-going as a not unpleasant sedative after the storm and stress of
his campaign. Reasons multiplied: it would be a sop to the prejudices
of no small body of the voting population; an act of tolerance worthy
of a mind open to broad horizons; a lightning-rod for supernatural
approval of his cause; and a simple means of falling in with Ruth
Temple, since by a happy coincidence Ruth Temple and a large block of
the church-going vote worshipped under the same spire. Some little
time later, therefore, Shelby was ushered to a prominent seat in the
midst of a decorous flurry of excitement which stirred the Presbyterian
congregation from choir-loft to rearmost pew. Unknown to the visitor,
the Rev. Mr. Hewett was scheduled to preach on the ethical issues
involved in the present election.
The minister entered the pulpit almost immediately and laid eyes upon
Shelby as he announced the opening hymn, coloring at the discovery.
His voice wavered perceptibly in the earlier parts of the service as
the absorbed congregation noted; but by sermon time he had conquered
his nervousness, and with set jaw thundered out his text from Jeremiah:
"Why trimmest thou thy way?" With this entering wedge the parson clove
into an analysis of practical politics which did not stick at
instancing corruption near at hand, and whose climax was a bitter
denunciation of ignoble leadership and the doubly ignoble laxity of the
indifferent led. It was as pointed an attack on local conditions as he
could frame without complications with his deacons, who were
politically of divers minds, and the fusion managers might have used
its final exhortation to "vote your conscience" as their own
ammunition, without altering a word.
Shelby sat under it all like a graven image, careless of the raking
fire of eyes from every point, sang "America" with unction at the
close, and advancing with the benediction to the pulpit stair,
congratulated the bewildered clergyman on his "effort," and before he
could conceive, much less deliver, a coherent reply, slipped down a
side aisle and greeted Ruth.
"Vigorous, but intemperate," said he, "and typically ministerial. The
right road and the wrong road in politics don't abound in sign-posts,
and pretty frequently both carry grist to the same mill."
The riddle of his character piqued Ruth at that moment as it never had,
and before they separated he obtained permission to call upon her after
tea—a privilege which he interpreted as license to present himself
betimes and stay to an unconscionable hour. Yet he talked fluently and
well, and went out at length into the night tingling with the
consciousness of having touched fingers with the higher life of his
cherished aspirations. By the token of Ruth's interest, moreover, he
took hope that he had not been found wanting where he was most
ambitious to excel. It was a thing to lay to heart, an epochal page in
his history which sleep alone could fitly round. Nevertheless, a
disturbing impression of something essential left undone haunted the
borderland of dreams to remain formless till morning, when his pocket
handkerchief jerked a note odorous of patchouli to his bedroom floor.
It was annoying. Of course Mrs. Hilliard had a certain claim, and had
he been less occupied on his return from stumping the state with the
governor he would have gone to her. By rights he should have made the
effort to see her after receiving this message—yesterday, in fact;
yesterday the golden. He would have gone, too, if—frankly, if the
stature of the man he had become had less exacting ideals of womanly
perfection. To the grown man of broadened horizon Mrs. Hilliard had
come indubitably to seem a bore. Still, she had her claim.
"I'll drop in after election," he decided, and laid his hand to the
day's work.
It proved a long, hard pull, made up of details petty enough in
themselves, but considerable in their relation to the whole scheme of
his defence. However, he reached its end cheery in the belief that the
sun of Tuesday would light no Waterloo.
"I'll win," he said to Bowers. "By no walkover, I admit; but I'll win."
"M-yes; I guess, but by the narrowest margin the Demijohn ever gave.
The slightest flurry might snow us under."
"I'd stake my head on it."
"Some who have betted less than that have hedged."
"Who?" exclaimed the candidate, quickly.
"Tuscarora House sports—I won't mention names—but poker friends of
yours."
"Sandy lot, they are," broke out Shelby, contemptuously. "I hope you
counteracted the effect."
"I instructed some of our people to cover everything they would put
up," Bowers answered dryly. "You know I don't bet myself."
Shelby guffawed and clapped him on the shoulder.
"Same way you don't stoop to buy the purchasable? Lord! If the
Tuscarora floaters only knew their Santa Claus!"
But Bowers merely coughed.
Tickled with his joke at the expense of his associate whose handling of
the State Committee's saving aid had been masterly, Shelby went to his
evening meal in a humor which even a second note from Mrs. Hilliard
could not damp. In scent, brevity, and chirography it was the
counterpart of the first, telling him that the nameless writer was
wretched, and begging him to come to her. The appeal found him in a
softened mood. Viewed at the close of an irksome day, Mrs. Hilliard's
society had attractions which his hypercritical mind of the morning
hours slighted; and while her message in itself left his withers
unwrung, he concluded that it was perhaps as well to break gently with
"poor Cora" now, as later, when possibly greater growth and broader
horizons might create barriers yet more awkward. Under a show of
letter-writing, accordingly, he lingered in the hotel office till he
was certain that Joe Hilliard had joined his boon companions of the
billiard room, when he let himself quietly out of doors and made his
way to the quarry owner's home.
"I was afraid you might come, and then that you mightn't," the woman
whispered, in the obscurity of the hall. "Joe had a headache, and said
at first that he wouldn't go out to-night; but he went."
"Yes; I know. Servants out?"
"Oh, yes."
"And Milicent?" he pursued, scorning hypocrisy.
"I let her go away for the night. The poor child needed a change."
As they left the hall he discovered that she was in evening dress—the
black gown glittering with jet beads and bugles which she had
introduced at the first autumn meeting of the Culture Club. He held
her hand high, and turned her slowly round after the manner of the
dance.
"Did you do that for me?" he asked, his face lighting.
She nodded.
"I wore it the night of your nomination, and I put it on to-night to
bring you luck at the polls. Was it silly of me?"
"Not if somebody else doesn't see."
"Joe'll not see. I shall have gone to my room before he comes. I'll
not keep you long. It's enough that you've proved you cared to come.
It's a crumb of comfort in my wretchedness."
"You know I've been on the jump," he returned, adding dryly, "You don't
look as wretched as your note led me to expect."
"You can't know."
"Not till I'm told."
"The scene there's been, I mean."
"Scene? What scene?"
"With Joe—about you—New York—everything."
"There wasn't need for a word. Nobody's blabbed. I saw to that. I
went to Sprague in New York."
"I told Joe," she confessed. "You didn't come that morning—and I was
frightened. I thought if stories were to get to him, I'd best be the
one to tell them. So I left at once."
"If you had only waited."
"If you had only got word to me."
They fell into explanation of their several movements, from which
Shelby, white-faced, suddenly cut loose, saying:—
"What does he know? For God's sake, what does he know? What did you
tell?"
"Oh, that I met you, had dinner, went to the theatre—"
"Then why—"
"I'm coming to that. While we were away somebody—Mrs. Weatherwax, I
suppose—filled Joe full of malicious town gossip about our—our
friendship—and he was terrible. Oh, you can't know, you can't know!"
"But me—me!" cried Shelby, clutching her by the arms. "What about me?
Is he down on me? His votes,—his two hundred votes, you know,—they
could defeat me—ruin me! Tell me—tell me—"
"No, no; it's not you he blames; not you, Ross. It's I. He thinks I'm
a fool—the brute! He calls me a fool!"
"Thank God! Thank God!" ejaculated the man, laughing wildly in his
revulsion of relief.
"But I—I am miserable," sobbed the woman, and clung to him when he
would have released her. "You will go to your triumph and your
future,—what have I left now?"
Shelby swayed unsteadily with his burden, his eyes on the perfect
shoulders whose curves played and quivered with the labored breath. He
recalled a fragment of poetry—something about "morbid . . . faultless
shoulder-blades," which he had overheard Bernard Graves quote to Volney
Sprague as Mrs. Hilliard passed at the club. Morbid had seemed an
inept word then, but he began to spy out a certain fitness. The house
was too still by far—dangerously still; the stillness of espionage.
With a flash of intuition he lifted his eyes, and in the doorway met
Joe Hilliard. Almost at the same instant the woman in her trumpery saw
him too.
"Joe!" she called, in an incredulous, husky whisper. "Joe!"
He loomed there in the dusk like a rock, and with a frightened whimper
she tottered and clung to him as she had clung to Shelby.
"I'm not a bad woman, Joe," she babbled. "I'm not a bad woman."
"No one has accused you," replied her husband, putting her gently away.
"Nor am I what you doubtless think," stammered Shelby. "It's all a
mistake, Joe; a big mistake. It can be explained—it can be
explained—"
Hilliard doubled and relaxed a mighty fist.
"No; not under this roof," he said quietly. "Go!"
CHAPTER XII
The scandal derived its impetus from the vulgar circumstance that the
Hilliard washing went to line on Tuesday (Monday having dawned lowering
and ended stormy), thereby exposing more family linen than could
possibly have been foreseen, since the day laundress and Mrs.
Hilliard's housemaid were bound in friendship by a common appetite for
gossip and for tea. Monday's unfinished labors despatched, these
familiars laid their heads together over a pannikin of their favorite
brew, and the laundress, poising her saucer with the elegance which was
the envy of her circle, ventured the opinion that the housemaid was
holding in reserve a palate-tickling morsel concerning the missus;
whereupon the housemaid cloaked herself afresh with mystery and
"suspicioned" that she could tell things if she were one of those
odious persons who carried tales, which of course she was not.
Blowing and sipping with the calm which is the handmaiden of true
elegance, the laundress conceded both propositions, and edged forward
the suggestion that tale-bearing and confidence between intimates were
horses of dissimilar color. This was readily admitted by the housemaid
with its corollary that anything intrusted in confidence to the bosom
of the laundress was as good as locked in the mute confines of the
tomb. With these time-honored preliminaries the crisis above stairs as
seen from below stairs was promptly bared to the scalpel.
"Whin he come home lasht night He was here," the housemaid imparted in
a whisper.
The laundress hurdled the ambiguous pronouns like a thoroughbred.
"Is it th' trut' ye're tellin' me?" she demanded, forgetting her
graces, and grounding her saucer with a clatter.
"Cross me hear-rt," said the housemaid, enjoying her sensation.
"Ye'll excuse me intherruptin'—"
"Ye're no intherruptin'. 'Tis th' ind iv th' shtory."
"But phat did th' good ma-an say?"
As the faithful soul did not know, she remarked that there were some
things which a lady in her delicate position could not confide even to
a bosom friend. She hinted, however, that in the light of what she had
told the laundress a week ago of the family jar occasioned by Her
meeting Him in New York, the present state of things was easy to
conjecture.
But the laundress thirsted for details.
"Was his dayparture suddin like?" she asked.
Feeling that the force of her narrative might suffer from the admission
that she had only entered the house by a side door after she had met
Him walking rapidly away from the front, the housemaid answered merely
by moving sighs. The laundress reasoned from past experience that the
font had gone dry, and suddenly remembered that she was promised to
help with the Bowers's heavy ironing. This was at a quarter before
nine o'clock.
At ten minutes past nine o'clock the laundress remarked across the
ironing-board to Mrs. Bowers that if she were one of those odious
persons who carried tales, which of course she was not, she could
expose the carryings-on of somebody living not a hundred miles away to
a tune which would bring the blush to New Babylon's outraged cheek.
Mrs. Bowers made haste to answer that she was of principle firmly
opposed to gossip; but as an intelligent woman, she recognized that
certain things require ventilation for the good of the community, and
was accustomed in such emergencies to send personal reluctance to the
rear. The tale of how He coming unexpectedly home found Him with Her
was then put through its paces with such skilful jockeying that not one
in ten would know it for the same dobbin so lately brought limping to
the light.
As now set forth, He had fathomed Her and Him with more shrewdness than
the world had given him credit for possessing—poor man!—and had been
hoodwinked by their transparent devices for meeting at the golf links
and on lonely country roads no more than had Mrs. Bowers or any other
person of equal virtue and capacity. He had seen, and he had warned.
Then, stolen sweets becoming perilous near home, the culprits had taken
their several ways to New York,—most fit choice for such a pilgrimage!
This too was fathomed and forgiven. O unwise clemency! O base
requital! Violence upon discovery? No doubt. Loaded pistol
constantly in the house since the last burglar scare. At this Mrs.
Bowers recollected shots in the night; Seneca had said "Campaign
fireworks"; but she knew better; shots, of course. Dreadful thing to
happen at one's very door. An immediate separation naturally. By all
the laws of righteousness she should not be given the custody of the
child.
In affairs requiring ventilation for the common good Mrs. Bowers could
conceive of no instrument so sure as the Widow Weatherwax, who
providentially dropped in to borrow flour at the precise moment Mrs.
Bowers had decided that if she ever meant to run over and copy the
widow's unequalled recipe for floating island, this was the time to do
it. Quite in the same breath with her greetings, therefore, Mrs.
Bowers intimated that were she one of those odious persons who carried
tales, which of course she was not, she could astonish the widow with a
chronicle of happenings not remote in time or scene. But when told,
the widow was not astonished.
"I've knowed she wuz a Scarlet Woman since the last night ov the
camp-meetin' at Eden Centre," she explained. "It come to me when I see
her a-standin' outside the circle, and it was borne in on me to testify
b'fore the brethren."
In this, its third edition, the tale gained picturesqueness and
circumstantial weight. To the New York episode the widow contributed
the imaginative touch of a baffled detective, while Mrs. Bowers's shots
in the stilly night passed into the province of undisputed fact. The
circumstance that the widow had only that morning seen the destroyer of
homes walking abroad unmaimed, was but touching evidence that the
husband had been too grief-crazed to send a bullet to the mark. The
widow almost remembered that the destroyer had limped; therefore the
injured man must have resorted to natural weapons. Doubtless the
beginning of proceedings for an absolute divorce hung fire only because
this was a legal holiday.
As the clock in the town hall struck ten the good women parted company,
and the now able-bodied scandal careered bravely into the world.
Tinctured by personal equation, the respective variants of Mrs. Bowers
and Mrs. Weatherwax had minor differences in the dramatic grouping of
detail, but they were variants, nevertheless, and adhered in all
essentials to the notable fabric these ladies had joined forces to
erect.
Early in the morning the Hon. Seneca Bowers returned to his home for a
warmer overcoat, and met the petrifying version of his wife. His first
thought was of its bearing on the election.
"True or untrue, Eliza," he declared, energetically, "this servant's
chatter must go no farther."
"But if he's a bad man—" began Mrs. Bowers, uneasily.
"I'm not concerned with his morals; it's the party I'm thinking of.
Not one soul must you tell—understand that clearly—not one soul."
"I—I did tell one—just one."
"In God's name, who?" cried her husband.
"Don't swear, Seneca. And you a church member."
"Who? Who?"
"Mrs. W—W—" It was impossible to articulate that tongue-worrying
name with her lord glaring at her so dreadfully.
The man blenched.
"Not old Weatherwax!"
"Y-yes."
Bowers's jaw hung flaccid. This phenomenon continuing, Mrs. Bowers
took alarm.
"You've not gone and had a stroke, have you?" she wavered timidly,
feeling for his pulse.
Bowers revived with a grunt, and bolted for the door. His buggy wheel
protested stridently as he cramped the vehicle at the horse-block,
reassuring Mrs. Bowers that his natural force was not abated; and his
flight down town affronted the ordinance against reckless driving which
he himself had framed.
Shelby, unnaturally pale, but composed, was issuing from his office
staircase, and joined him directly at the curb.
"Jump in," said Bowers, making room.
"No time now."
"But this is important—critical, in fact." Observing no sign of
compliance. Bowers lowered head and voice, murmuring, "You know I'm no
hand at carrying tales, Ross, but—"
"You won't have to," cut in Shelby. "I know."
"You know?"
"Baffled sleuth—discovery by husband—shots—kicked down
steps—divorce case summons in the morning—you see the whole roorback
has come my way."
"Roorback!" Bowers caught at the straw. "We can make a sweeping
denial, then?"
"Whole hog or none." He smiled sarcastically into the face which had
so suddenly gone bright. "The truth has been so far outstripped that
you can't see it with a telescope. Get handbills printed denying the
story, denounce it as a partisan trick, and sign the statement yourself
as chairman of the County Committee. Have them distributed all over
town, and station men—men, mind you, not boys—with a supply just
outside electioneering limits at each polling place. If the yarn
spreads elsewhere in the district, wire our people to take similar
measures."
"Ross!" Bowers called him back. "I don't need to tell you how glad I
am. I never believed it of you."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," laughed Shelby; "but I'd rather
you'd hurry the handbills."
He had a more urgent reason yet, for wishing Bowers to take himself
off. A block or two up the street, where the trees began to interlace
their denuded branches and the court-house common sparkled with frosty
rime, he had seen the Widow Weatherwax accost Ruth Temple. The girl
had stopped when addressed, but almost immediately walked on, as if to
escape the little busybody who, nothing daunted, trotted at elbow for a
rod or more. Then Ruth came down the slope alone, and was intercepted
by Shelby at her gate.
"I must speak with you," he said abruptly. "My good name is being
dragged in the dirt, and I must assure you—"
"No, no," Ruth interposed.
"I tell you I must. You have heard this calumny. I saw her stop
you—the woman who is peddling it from door to door. I must
speak—it's no time for mincing words—speak to you personally—Bowers
will answer to my constituency—speak to you personally, I say, appeal
to you to believe in me. You don't know what your belief in me has
been—my inspiration, my safeguard. Don't take it away—it's vital;
don't deprive me of all this on hearsay. Say you'll not. Give me a
sign—"
"Go win in spite of it." In a single wave of generous impulse she had
spoken, put out her hand, and slipped past him, flushing, through the
gate.
"I can't fail now," he exulted, detaining her an instant. "And victory
means so much. It means—listen: I'll tell you a thing I've breathed
to no one else; success to-day means the governorship two years hence!
It's been fairly promised me—the governorship! That's the great
stake—part of it, rather; you're the rest; you who believe in me and
bid me win. I've not changed my mind since the day we rode together.
I told you to think over what I said, and I've given you time. I meant
then to come to you on the night of my election—a victor—and so I
shall. I couldn't know that I should have the executive mansion to
offer you, but it's none too good. I'll come! I'll come!"
CHAPTER XIII
There was more solid ground than mere confidence in his destiny behind
Shelby's bold front. The earliest mail delivery had shed a glimmer of
hope in the shape of a midnight note from Mrs. Hilliard. He did not
require her reminder that the voting strength of Little Poland was no
longer to be counted in his column—he had thought and fought that out in
the small hours; but he did need and pounced upon the statement that
Little Poland's master would be out of town the greater part of election
day. The scrawl ended with an appointment for a clandestine meeting at
eleven o'clock, toward which he now bent his steps on leaving Ruth.
Mrs. Hilliard had named a cemetery on the immediate outskirts as the
rendezvous—a choice on whose evil omen Shelby wasted no thought. In the
heyday of their flirtation he and Mrs. Hilliard had made frequent use of
it as a Platonic trysting-place, and he climbed the silent paths toward
the summit of the mount, as it was styled in that level land, with no
sentiment save approval of her wisdom in seizing upon the one spot in all
New Babylon whose privacy was certain.
Mrs. Hilliard, shivering in the lee of a pretentious granite shaft which
bore her family name, was more susceptible.
"Bleak—desolate," she chattered. "What an end for our Fools' Paradise.
But where else could we escape their prying eyes?"
"You've heard what they're saying?"
She nodded listlessly.
"Who has not heard?" As they huddled in the shelter of the monument she
brooded over the plain below wherein the canal, livid, yet unfrozen
still, half girdled the town in a serpentine fold. Each chimney curled a
light spiral into the nipping air. "Under every one a wagging tongue,"
she said. "It's known to every soul except one."
"You mean he's still in the dark?"
"He can't know yet. He took an early train to Centreport. It's some
quarry business that could not wait. I remembered it last
night—after—after you had gone; so I wrote. It was past two o'clock
before I dared steal out to post the letter."
Shelby shrugged into the collar of his ulster.
"I don't deserve all this," he muttered.
"Don't say that. You've done things, too. You've stood for—things;
something to pin faith to. You are—"
"I'm your good friend—remember that."
"Friend!"
He drew her farther into shelter, and tucked her furs about her throat.
"Now concentrate your mind," he enjoined, "and tell me exactly the lay of
the land. Did he communicate with the foreman at the quarry before he
left?"
"Yes. I overheard him telephone Kiska before breakfast. He said he'd
return at half-past three. There's no train to-day from Centreport till
then."
"And there is no other till the polls close. He said nothing, then,
about voting the hands before afternoon?"
"They're at work this morning."
"On election day! You're sure?"
"They're working half a day on full day's pay. Joe's hurrying some
contract through. I don't understand it very well, but the stone has to
be shipped before the canal freezes on account of—something—freight
rates—"
"Never mind that. What did he say to Kiska about voting—that the men
should be ready at such and such a time?"
"No, no; I know about that. Before anything happened it was arranged
that the men should vote about four o'clock. He merely told Kiska he'd
return at three-thirty."
"Good, good!" exclaimed Shelby, making ready for action. "Every
naturalized mother's son in Little Poland shall vote for me before the
train can even whistle. Now, you go home, Cora," he charged, "and drink
something hot against this graveyard chill. Keep a stiff upper
lip—that's my creed. Everything blows over in time. The scandal is so
tall that it will topple of itself. Nobody will believe it after
election."
"But Joe? Think of him when he learns what they're saying, and that
you've outwitted him."
Shelby grinned.
"That's the situation's one humorous phase," said he. "The two things
will neutralize one another's effect,—like Kilkenny cats, you know.
He'll not dare raise a row about the votes for fear of lending color to
the scandal."
But Mrs. Hilliard, whose sense of humor was sluggish this morning,
rejoined bitterly;—
"The row will fall to me."
"He needn't know your part in this—the matter of the votes; and as for
the other thing—well, after all, he is your husband, hard and fast, and
you'd best try and patch things up."
She straightened, flashing him a stony look, and he braced himself for a
hurricane; but to his equal discomfiture she went down beside the shaft
in a passionate fit of weeping.
"I should be under here," she sobbed; "I should be under here."
Shelby, tingling to be gone, shifted from foot to foot, and offered some
blundering solace which she put away.
"You've ceased to care," she accused.
He protested, adding indiscreetly that she had done too much for him for
that.
"You've filled the place he should have filled!"
Shelby was silent, goaded to torture by the lapse of precious minutes.
"There's only blackness ahead!"
"Don't take the dark view," entreated Shelby, groping desperately for a
bright one. "The man can't live always—so much older than you—and
then—your life's your own—"
The bowed figure shuddered.
"It's a dreadful thing to do—but I've thought that, too. I can't help
it. You—you are the real one—the real one—" She waited.
"Yes." It was screwed from him.
"The real one—and if—I know I don't need your promise—but if—"
"Yes, yes; of course if—"
Neither of them would name the contingency. Shelby contrived a
leave-taking, and bounded down the terraced slopes. It was quite noon
when he reached the Tuscarora House, but without a thought of food, he
got his horse and buggy from the livery, speeding the harnessing with his
own hands, and whipped away for Little Poland.
On reaching the Hilliard quarries he confronted unexpected obstacles.
The men had quitted work and scattered to their homes, and Kiska was to
be discovered neither in nor around the little office. However, the
Polish lad in temporary charge, Kiska's own son, was not slow to
recognize the original of the campaign lithograph which in his home
enjoyed honors second only to a highly-colored Madonna, and went flying
in search of his father. Shelby took instant advantage of his absence to
telephone Bowers, whom he luckily located at his midday meal. He learned
that the handbills had been sown broadcast with encouraging effect, and
that the general opinion of the voting public leaned toward unbelief.
Shelby told his whereabouts, and requested the prompt services of Jasper
Hinchey and three or four kindred spirits, ringing off after certain
mysterious, though concise, directions regarding a concert hall in the
Flats, which he meant shortly to utilize.
He had barely hung up the receiver when a telegraph messenger from town
brought a despatch for Kiska. Shelby's breath shortened at sight of the
yellow envelope, but he mustered a specious unconcern, telling the boy
that the foreman's return, though certain, was not within immediate
prospect, and volunteered to receipt for the message himself—an offer
readily embraced by the lad, who, without a glance, pocketed the book in
which Shelby scrawled Kiska's own name, and fared away with a head aflame
from the bonfires of the coming night.
The envelope was loosely gummed, and gave under gentle persuasion.
Shelby threw a glance from either window of the narrow room, and drew the
paper from its cover. It was from Hilliard at Centreport, and announced
that he had missed his train. The reader's delight was qualified by the
succeeding statement that he should come by the canal, and that the men
were to be in readiness.
"He's hired a launch or tug," commented Shelby. "Horses aren't to be had
to-day for rubies or fine gold."
He replaced the message, sealed the envelope, and flung it on the table,
catching sight of Kiska, as he did so, striding along the canal bank
toward the office. The big Pole burst into the room a moment later, his
simple face aglow at the meeting, and sputtered broken excuses for
keeping his preserver waiting. Shelby shook both his grimy hands, and
smilingly supposed that Kiska had made up his mind how he should vote.
Kiska's English was uncertain, but there was no misreading his
gesticulation.
"And Little Poland?" insinuated the candidate, blandly.
"Leetle Poland ees ein beeg vote," Kiska eagerly assured him; "joost ein
beeg vote for Meester Shelby. Whan you save me, Meester Heelyard he say
eef anybody no want to vote for you, he can joost valk aus de qvarry."
"Very kind of him," said Shelby. "Now, since you all know your own
minds, I'd take it as a favor if you would get to the polls at the
earliest possible moment. The voting promises to be heavy toward the
close, and I don't care to have my friends inconvenienced. By the way,
Kiska," he broke off carelessly "there's a telegram for you over there.
It came not ten minutes ago."
By dint of facial contortion Kiska puzzled out the meaning, and handed
the message to Shelby, who gave it grave perusal.
"Ah," said he. "You see he's anxious about it, too. If there was any
way of reaching him by wire, we could relieve his mind; as there is not,
the wise course is to go ahead. His coming by boat is uncertain. It
will be a nice little surprise for him to find that you've got the votes
all in."
So it seemed to Kiska, and the business of rallying Little Poland to its
civic duties was instantly got under way. Here, too, were obstacles.
Having been told to present themselves at a later hour, the villagers
were in all states of unreadiness; but by impressing this helper and
that, doing the work of three men himself, and with the reënforcement of
Jap Hinchey and his co-workers, whom Bowers hurried to the scene in a
hired carriage whose bravery of varnish made mock of their rags, Kiska at
last collected his compatriots. The rented vehicle was urged back at a
gallop to Bowers and continued public usefulness, and the whole body of
enfranchised Poles, under the escort of Kiska, Jap Hinchey, and his
fellows, trudged off in groups of five and ten to New Babylon.
Little Poland lay within the same voting precinct as the Flats, and when
Shelby had assured himself that the straggling column was finally in
motion, he rode on in advance toward this quarter and the concert hall to
which he had made mysterious reference in his telephoned directions to
the Hon. Seneca Bowers. From the elevation of a canal bridge he searched
the waterway for a sign of Hilliard's coming, pondering anxiously whether
a pillar of smoke at the horizon's rim were his herald; but a glance at
his watch reassured. The train which Hilliard had missed was barely due,
and to cover the distance by boat meant an additional hour at least.
Employing a street urchin to lead his horse to its stable, he struck out
on foot for the Flats.
At the tawdry concert hall everything was as it should be, and in the
brief interval before the arrival of the Poles he received inspiriting
news from one of his workers. Money was flowing, buckets of it, but
beyond doubt they held the longer purse. Their policy of offering high
prices to the floaters at the outset had drained the disciples of the
late Chuck O'Rourke before twelve o'clock, and patriots were now to be
had at bargain rates. Some few conscientious souls who could not see
their way to a Shelby vote had been induced to stay away from the polls
altogether; and at least a dozen irreconcilables had been laid by the
heels with bad whiskey before they had done protesting that not all the
powers of darkness could deter them from casting an unsullied ballot
under the emblem of the Square.
The Poles came hulking in, Shelby himself keeping tally at the door, and
when Kiska had urged the last loiterer over the threshold, the key was
turned. Drinks were sparingly circulated, and Kiska harangued the crowd
briefly in Polish, hammering in Shelby's instructions for their conduct
in the voting booths, and impressing them with the fact that good cheer
in plenty would await them here on their return. Under the efficient
supervision of Jasper Hinchey and his lieutenants they were now guided to
the polling-place in squads of three or four, returning presently to
unlimited refreshment and a surreptitious two-dollar bill—shining
examples and incentives to such as had not yet voted to speed their going.
Yet with all their willingness, the affair consumed time, and twice
Shelby went into the dusty wings of the stage to a window overlooking the
canal, and strained to detect the panting of a laboring launch or tug.
But the last quarryman voted, the polls closed, darkness fell, and Joe
Hilliard was not yet come.
CHAPTER XIV
A pleasant local custom fell this night into abeyance. Years out of
mind the adherents of the leading political parties had mingled
sociably before a non-partisan bulletin board in the courthouse, much
as hostile camps fraternize in the truce forerunning peace. But the
old, simpler order of things had suffered more wrenches than one in
this acrid congressional campaign, and the warring factions could unite
only on the hibernian proposition that union was impossible. One
party, therefore, made ready to gather in the accustomed place, the
other in the Grand Opera House, while seceding remnants from both
swelled the crowd in the street before the office of the Whig, which,
with unlooked-for enterprise, had prepared to announce the returns by
stereopticon.
At six o'clock Shelby broke his fast with a ravenous meal at the hotel,
which Bowers shared, and three-quarters of an hour later the two men
shouldered through the boisterous mob in the streets to Shelby's law
office, where arrangements had been perfected to receive the returns by
messenger and private wire. The Whig bulletin over the way had
already massed a constituency extending to the Temple lawn, which, in
default of definite news, it was edifying with views of foreign travel
and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within
doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table
which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was
making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by
goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne
just arrived from the Tuscarora House.
Shelby was in rare fettle.
"William, thou abstemious youth," he addressed the clerk, "I am tempted
to empty one of these cold bottles down your scandalized neck and pack
you off with another for the Widow Weatherwax!"
He had the youth carry the wine to the rear room and set out glasses
against the coming of his friends, drinking a bumper meanwhile to
William's good health and the sentiment Confusion to Fusion. Never a
solitary winebibber, and William remaining recalcitrant, he returned to
the outer office and demanded "no heeltaps" of the operator and Bowers.
This accomplished to his taste, he crammed a greenback into the dazed
clerk's fingers and dismissed him for the night with the injunction to
buy and blow the biggest tin horn in New Babylon.
His intimates now began to drift in, and the toast of Confusion to
Fusion enjoyed a wide popularity, the telegraph operator and the county
chairman being the only ones permitted to flag in the exacting
ceremonies which the occasion required.
"I'll do my hurrahing when the returns are in," said Bowers, and
stripping to his shirt sleeves he took his station under a drop-light
and made ready to figure the local result.
But the local returns were tardy. It developed early that throughout
the Demijohn split tickets had prevailed to an unprecedented extent.
Heretofore reliable localities ran after strange socialistic and
prohibition gods, to avoid voting for either of the leading candidates;
while Graves and Shelby both gained support in quarters where it would
have been sheer fatuity to hope. The hurrying news from the country at
large shamed the dribble at the threshold. Texas and Vermont, those
stock commonplaces of election night humor, went Democratic and
Republican by the usual majorities, and all signs pointed to a sweeping
victory for Shelby's party in state and Union. And still Tuscarora and
the Demijohn aped the Sphinx.
Men elsewhere became curious. Bowers received and passed silently to
Shelby demands for a forecast from other county chairmen in the
district; from leaders prominent in the state; from great metropolitan
newspapers which were tabulating the congressional elections of the
nation and studying the complexion of the future House.
"Claim the district, of course," directed Shelby. "Say we're
deliberate, but true blue."
The drumming humble-bee [Transcriber's note: bumble-bee?] voice of the
crowd below the windows watching Volney Sprague's bulletin suddenly
lifted in a lion roar. Elation in that quarter was ominous, and Shelby
drew a curtain. It appeared that a minor revolt against the Boss in
New York City, with which the Tuscarora independents had felt
themselves peculiarly in sympathy, had made good its claim for
recognition. Shelby turned from the window with a laugh.
"Merely a little extra diplomacy for Old Silky," he said. "Within a
twelvemonth each reformer will have a foreign mission."
A tactless friend embraced the occasion to wonder where the Boss would
banish Bernard Graves should he chance to win; but even idle
speculation on such a possibility was so distasteful to the company
that the blunderer only retrieved his mistake by toasting Confusion to
Fusion anew.
The returns from the laggard Demijohn presently thickened, and Shelby
left his seat to pace the floor, while Bowers, with an unlighted cigar
between his teeth, and looking very like Grant indeed, figured,
discarded, and figured again as successive reports modified his
calculations.
"Never saw its equal—never!" he grunted. "Here's our own town hanging
fire till almost the last like some jay village in the Adirondacks.
We've always prided ourselves on being prompt." He caught a flying
sheet from the operator and groaned: "We are the last! By the Great
Horn Spoon!" For Shelby's ear alone he muttered: "The last, Ross; New
Babylon's the last, and the die by which you lose or win. Figure it
yourself."
Shelby ran through his senior's calculations and nodded without speech.
No one spoke now. Not a wine-glass tinkled. The room sensed a crisis.
By telephone, special messenger, and the instrument at the table the
belated story of New Babylon's vote pieced itself together under
Bowers's pencil. The candidate hovered above him, intent on every
stroke.
"Good God!" he whispered suddenly; "it hangs on the Flats!"
"Yes; it's the last precinct. They sent word that the thick-skulled
Poles and the rest had made an awful mess of the ballots. Tom"—to one
of the onlookers—"'phone the Flats again."
But on the instant the Flats embodied itself in the doorway in the
person of a breathless messenger. Bowers's trembling fingers fumbled
the paper and cast it fluttering toward the floor, but Shelby fastened
on it in mid-air, read it, crumpled it, mechanically made it smooth
again, and laid it gently on his desk. There came a second roar from
the street, a medley of cheers, groans, hisses, and the blare of horns.
Shelby again drew a curtain. On the Whig's screen was displayed a
huge rooster with the legend: IT'S GRAVES!
Shelby caught a murmuring from the group behind him: vapid expressions
of regret, scorching condolence, pitying oaths; then the voice of a
newcomer, a newspaper correspondent, asking Bowers if they conceded
their defeat.
He spun about, crying,—
"We concede nothing."
The reporter said that the returns as received indicated a slight
majority for the fusion candidate.
"We dispute the returns."
"But, Ross,—" Bowers put in.
"We dispute the returns. Should the official count be adverse, we
shall dispute that. In view of the methods employed by the allies of
the independents, it becomes nothing less than a public duty to carry
the contest to the floor of the House of Representatives."
"It will be a House of your political friends," remarked the
correspondent, impersonally. "Shall I then quote you as claiming your
election?"
"Most emphatically, yes. Quote me as confident of a verdict approving
my public course and rebuking the slanderous attack on my private
character."
"What's the use?" protested Bowers, as the reporter hurried off in
quest of Bernard Graves. "It's too late to bluff."
"Use," echoed Shelby. "I tell you, man, there's a blunder in the
returns. Look, man, look!" snatching up the report from the Flats.
"Isn't that arrant nonsense on the face of it? The Flats, mind you;
our own little pocket borough of the Flats! Don't talk to me about the
Poles muddling things; those inspectors of election can give them cards
for stupidity and take every trick. Let me 'phone the Flats."
And he was right. The inspectors of the belated precinct, conscious of
unwonted delay, nervous from long weighing of defective ballots,
harassed by incessant demands for their report, had capped the climax
of their offending by announcing the result as favorable to Graves.
The mistake was discovered and rectified within fifteen minutes of its
commission. Shelby had carried the precinct, and with it the election
by something less than two hundred votes.
Giddy with the reaction, the Hon. Seneca Bowers gulped glass after
glass of champagne, toasting Confusion to Fusion like the veriest
roisterer.
"And we abused the Poles," he said in self-reproach. "Ross, it was the
Poles who saved the day."
Shelby was the one self-contained being in the room.
"Yes," he answered soberly, "it was the Poles."
With stern straightforwardness the Whig bulletin over the way had
promptly set forth the corrected result, and the crowd, now swollen by
more deserters from the tame gatherings in the little theatre and the
court-house, was clamoring for a sight of the victor whom everybody
knew was within hearing. Shelby's jubilant companions were puzzled at
his reluctance to comply with the popular demand. He declined to show
himself, however, till the arrival of a serenading brass band compelled
an acknowledgment, when he stepped from a window to a little balcony
and spoke a few grave words: he had never doubted their support, they
had repaid his trust, he was grateful; as he had championed their
lesser interests in the smaller field, so should he strive to further
their greater concerns in the national lists to which he was to pass
their chosen knight.
Within the law office preparations were rife for adjourning to the
Tuscarora House as a less restricted arena for the celebration which
the fitness of things demanded. Shelby begged them to go before him,
promising to follow.
"I need a few minutes to myself, boys," he said. "It's been a strain,
you know."
They caroused away. Bowers the most jocund bacchanal of all; the
operator boxed over his instrument against harm and slipped out; and
Shelby was left solitary with the litter and the lees. One by one he
extinguished the lights, and in darkness, at length, halted at the
window from which he had so often marked the goings and comings of Ruth
Temple. The old house was brilliantly alight in its lower rooms; lit,
he dared hope, in honor of his triumph and his anticipated return. He
turned and left his office with elastic step.
Fumbling with the lock in the dim light of the hall, he was spied from
below by a newsboy who came bounding up the stairs.
"Extry! Extry 'dition of th' Whig, Mr. Shelby," he called. "Read
all about yer 'lection an' th' drowndin' accident!"
"Drowning accident!" Shelby started and seized a paper. "Who is
drowned?"
The lad did not know. He had not read beyond the headline which seemed
to promise salability. But in the obscurity of the landing Shelby came
upon the particulars swiftly enough. Skimming the brief despatch, here
a sentence, there a sentence seared itself into his memory.
"Missed his train at Centreport—conscientious citizen, valuing his
vote—hired a naphtha launch—collision—hampered by clothing—leaves a
sorrowing widow—"
"Th' extry 'dition is two cents," reminded the urchin.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
The executive mansion was strewn with the wreckage of the inaugural
reception. A musky odor blent of plant life and massed humanity hung
thickly throughout the spacious rooms and corridors; the bower of palms
and flowery brightness at the foot of the great staircase, which had
fended the orchestra, and incidentally barred an intrusive if sovereign
people from the private apartments, was jostled and awry, its blossoms
half despoiled; here lay a trampled glove, there a shining shred of
braid, beyond an embarrassed cigar stump—dumb emblems of social
Albany, gold-laced officialdom, and the unaristocratic unofficial ruck,
whose mingled tide had beat upon the new governor's threshold in the
late hours of the afternoon. A clock somewhere about the scene of
devastation chimed midnight, and a man with attractive black eyes, who
had been monopolizing his hostess upward of two hours, outstaying all
other guests save one, now took his belated leave.
"Yes; I prophesy a brilliant season, Mrs. Shelby," he said. "With a
woman of your talents in this house, Albany must at last awake."
Cora Shelby returned to one of the smaller reception rooms, where an
open fire wrought changing shadows in the face of the Hon. Seneca
Bowers.
"I think ex-Senator Ludlow is perfectly fascinating," she exclaimed.
"Have you known him long?"
"All of ten years," returned Bowers, with a little tightening of the
lips. "Most everybody in politics knows Handsome Ludlow."
"Ah, he is handsome. And so polished, too."
Bowers found the topic difficult, and changed it.
"What's your opinion of Ross's inauguration?" he asked. "I call it an
A-1 success."
"It would have been a success," discriminated Cora, "a pronounced
success, if Ross had approached it with a tithe of the spirit I urged.
But no; simplicity, simplicity! You would have thought the affair a
transfer of Methodist parsons. No military escort to the capitol, no
decorations in the Assembly Chamber to speak of, no music, no anything
that the occasion demanded."
"Fuss and feathers never did appeal to Ross," said the guest.
"Besides, I guess he thought the last administration had splurged
enough for two."
"Their fine plumage covered as slovenly housekeeping as I ever saw,"
interjected Mrs. Shelby, momentarily diverted from her husband's
shortcomings. "I wish you might have seen what I have seen in
out-of-the-way corners of this establishment. What the servants did
for their wages I can't conceive. But, after all, those people had the
right idea of upholding the dignity of the position. The ex-governor
didn't decline an escort to the capitol when he took office. That puts
me out of patience with Ross every time I think of it. Then, to cap
the climax, he didn't even take a carriage; he walked!"
"Walked down with me," Bowers chuckled.
"And, by Jove, nobody knew him. One of the orderlies wanted to keep
him out of the executive chamber."
Cora shuddered, and the old man bestirred his wits to soothe her
outraged sensibilities.
"You must remember that he made his run on an economy platform," he
reminded. "He believed it, too, every word. After all, you can't say
that you've not had things your own way here at the mansion."
"It's a mercy I did. He would have had the house reception and the
staff dinner equally prim if I hadn't put my foot down. I said no; be
as puritanic as you please at the capitol, but the executive mansion
concerns me; I'm governor here."
"Tolerably big commonwealth, too," commented Bowers, dryly. "Somehow
it puts me in mind of what I thought palaces were like when I was a
boy."
"Oh, yes; it's well enough, though the decorations aren't to my taste;
but the location is very unfashionable—orphan asylums, hovels,
saloons, and all that under one's very nose."
"I hadn't noticed the saloons."
"Well, there's a saloon at any rate. I saw it to-day from one of the
south windows. The state was stupidly short-sighted to buy a house in
this quarter. The executive mansion ought to stand in Quality Row."
"What's that?" asked Bowers.
"Not much to look at—just a block or two of houses near the capitol,
not one of which could have cost more than my own place in New Babylon,
for all that famous people have lived in them; but it's the cream of
Albany."
"Everything else is skim milk, I suppose?"
Mrs. Shelby eluded the classification.
"Nearly all that's socially significant is grouped thereabouts," she
pursued; "the cathedral, the Beverwyck Club, Canon North, and Mrs.
Teunis Van Dam. The canon and Mrs. Van Dam are the keys to the social
citadel, I assure you. Probably you noticed them on the platform at
the Inauguration. Then, she helped me receive this afternoon, thanks
to a bit of diplomacy."
Bowers absorbed these esoteric deliverances in meekness.
"It takes a woman to bottom such things," he said admiringly. "I guess
you'll pass."
Cora herself harbored no doubts, but she disclaimed a single-handed
victory.
"I shouldn't know all these things yet if it were not for the
governor's military secretary, Colonel Schuyler Smith. Do you know
him?"
"I'm not sure that I can place the colonel," ruminated Bowers. "Is he
that blond young dandy whose sword got tangled in his legs?"
"Yes, poor dear! He's not used to wearing it yet. But he's a
treasure. He's Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's grandson, you know, and like her
is descended from all those delightful old Dutchmen who make such
enviable ancestors, and have stained glass windows in the cathedral.
He knows who is who, I assure you. Ex-Senator Ludlow does too, for
that matter; though he doesn't care for Mrs. Van Dam's circle. He
thinks it too stately and old régime. He goes with the younger
set—Mrs. Tommy Kidder's—and he says Mrs. Tommy is quite my own style."
The governor entered the room in the midst of these matters and
listened soberly. Shelby had taken on more years than his
congressional service spanned. His dark hair had grayed at the
temples; his old puffiness of jowl and dewlap had vanished; and the
strong bone framework of his head showed for what it truly was.
Tuscarora ancients, who remembered the pioneer, said that Shelby
favored his grandfather.
Bowers turned to him with a laugh.
"It's a mighty good thing you've got a skilled pilot in these waters,"
he said.
"Yes, Cora knows her way around," returned her husband. "I dare say
the world's a brighter place for this varnish, though I've noticed that
when you scrape through it people average much alike. It's meant more
to me to-day to have you here, old friend, than the notables. You gave
me my start." He hesitated, glanced at his wife, and added: "But they
were all welcome. Cora has come into her kingdom, and I wouldn't abate
a single courtier."
"I've waited for my kingdom," she declared; "waited for it in sackcloth
and ashes. You can't call Washington anything else for a congressman's
wife. Her husband may get glory; she gets snubs. Now my turn has
come, and I've plans galore. Milicent's début is one of them. I'll
bring her out with a ball when she has had enough of her finishing
school. Ex-Senator Ludlow thinks it an inspiration."
The men exchanged a look.
"Handsome Ludlow isn't an ideal adviser for young girls," dropped
Shelby, quietly.
"He's a victim of gossip; he told me so. You and I know too well what
that means to countenance it. Besides, you're going to appoint him
commissioner of something or other—I read it in yesterday's papers;
but that's politics, I suppose."
Shelby gloomed in his corner, but made no answer.
Bowers essayed a diversion.
"I saw Bernard Graves's wife in the assembly chamber this morning," he
remarked. "Seems to me she's looking rather peaked since her marriage."
"Ruth Graves here!" exclaimed Cora.
"I saw her too," said Shelby. "She congratulated me later in the
executive chamber. She has been living in New York this winter.
Graves is still lecturing around the country, telling how he wrote his
poem and what it's all about."
"I presume she couldn't resist coming up to see how we would behave,"
Cora reflected, aloud.
"She is visiting Mrs. Van Dam," added the governor.
"Of all people!" Mrs. Shelby's wonder was unrestrained. "I do
remember, though," she continued presently, "that she made friends here
when she was in Vassar College. It's plain enough why Mrs. Van Dam has
taken her up again. She wants to know all about us."
It was an easy step now to the conclusion that perhaps such an old
friend really merited an invitation to the executive mansion.
The governor brushed his forehead with a weary gesture, drew a chair to
Bowers's side, and unfolded a bundle of manuscript.
"I know it's late," he said apologetically, "but there's a bit of my
message I'd like to read to you. There'll be no time in the morning if
you're still bent on taking the early train to Tuscarora. I'd like
your opinion whether it's what the plain people want."
Mrs. Shelby found the reading unspeakably juiceless and went yawning to
bed. Nor did the governor detain Bowers long. A servant entering
presently discovered Shelby before the grate alone.
"Don't wait up for me," he directed kindly. "I'll see to this fire,
and remember not to blow out the gas."
The relic of the old régime restrained his surprise at these democratic
doings, smiled decorously, and withdrew. Jocosity slipped out at his
dignified heels. The man before the fire drank deep in self-communion,
and his face was grave. For the first time that crowded day he could
look his future in the face. Yet, evoked by a woman's handclasp in the
long line which had filed by him as he stood in the executive chamber
surrounded by his glittering staff, it was the past which most absorbed
him. It struck him as a wanton caprice of fate that they should have
been flung together that day. Ruth, whom he had promised a share in
these honors; Ruth, whom he had boasted that he would return and claim;
Ruth, whom he had put away because he must, because of a loftier
standard which—grimmest irony of all!—she herself had unwittingly set
up. He wondered—as he had wondered often in the years which had
witnessed her marriage, his own, and his rise to power—whether she
had waited that night; whether she had cared as he, apart from the
red passion of the struggle, could perceive that he had cared.
A vagrant memory of the morning's inauguration intruded. The moment of
his oath had been a time of solemn consecration for him, a laying on of
hands unseen; the shades of his greatest predecessors stood round
about; the genius of the state was in presence. Then came Cora and
kissed him. Emotional souls in the gallery applauded the act, but the
husband divined its prompting egoism and was cold.
CHAPTER II
Neither the public nor the honorable body to which it was directly
addressed took the new governor's message stressing general
retrenchment and the pruning of useless offices seriously. Nothing in
the recent course of the party wooed faith in its promises to purge and
live cleanly, and the accident of a huge majority in the late
elections, owing to national issues, had set not a few mouths watering
for fruits of victory which had lately dangled out of reach. The
machine was perfected to its utmost, and the young year was held to
signalize the full flowering of the Boss's topping supremacy. The
great man was now master of the county committees of the metropolis and
the greater cities; of the State Committee; of the Legislature, of the
lieutenant-governor, and apparently of Shelby. The cartoons depicted
the chief executive as a craven monarch yielding his sceptre to the
leering power behind the throne; as a marionette twitched by obvious
wires; as a muzzled dog, ticketed with the Boss's name.
Whereupon Shelby, in a quiet way, did an audacious thing. By an odd
chance the first enactment of the Legislature which reached his desk
affected Tuscarora County. It was a general measure concerning marsh
lands, philanthropically worded and fathered by an assemblyman from an
eastern county; but its special purpose, as Shelby fathomed, was to
give certain Tuscarora people a selfish advantage in a locality as
familiar to him as his hand. The Swamp, as Tuscarora called it,
embodied his boyhood notion of primeval nature, the one spot untamed
amidst tilled and retilled commonplaceness, the last fastness and
abiding-place of the unknown. Rude corduroy roads threaded the
wilderness in parts, and from this Red-Sea sort of passage the lad had
peered and questioned in delicious fear. Even now the man had but to
shut his eyes to recall it with the senses of the boy. Cowslip, wood
violet, and Jack-in-the-pulpit bloomed again, the scent of mint was in
his nostrils, fairy lakes lured amidst the ferns, and the way wound
through lofty halls whose wonderful pillars set foot in emerald pools
and sprang in vaulting hung high with wild grape. Once in those tender
years he had skirted the spot by night when owls hooted, unnatural
frogs boomed, will-o'-the-wisp stalked abroad, and Old Mystery held
carnival; that breathless experience almost outdid the delights by day.
All this issued from the phraseology of a bill—this, and something
more. He held the measure a day or two and invited its sponsors,
ostensible and real, to a conference. They were trained legislators,
with whom he had served and fraternized, and in this matter furthered
the interests of men in his native county who had backed him from the
beginning of his career.
"Gentlemen," he said, regarding them quizzically, "this bill reminds me
of a Tuscarora story." They laughed at the familiar beginning, and the
governor laughed with them. "It's about a man who ran a grist-mill on
a creek fed by a certain swamp, which I guess you know about. He was
easy-going, the water was often too low for grinding, and the little
mill had business for six, since there wasn't a rival within thirty
miles. The pioneers came prepared to camp when they brought grist, and
I suppose loafed around pitching quoits and cursing the mill trust by
whatever name they called a monopoly then. One day along came a cute
boy astride a mule with two bags of grain. He sized up the crowd ahead
of him as he carried in his grist, and decided that if he waited his
turn the country would grow up without him. The miller happened to be
tinkering his water-wheel, so the boy got his bags into a dark corner
unobserved, and with a handful of mill dust gave his work the finishing
touch of ripe old age. I dare say you think he took the man in, but he
didn't. 'Bub,' said the miller, 'I used to do that trick myself.'"
Shelby's old associates in log-rolling took the unmasking
good-naturedly, but declined the amendment he suggested. He dismissed
them with charming civility, jotted a laconic memorandum that the bill
meditated a raid on public property for private gain, and with the calm
of a gardener lopping a weed, withheld his signature.
It were hard to say whose smart was shrewder, the spoilsmen's who
mourned the backsliding of a pal, or the professional reformers' who
chewed the galling fact that not one of the elect, but a practical
politician, had done this creditable thing. Both joined forces to
fling clods. In the greater world, however, Shelby's simple act won
swift approval. In the cartoonists' fancy the wires of the puppet-show
had gone awry, the dog bit the heel at which it slunk, the usurper's
knuckles were rapped by the sceptre he would have seized. The press
teemed with anecdotes and personal gossip of the governor. Everything
he did or said became of interest: his dress, his habits of work, his
Tuscarora stories, his domestic life. An admirer on Long Island who
bred bulldogs sent him a white pup trained to answer to the name of
"Veto." Triplets in the valley of the Susquehanna were christened
"Calvin," "Ross," and "Shelby," respectively.
During this time no word passed between Shelby and the Boss. The
leader had not witnessed the inaugural ceremonies. Indeed, he had not
attended the inauguration of a governor since his party regained
control of the state. He and the governor-elect had lunched together
frequently, however, and in concord discussed the forthcoming message
and the party policy of the incoming Legislature. With two years of
common work and intimacy behind them, they felt slight need of
explanations. The machine as it stood was of their joint perfecting.
Accordingly, the Boss viewed the cartoons with his habitual serenity,
noted that a fund of good will was accruing to the party through the
personal popularity of the new executive, and smilingly assured the
reporters, who scented a quarrel, that Shelby was the right man in the
right place. He found no thorn in a special message reminding the
fortnight-old Legislature that, with the chief financial measures yet
untouched, the bills already introduced called for the outlay of
millions; nor did the speedy pruning of several sinecures, one of which
was held by that tried veteran, Jacob Krantz, dash his cheery
confidence. Krantz and the ousted were quietly found corporate
business openings of glittering promise, and the campaign slogans were
proved no mere catch-vote generalities.
Meanwhile the ancient city of Albany privily assorted its impressions
of Shelby's wife, and awaited the dictum of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam.
Although it was by deeds, rather than speech, that she made her
judgments public, Mrs. Van Dam among her intimates did not deny herself
the luxury of a stout opinion vigorously expressed.
"Mrs. Shelby's a fool," asserted the old lady in her positive way to
Canon North, "but, after all, one of our own church people and the
governor's wife."
"Either claim is weighty," smiled North; "tenderness for the family
skeleton, respect for the state. United they're irresistible." For a
social autocrat the canon took his position simply. Indeed he would
have been rather astonished to learn that he was anything of the kind.
"But the governor—he's genuine," he continued musingly; "I'm drawn to
the man. He seems to me a power to be reckoned with—presidential
timber, perhaps. Of course all our governors are heirs apparent by
virtue of their office; but unlike so many of them, he isn't of a
stature to be dwarfed by the suggestion. I think him rather
Lincolnesque in a way, though I don't press the comparison. Perhaps
it's merely his smile—have you noticed it?—the 'sad and melancholy
smile on the lips of great men' that Amiel tells us is the badge of the
misunderstood."
"Pshaw!" returned Mrs. Van Dam. "I've known two or three great men who
wore sad smiles. When a disordered liver wasn't at the bottom of it
'twas the wife."
North gave over the argument.
"Nobody would impeach Shelby's liver," he laughed. "He's as robust as
a patent medicine witness after taking."
"Oh, I don't accuse Mrs. Shelby," rejoined Mrs. Van Dam, quickly. "The
governor's smile isn't the issue. One and one don't make one in the
state of matrimony any more than elsewhere on the globe, and whether he
and his wife agree or disagree doesn't interest me in the slightest.
What does concern me is the important fact that the mistress of the
executive mansion of the great state of New York appears not to know
certain things she ought, chief among them the true character of
ex-Senator Ludlow."
"I'm afraid it's true," owned the canon.
"Before Ruth Graves left I suggested that she intercede. She has tact,
knows the Shelbys well, and had received an invitation to visit them.
But she declined visit, intercession, and all. I'm sorry. Somebody
must speak to Mrs. Shelby, and an old acquaintance could carry off such
a mission with better grace."
"Why didn't Graves come on with his wife?" inquired the canon,
irrelevantly.
"Don't mention the simpleton! I've no patience with him—or with Ruth
for marrying him. We never can see the reason for other people's
marriages, but that one above all others was incomprehensible. If ever
a woman needed to marry a dynamo to bring out her best it was Ruth
Temple. And she married Bernard Graves—a man who has degenerated into
a poseur before women's clubs. Marriages made in heaven indeed!
Give me Darwin and natural selection."
"You really have something of the kind," laughed North. "She was a
free agent, his plumage evidently attracted in the old, old way, and so
she made her choice."
"Fiddlesticks! Don't tell me that she made a fool of herself of her
own free will. That man isn't capable of stirring the emotions of a
poster girl with orange skin and purple hair, let alone a flesh and
blood woman. Something outside herself—don't laugh; I'm a woman and I
know—somebody, not Graves himself, bred that folly. If she were
another sort of nature, I'd say she married for spite; but she—"
"For respite, perhaps—respite from herself. I've known cases. But
we're far afield from the Shelbys. Shall I approach the governor?"
"No," said Mrs. Van Dam, with decision. "The wife is the one to see,
if I know anything of women, and this is a woman's task; I, clearly, am
the instrument, and shall not shirk."
"You would have made an eminent surgeon," remarked North, with his slow
smile.
The unflinching Good Samaritan selected an hour two days later when the
governor's wife was likely to be alone, and sent up her card. Not a
few women had sighed for a sight of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's calling card,
and sighed in vain; but Cora Shelby, who had heard of these yearnings,
thanked her God that she was not as other women are, and glanced at the
pasteboard with indifference.
"Yes; I suppose I'm at home," she said languidly, posturing for the
maid, and for a full half-hour left the august visitor waiting below
stairs while she turned the pages of a novel.
The influence of Mrs. Tommy Kidder had determined this petty course.
This sprightly young person, being herself a real social force, shared
little of the awe in which Mrs. Teunis Van Dam was held by most of her
townsfolk and by all newcomers, and Cora, with her own ideas of the
part which she, as the governor's wife, should play, had taken Mrs.
Tommy's frothy nonsense at rather more than its surface value. She was
more than ever alive to Mrs. Van Dam's importance—her grandson, the
military secretary, was an ever present reminder; but she cherished a
quickened sense of her own importance, too, and was vigilantly alert to
withstand any sign or symptom of what Mrs. Tommy called "Knickerbocker
domination."
Her first shaft, however, fell wide of the mark. Mrs. Van Dam serenely
assumed that her tardy hostess meant to pay her the compliment of a
more elaborate toilet, and employed the interval in an interested
survey of the changes wrought in the reception room's arrangement by
its new mistress. So absorbing did she find this occupation, that she
utterly missed the glacial temperature of Cora's greeting.
"I must congratulate you on resurrecting that bit of mahogany,"
declared the old lady, indicating a table. "I've missed that piece for
three administrations. Wherever did you find it?"
"Really, I can't remember," fibbed Cora, resolving straightway to
banish it.
The military secretary had suggested its restoration, and she jumped to
the conclusion that he had been inspired by his grandmother.
"It's a real link with the past," added Mrs. Van Dam, with a far-away
look in her eyes. "I can recall it as long ago as Governor Tilden's
time."
The great Mrs. Van Dam's cordiality thawed Cora in spite of herself,
and she was well in the way of unconditional surrender to her charm
when the caller cut straight into the pith of her errand.
"Without beating about the bush, my dear," she began, "I'm here on a
meddlesome business which you mustn't take amiss. As an old woman who
has seen something of the world in general, and much of this queer
little Albany corner of it in particular, you must permit me to tell
you that you have been too generously lenient with a person who has
forfeited the right to darken decent people's doors. I mean ex-Senator
Ludlow; and I presume I needn't specify his misdeeds."
"No. You need not," rejoined Cora, stiffening. "I'm not interested in
scandal."
Mrs. Teunis Van Dam straightened rigidly in her chair.
"I fear that, after all, I must particularize," she replied.
"Obviously you can't know the truth of things."
"I know that his wife divorced him, and I have heard a dozen or more
malicious tales about his present life. I doubt if you can add to the
collection."
"You put me in a false position."
"And you reflect on mine in assuming to dictate whom I shall receive.
This house belongs to the state. Every citizen is welcome."
Mrs. Van Dam had gathered her furs and risen, but at this she paused.
"There," she exclaimed, with a little laugh, "what women we are! I've
been talking of one thing, you of another. You have the right view of
your official obligations precisely. Of course the man is free to come
to your public receptions. The state can't establish a moral
quarantine, more's the pity."
"Ex-Senator Ludlow is free to come to my house at all times," cut in
Cora, with a brilliant crimson dot in either cheek. "I do not sit in
pharisaical judgment on the unfortunate. I've had his story as well as
that of you who are against him. I believe him a misjudged man who
deserves a courageous friend."
"Oh, if it is a question of friendship—" and Mrs. Van Dam terminated
sentence and interview with a shrug.
Yet Cora had not seen the last of her visitor's stately back before she
repented her open championship of Handsome Ludlow. Knickerbocker
domination, not conviction, had forced her hand. Since she had hung
her banner on the walls, however, she resolved to stand fast, and the
following Sunday morning issued an unmistakable declaration of war. On
her way to service she saw Ludlow crossing the park before the capitol,
and stopped her carriage.
"'Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember'd,'" quoted the man,
his handsome, impudent eyes on hers.
"I propose that you'll do that for yourself," Cora retorted archly.
"Get in."
She had intended going to the cathedral, but withal sudden resolve she
ordered the carriage driven to an older church just at hand, which time
out of mind had made special provision for the head of the state, down
whose central aisle she marshalled Ludlow, and installed him in the
governor's pew.
CHAPTER III
Had the protest against Knickerbocker arrogance languished at this
pass, history would be the poorer, but Cora Shelby found it impossible
to stop with this show of independence. Her ambition was whetted for
an exercise of actual power, and the outcome was the famous battle of
Beverwyck, whose story still lacks its balladist.
Early in her survey of Albany society, Cora had met with the Beverwyck
Club.
"It is the local academy of immortals," instructed the military
secretary. "Its judgments may not be infallible, but they're beyond
appeal. It is the pink of exclusiveness; it worships etiquette above
all other gods; and its receptions to incoming governors demand the
reddest lettering in the calendar."
When Shelby's turn for this signal honor drew near, and the military
secretary, to whom Fortune, not content with sending him into the world
a grandson of Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, had added membership in the
Beverwyck Club, approached him to discuss preliminaries, the governor
cheerfully referred him to his wife in whose social knowingness he
placed an abounding trust. Of Albany other than as a legislative
workshop he knew next to nothing. His social progress in the salad
days of his first term in the Assembly had begun in a saloon behind the
capitol much frequented by departmental clerks, whence through hotel
corridor intercourse he evolved by his second session to a grillroom,
patronized by public servants of higher cast who gave stag dinners and
occasional theatre parties, which called for evening dress. Up to this
period Shelby had never found evening clothes essential to his
happiness. His little sectarian college had rather frowned on such
garments, and he, too, for a time had vaguely considered them
un-American. Yet, taught by the grillroom, he assumed this livery,
wore off its shyness, and grew to like it for the best it signified.
Here evolution paused. Mrs. Teunis Van Dam, Canon North, and the
Beverwyck Club, so far as they stood for anything, peopled a frigid
zone of inconsequence which he had no wish to penetrate. Washington,
influence in his party, and intimacy with its leaders sophisticated him
before his return; behind every mask he now discerned a human being;
and no social ordeal terrified. Nevertheless, something of his
old-time diffidence toward the unknown country beyond the grillroom
lingered, and it made for peace that his wife seemed so competent to
guide.
On the score of her competency, Cora entertained no misgivings, and the
day following Handsome Ludlow's public elevation to sanctity she met
the club's representatives, the military secretary, and an august judge
of the Court of Appeals, with a self-possession she felt would grace
the daughter of a belted earl. The judge, after some ponderous
compliments, told her that the committee in charge, having assured
itself through the secretary that the governor and herself had no
conflicting engagement, had agreed upon a near date for the reception,
which he named. Cora promptly decided that in not consulting her the
military secretary had been wanting in respect, and to punish him
invented a previous engagement out of hand. Withered by his senior's
Jove-like frown, the young man apologized in hot-skinned contrition for
his ignorance of the unknowable.
"It's barely possible I didn't mention it," dropped Cora, scrupulously
fair.
This gracious intercession for the culprit had no weight with the
judge, who continued to regard the secretary with severity, and left
him wholly out of the discussion of a date which should meet her
wishes. This matter settled without further affront to her dignity,
the judge expanded under her flattering attention, and gossiped of the
reception itself.
"Between ourselves," he confessed, "the invitation list is bothering us
unconscionably. You see, it has expanded beyond our space. At the
last governor's reception the club-house was invaded by a mob—a mob,
madame,—there is no other expression,—-which I need not add is out of
keeping with our traditions. But how draw the line without offence?"
With the dregs of her wrath against Mrs. Van Dam stirred afresh by the
disciplining of the grandson, Cora perceived and seized the opportunity
for a swingeing blow.
"There's an absurdly simple remedy," she returned thoughtfully; "but of
course it would hardly become me to offer suggestions."
"My dear madame," the judge protested, "it would be an act of charity."
After a politic interval of coaxing, Cora explained:—
"The reception is meant to be official in spirit, isn't it? Then why
not make it so in fact? Limit your invitations to the official circle.
If all the townspeople unconnected with the government are excluded, no
one need take offence."
A few days afterward the invitations went forth, restricted according
to Cora's plan, and the heart-burnings which were kindled scorched the
club's self-esteem like nothing in its staid career. But while others
merely bewailed the amazing fact of their exclusion, Mrs. Teunis Van
Dam, with characteristic energy, determined to probe the indignity to
its author, and summoned her grandson to an absorbing interview.
"Schuyler Livingston Smith," she inquired, "what is Mrs. Tommy Kidder's
relation to public affairs that she should receive an invitation to the
Beverwyck Club?"
The secretary named an insignificant board of which Mr. Kidder was a
member. His grandmother rapidly instanced a dozen other names, and
repeated her question. In most cases the young man had to confess his
ignorance of their claims.
"So," she commented in the end; "so. And I, whose people have helped
govern this community since there was a colony to govern, am beyond the
pale! But who was Peter Stuyvesant beside Mrs. Tommy Kidder's husband?
Nobody. Who was Abraham de Peyster? who was Gerardus Beekman? who was
Rip Van Dam? And the Schuylers, Livingstons, and Van Rensselaers? All
nobodies. My dear child, what lunatic in the Beverwyck Club suggested
this official classification, which even the Archangel Michael could
not carry out?"
Her grandson, with no friendly recollections, named the judge.
"The silly old man!" exclaimed Mrs. Van Dam. "And who inspired him?"
He cheerfully told her, with the added detail that Mrs. Shelby and the
judge had subsequently gone over the invitation list together. She was
silent for a time, and then dismissed him. Alone with her thoughts,
she elaborated a countermine, whose energy was specially directed
against the Beverwyck Club, though she had no objection to hoisting the
governor's wife in the explosion, albeit she refused to consider her
the real antagonist. The true offender was the exclusive organization
which had prostituted itself to such ignoble influence.
Within an hour of her grandson's departure Mrs. Teunis Van Dam
despatched an invitation of her own. The Beverwyck Club reception was
scheduled to run its formal course from nine to eleven o'clock; Mrs.
Van Dam asked the governor and his lady to dine with her on the same
evening at the hour of eight.
All hinged now on the personal equation of Cora Shelby, whose vagaries
the old lady owned herself quite unable to forecast. Nor in this
respect was Cora herself a much wiser prophet. Her first instinct,
mixed with wonder, was to decline, and she held to this opinion the
better part of an hour. Yet before the impulse could stiffen into
resolution, it met the neutralizing influence of the old town, which,
partly through the military secretary, partly through the scoffing
Ludlow, she had unwittingly assimilated. By these teachings she had
learned the flattering, almost royal, significance of Mrs. Teunis Van
Dam's dinner invitations. She was seized afresh by a curiosity to
observe how they did things in Quality Row, and became of two minds
forthwith. Appointed for the same evening as the club reception, the
dinner had, moreover, the look of a peace overture, a concession to her
power, even an admission of defeat, which was soothing. She could
hardly present the matter to Shelby in this light, as she had withheld
all mention of the Ludlow business from his ear; but with a generosity
which astonished herself, she dwelt on Mrs. Teunis Van Dam's undoubted
prestige, and ended by advising acceptance.
Shelby, preoccupied with an appeal for the pardon of a consumptive
forger, mechanically agreed.
"Sooner or later we'd have had to endure both functions," he said. "It
is time saved to pack them into one evening."
Cora bridled. It was a prodigious affair for her that he took so
indifferently.
"Time, time," she reprimanded; "the state doesn't expect its governor
to grub like a clerk."
Shelby promised to mend his ways; but the dinner and reception occupied
his thoughts so little that he worked beyond his usual hour at the
capitol on the afternoon of the appointed day, and, coming tardy home,
was late in dressing and late in setting forth. Cora was indignant to
the boiling-point. She meant to be behind-hand at the reception, as a
display of what she deemed good form; but a dinner was a dinner, as her
husband, in the privacy of the carriage, was taught past all
forgetting. Yet his fault lost its gravity before Mrs. Van Dam's
welcome.
"If you're really late, I'm delighted," she returned to Cora's
embarrassed excuses; "for you see, I've just found that I must
apologize for a delay myself. What a boon servants run by clockwork
would be! But it won't be very long."
It was long, though neither of the guests suspected it. Shelby was
diverted by Mrs. Van Dam's unimagined vivacity; while his wife had no
immediate room for any impression save satisfaction that this autocrat,
who held that punctuality should be the politeness of democracy no less
than princes, had been caught napping. It was clear that she meant to
bury the hatchet, and Cora, with her own point carried, saw no reason
why she should not add a shovelful of symbolic earth herself. Thus,
beginning with a trickle, the flow of her good humor presently
broadened to the width of the sluice-gate, as she entered upon an
absorbing scrutiny of the quaint old house which by tradition had
served one of the earlier governors. It was a rambling structure of
unexpected turns and endless alcoves stored with curios, art treasures,
and trophies of travel.
Perceiving their interest in their surroundings, Mrs. Van Dam gladly
played the cicerone.
"That chair and desk came from the Senate Chamber of the old State
House," she said, following Shelby's eyes. "They were used by my
grandfather, and I luckily got them at the demolition. His wooden
inkstand and pounce-box are there too. That Stuart over the
mantelpiece is his portrait."
"I've heard of him," answered Shelby, warmly. "He upheld De Witt
Clinton's hands in the fight for the canal."
She left him momentarily to give Cora the history of a faded Flemish
tapestry that lay in a cabinet, and then included them both in the
romantic tale of a Murillo, unearthed in a Mexican pawnshop, which she
assumed would interest so steadfast a champion of art as the governor
had shown himself in his congressional career. Cora basked in the
exquisite flattery of being treated as a person of greater cultivation
than she was, and strained on tiptoe to merit her reputation. Had her
mind been free to register its ordinary impressions, two things might
have struck her as singular; the absence of other guests, and, stranger
still, in a temple of punctuality, the lack of clocks.
The same happy atmosphere enveloped the dinner itself, whose perfection
of service and cookery betrayed no hint of delay. Mrs. Shelby found
her views of life and the sphere of woman sought for and appreciated,
and the governor was enticed into political by-paths illustrated by
Tuscarora stories told in his happiest vein. He was frankly charmed.
Many women had attracted him in many ways, ranging from the earthy
fascination of the sometime Mrs. Hilliard to that commingling of
girlish impulse, mature good sense, and an indefinite something else in
Ruth which swayed him still; but none of them had met him on quite the
serene plane of this delightful old woman of the world. By her
birthright she seemed to bridge the present and the past, and under her
spell the quaint-gabled Albany of another century rose again. Once
more Arcadian youth picnicked in the "bush" and coasted down Pinkster
Hill past the squat Dutch church; the Tontine Coffee House sprang from
dust, and through its doors walked Hamilton and Burr, Jerome Bonaparte,
and a comic-pathetic émigré marquis, who in poverty awaited the
greater Bonaparte's downfall, cherishing his order of Saint Louis and
powdering his poll with Indian meal; the Livingstons and Clintons
divided the land between them; Van Buren and the Regency came to power.
There was more of this when the dinner had ended, and they lingered in
the library over their coffee and Mrs. Van Dam's priceless collection
of relics of the time of the royal province and the yet earlier New
Netherland.
"A plague on the reception!" exclaimed the governor in the carriage,
when the good nights had finally been said. "I could have talked with
her till morning."
There was a lively stir and bustle about the entrance of the Beverwyck
Club as they approached, which Cora took to be that of late-comers like
themselves. She would have preferred that she be conspicuously the
last,—the climax. Seen nearer, the flurry was peculiar. If the idea
were not preposterous, she could believe that people were actually
leaving the club—leaving before they met the governor in whose honor
they assembled—leaving before she came!
"Your watch, Ross, your watch," she exclaimed suddenly.
"I did not wear it."
She bethought her of a recently acquired carriage clock whose face the
lights of a passing trolley made plain. She looked, gasped, and looked
again in horrid fascination. The punctilious Beverwyck Club had
decreed that its reception should end at eleven, and the decrees of the
Beverwyck Club were rigidly enforced. The carriage clock pointed its
inexorable hands to a quarter past.
CHAPTER IV
Thenceforth Cora Shelby's respect for the fearless strategist in
Quality Row verged upon awe. If Mrs. Teunis Van Dam now deigned to
assist at one of the weekly house-openings, the occasion savored of an
aroma which the united patronage of Mrs. Tommy Kidder and the ladies of
the lieutenant-governor, the secretary of state, the controller, the
treasurer, and the entire bench of the Court of Appeals could not
exhale. Cora made sure of her good offices for the legislative
reception weeks in advance, and in all matters, save only Handsome
Ludlow, deferred anxiously to the great exemplar's code.
No one who thought twice about Mrs. Van Dam escaped the reflection that
she was a descendant, and Cora with her mind running continually on
this shoot of a peculiarly sightly family tree, was as fired by this
truism of natural law as if it had lain all the centuries awaiting her
discovery. Those delightful magicians of figures, who as easy as
asking prove William the Conqueror the mathematical begetter of us all,
had hitherto contented her; but such sweets cloyed before Mrs. Van
Dam's august line of Dutch and English forebears, who had considerately
made history and bequeathed portraits and plate. But the path of
Japhet in search of a father was primrose beside the American's in
search of an ancestor, and Cora's researches were long barren of
result. The labyrinth of Brown, her maiden name, she speedily forsook,
though at the outset it seemed to run promisingly to knighthood,
literature, and art; Huggins, her mother's name, was impossible, and
Hilliard, more sounding, clearly out of the question; while the
Shelbys, to whom she turned in last resort, seemed hopelessly
commonplace. Ross's father, to her own knowledge, had done little but
drink; and the grandfather, though of sterner stuff, as became a
pioneer, was handicapped by his unlucky distillery. The governor's own
notions about his family were the vaguest. Like many Americans, he had
the impression that its beginnings traced to two brothers who
immigrated to this country prior to the Revolution in which they served.
"The Revolution seems to be the Norman Conquest of American genealogy,"
he remarked in the course of his wife's cross-examination.
"But don't you know their names, or what they did in the war?" she
queried anxiously.
Shelby shook his head.
"Perhaps they were teamsters," he laughed.
Cora was too pained to jest. Mrs. Van Dam was a "daughter" of this and
that society by virtue of descent from generals.
For a time the chase now circled teasingly round a southern branch
whose achievements were notable, but the unconcern of the distiller
with regard to vital statistics balked a happy union of North and
South, and goaded Cora to that last desperate ditch of the
ancestor-hunter—a blind leap over seas. In the fortunate isles where
choice forefathers flourish thick as buttercups, Cora made her foray
with hunger's lawless haste, enlisted the aid of an indigent person
skilled in blazonry, and in good season brought her spoils to the
governor.
"I've had bother enough getting this," she said, exhibiting a coat of
arms; "but I must say it's far prettier than the one we saw in Mrs. Van
Dam's library."
"Runs mainly to red, doesn't it?" Shelby ventured, gravely considering
the work.
"That's gules," explained Cora, learnedly; "the color of the field.
Books of heraldry describe the arms as: 'Gules, two boars' heads
displayed in chief and a mullet in base, sable; crest, a dexter arm,
embowed, grasping a cimeter—'"
"I took that for a crumb-scraper," put in the governor, jocularly.
"The motto," went on Cora, soberly, "is, 'I achieve.' I think the
purple of the mantling highly effective—purpure, that's called—which,
taken with the red and black, would give a most romantic light to our
hall in New Babylon if we put a window at the turn of the stair.
Tomorrow morning I shall order a die made for my stationery."
"So this is ours," said Shelby. "Did the original owner acquire it in
the Holy Wars, or was he a rich brewer who endowed a hospital?"
Cora reddened.
"He was Owen Shelby, a Welsh soldier of the Commonwealth."
"A near relation of mine?"
"You are undoubtedly his descendant. Of course I can't supply every
trifling link—your people were so careless of their records; but there
is no question in my mind that you are entitled to his arms, and you
ought to be grateful to me for my pains."
"I am, I am," protested Shelby, with a chuckle. "But before the
engraver begins work on the crumb-scraper and the prize pigs let me
suggest that you add a detail which has been overlooked. I mean a bar
sinister."
"Ross!"
He slipped his arm round her waist with a laugh.
"One of the state library people said that you were trailing the
foreign Shelbys, and I glanced at your references. The fact I remember
best is that Owen Shelby, late of Cromwell's Ironsides, died a
bachelor."
She flung from him in stormy anger.
"I've twice been fool enough," she flashed, "to marry a man unable to
appreciate me."
He winced. The reproach, more wanton than any she had ever framed,
lashed him on the raw. The manner of his succession to Joe Hilliard's
shoes had fostered an almost morbid solicitude for her well being which
had not seldom over-topped his better judgment. If he had failed of
his duty, it was not for lack of striving.
"I've tried, Cora," he answered bitterly.
Neither broached a formal reconciliation—such crude devices fell into
disuse early in their marriage; but the man gave her social hours he
could ill afford in the press of the closing session, and presently a
tremendous event from the outside patched, if it could not heal, the
breach. This was nothing less than the launching of Shelby's
presidential boom.
Three factors contributed to this movement: the return of prosperity,
the governor's personality, and the Boss. Shelby won his election in a
midnight of universal hard times; his inauguration saw the dawn; the
legislative session closed amidst a sunrise of splendid promise. By
the deathless fallacy which credits or blames the ruling powers for
everything, natural or supernatural, Shelby's party reaped abundantly
where it had sown with niggard hand. The governor's personal deserts
were more solid, the public recognizing his retarding ratchet as the
cause of the machine's continence and the lowered tax-rate. Apparently
the Legislature bore him no ill will for his curbing hand. A quiet
word had issued from the Boss that the governor's vetoes must stand,
and Shelby's one pet measure, the appointment of a commission to deal
with the improvement of the canals, had passed both Houses by a vote
which was almost non-partisan. A spontaneous demand seemed to well
from the people that this faithful steward be sent higher.
But Shelby knew something of the rearing of that tenderest of plants in
the political garden—the spontaneous demand. In the voice of the
people he had so often read the will of the Boss. The inspired
laudations of country editors, the resulting echoes in the city press,
the interviews with the knowing ones who withheld their names, the
genuine momentum lent by the easily impressed—all the covert workings
of spontaneity were known to him from the days of apprenticeship at the
Boss's feet. The method was transparent, the motive only was hazy; yet
he divined the motive itself with sufficient accuracy. The Boss
thought he knew too much. It is well to make your own governor, but to
make him too well is ill. It was this one's drawback that he had
passed the No Admittance sign of the workshop and got the trade secrets
of the boss business at his finger ends. The pupil smiled sometimes
when he recalled the first great rencounter with the master. The birch
and frown no longer terrified. Evidently the Boss knew this, and
failing the birch, dangled a prize.
What Shelby did not divine was the incentive force of pique. While the
leader gave his smiling interviews to the reporters on the subject of
the governor's vetoes, he had too often had to dissemble that his
earliest information came from them. He did not resent the vetoes, if
they made party capital; nor did he resent Shelby's popularity, for he
liked him. The bitterness of the cup was that the ingrate took no
pains to inquire whether he cared or not. It is true that in large
questions Shelby had uniformly sought his counsel, and the session had
been fairly prolific in legislation redounding to the party credit; but
the governor's independence in the lesser matters attainted his
loyalty. What the one man considered upholding the dignity of his
office, the other interpreted as leze-majesty.
Shelby's attitude toward the presidential chit-chat was frankly human.
Too modest to measure himself beside the greater successors of
Washington, he yet knew himself to be as well equipped as many who had
held the office; and, without troubling his sleep, determined that
should the boss-made boom attain genuine popularity, it might drift
where it would without hindrance from him. Precisely this occurred.
The governor's practicality smoothed the way to his indorsement by men
whose foremost interest was business rather than politics, and a
banquet given him late in April by a great commercial organization of
New York, which approved his policy of letting the city mind its own
affairs, set him definitely in the race.
Throned in a gallery above the diners; courted by heroines of by-gone
horse shows, the hem of whose garments she had never dreamed to touch;
with the White House looming mistily through the sheen of silver and
crystal and napery under tinted lights, Cora viewed the taking
spectacle as a personal apotheosis. A silly periodical for "ladies"
had recently printed an article about her which ascribed Shelby's
making to herself, and she, in this rosy hour believing, looked upon
her handiwork, and saw that it was tolerably good. Statesmen,
diplomats, captains of industry, the smiling Boss—a very parliament of
brains—did the governor honor, and the most famous after-dinner
speaker in the land proclaimed him New York's favorite son.
To most of his listeners Shelby's reply seemed admirable. A morning
paper called it "a little classic of straightforwardness"; but his
king-maker aloft thought his bearing too simple by far. If he listened
to her, he would tip his presidential lightning-rod more showily.
CHAPTER V
Summer leaped a hotbed growth from spring, and Cora Shelby, tiring of
golf, the country club, and Albany's now mild pastimes, took herself
off for a round of fashionable resorts with Mrs. Tommy Kidder. The
governor had other occupations. So far as a man could do such a thing,
he put his presidential chances out of mind and bent his energies upon
a study of the canal problem, whose solving he was ambitious to make
the monument of his administration. As a legislator he had been
recognized as an authority upon this his hobby; but the knowledge of
the assemblyman was shallow beside that of the governor, who asked no
fairer laurel than to link his name with the regenerated Erie Canal as
the second Clinton had associated his name with its beginnings.
Throughout the languid heated term whose official calm only the
occasional request of a fellow governor for requisition papers
disturbed, Shelby plodded over the bewildered mass of estimates, maps,
and mazy statistics which his special committee was accumulating. A
more brilliant man doubtless would have left much of this arid drudgery
to subordinates, contenting himself with the sum of things, without a
close scrutiny of detail; but this was never Shelby's way. When he
mastered a subject it was his blood and bones, and his passion for the
Ditch transmuted its story, howsoever told, into stuff that splendid
dreams are made on and modern empires built.
Those arduous months were the happiest he had known. He toiled
mightily, but he wrought at a labor of love, while his leisure hours
fostered friendships as novel as they were attractive. Cora Shelby's
campaign of the watering-places had not embraced Milicent, and the girl
returned from school in June to find her mother already gone. She
dutifully made known her arrival in Albany, and in time deciphered from
a patchouli-scented scrawl postmarked "Bar Harbor" that Albany was an
excellent spot for her to remain.
"She says that summer hotels are no places for young girls," Milicent
told her stepfather. "Why then does mamma care about them?"
The governor was nonplussed: but he quietly set himself to make Albany
tolerable for this astonishing young person, yet scant of seventeen,
who had suddenly flowered into the outward semblance of a woman. He
devised excursions on the river and pilgrimages to historic spots about
the city and the countryside, acquiring strange antiquarian lore of the
Schuyler house, the Van Rensselaer mansion, and the Vanderheyden
Palace, and, more curious still, a perception of his deep capacity for
affection. This child of the Hilliards' better selves, with her
father's frankness, her mother's earlier beauty, and with a winsomeness
all her own, awoke his slumbering instinct of fatherhood.
The wholesome new relation quickened his insight amazingly. He divined
that however much the girl might care for these wayside rambles with
him, her youth must still crave youth, and in this strait he turned to
Mrs. Van Dam, who forthwith became Milicent's captive, too, and a fairy
godmother into the bargain. So Shelby came much to frequent a
vine-screened upper veranda off Mrs. Van Dam's library, where she was
fond of serving coffee after dinner, and one could dip down over the
red roofs and tree-tops to the stripling Hudson changing its coat of
many colors in the sunset. As this corner was a haunt of Canon
North's, also, it fell out that a friendship sprang up between the men
which strengthened into intimacy. Shelby had never dreamed of making
friends with a clergyman. The sectarian college had put him out of
joint with priestery. But North was in a class by himself. He had no
sacerdotal air or jargon—that negative virtue was his earliest
passport; and he was from crown to sole a robust manly man. The
governor took to dropping into the canon's book-lined study near the
cathedral after office hours, and North would come to the executive
mansion and smoke half the night away; for the canon was a judge of
tobacco no less than men. Not once in their intercourse did he mention
church-going or creeds; he did not "talk religion." Yet, whatever the
canon's religion was, Shelby was aware that he lived it. The air was
full of little stories of his helpfulness of the sort people told of a
man North once alluded to as "Saint" Phillips Brooks.
Milicent went to the Catskills late in August as the guest of a school
friend, and after a day or two of novel loneliness, the governor
decided to carry out a recently formed plan for supplementing the work
of his committee with a personal inspection of a part of the canal
system. As it seemed to him that he could get at the best results by
quiet means, his journey was presented to the press in the light of a
business trip to his old home. For forty-eight hours his leisurely
progress with his private secretary escaped remark. Then the
newspapers upset his apple-cart. Shelby had become too interesting a
figure for the rôle of Haroun-al-Raschid, and the paragraphers rang
astonishing changes on his adventures at the few points where he had
succeeded in making observations unrecognized. What he saw thereafter
was accompanied by the click of cameras and the fatuity of local
bigwigs brimming with eagerness to tie their fortunes to the car of the
coming man.
At New Babylon, where he became the guest of the Hon. Seneca Bowers,
the minute espionage upon his doings ceased, and Shelby felt less a
personage than at any time since his inauguration. The town was proud
of him, but too faithful to its ancestral reserve to tell him so.
People who had called him "Ross" all his days addressed him in this
fashion still; and the Widow Weatherwax calmly imposed an audience in
the matter of her last will and testament, which the new-fledged
lawyer, William Irons, had bungled, and spiced the renewal of their
relations with her old-time candor and a full chronicle of the past,
present, and probable scandal of the county. In little ways, however,
the governor perceived what close-mouthed Tuscarora really felt. They
had hung a crayon portrait of him in the court-house, and the Pioneer
Association, which was about to hold its annual picnic beside Ontario,
asked him to deliver the address.
Shelby accepted the invitation, and, saturated as he was with the
homespun history of his county, excelled himself. But he did something
more than retell a familiar tale. A product of this life, he
nevertheless saw it from the outside and in its wide relations, and the
canal-begotten civilization, which was his immediate theme, led
irresistibly to the vast economic problem that lay near his heart, and
to a suddenly formulated plan for its solution. By one of those
inspirations of the moment which public speakers know, yet dare not
count upon, the vexing details of his summer's drudgery shifted and
rearranged themselves into a coherent pattern and policy whose
fulfilment should place the historic waterway, not merely abreast of
the age, but bulwarked for the future. It was a significant utterance
which carried far. Shelby could give no copies of his speech to the
press, since the speech had largely shaped itself in the making; but
the correspondents who covered what had promised to be a purely bucolic
assignment, were not slow in seeing their error and retrieving it.
What the Tuscarora pioneers and their descendants heard, the whole
state read; and the discerning perceived that, wherever the party, the
party machine, or the party boss might stand, the governor had scaled
the high plateau of statesmanship, where public opinion is less catered
to than led.
Late in the afternoon Shelby shook the last brown hand in the
serpentine line of country people which coiled in and out the stuffy
parlor of the Lakeview Inn, and cutting loose from the reception
committee under cover of a headache, slipped away into the trees. The
fringe of the wood was defaced with the litter of picnickers, and smelt
of lunch; the din of the agents for new-fangled reapers and ploughs,
whose gaudy paint was doubly garish against the sober background, had
routed the squirrels and birds; but the remoter paths held only silent
lovers, and the camp-ground, where the Widow Weatherwax had mouthed and
played the prophet, stripped of its tents, its zealots, its wavering
torchlights, was full of wholesome sunlight and forest peace.
The spot stirred ghosts, and the governor turned to the murmuring shore
with its gentle mimicry of ocean. Half sheltered by a clump of sumach
sat a woman upon a bit of driftwood and flung pebbles in the lake. He
stared, and then went slowly down to her.
"Ruth," he said, "you here!"
"Your Excellency startled me."
Her banter puzzled him, but the handclasp was warm.
"Forget my office," he petitioned.
"After your tremendous speech to-day? You were his Excellency the
governor of New York with that, and I was properly impressed. It
struck me that you would make a benevolent czar."
"Are you mocking me?"
"God forbid, your Excellency!"
"I'd rather be plain Shelby," he said, studying her profile. "I'm glad
you heard me—glad that you liked it. It was sincere, and you value
sincerity. But I had no notion that you were listening. I supposed
you somewhere with the fashionables."
"I reached home yesterday, and came at once to my lake cottage. I
heard that you were to speak, and braved the picnic to hear you. I
trust you appreciate the sacrifice."
"And—your husband? Is he here too?"
Ruth flung a pebble.
"I believe he's addressing a woman suffrage convention in Chicago
to-day." She gave him a lazy glance. "And Mrs. Shelby—is she here?"
"She's in Saratoga, I believe."
"Belief again? We really ought to read the papers."
He tried to search her face, but the pebble-throwing prevented. The
Widow Weatherwax had expatiated on the topic of Mrs. Bernard Graves's
unhappiness, with tedious variations on the saw about marrying in haste
to repent at leisure. He wondered—he scarce knew what. She drew him
with all the old attraction, but an elusive something had vanished. He
guessed that it was the essence of youth, though the form lingered.
"Are you happy, Ruth?" he asked abruptly.
She looked him in the eyes, and laughed.
"That reminds me of your unofficial self," she said. "You never could
invent small talk for the feminine mind."
"You were never the kind of woman who wanted it."
"I better appreciate its uses nowadays. It conceals either the absence
or presence of thought. Bless me! there's an epigram. But I'm afraid
it's merely an echo of Voltaire."
He was not listening. A midsummer madness rioted in his brain.
"But are you happy?"
"Small talk, small talk," she insisted. "See how that yacht's sails
take the sun. Isn't the water a splendid sapphire? Do you like to
fish? Do you prefer Tennyson or Browning? Meredith or Hardy? Isn't
it warm? Isn't it cool?"
"But are you?"
She rose and faced him with strange eyes.
"What do you want?"
"Want," he repeated mechanically, rising too.
"Why have you come here in your pomp of governorship and promise of
greater things to harass me?"
"Harass you, Ruth! If you knew—"
"Know? I know too much. I'm unlearning things now. That's the key to
happiness—forgetting. And here come you, as you used to come, an
untamed, masterful force—that's what you are, a force!—and instead of
forgetting you ask me to remember. What is it you're really seeking in
this probing of my happiness? What must you be told?"
"Nothing." With the revelation of the flaw in her armor he conquered
self. "I know—God help me!—I know."
CHAPTER VI
The Boss questioned the wisdom of the Tuscarora speech, and the fall
widened the unacknowledged breach between him and the governor. The
September primaries had assured the leader a firmer control of the
state convention than he had ever exercised, and it was well understood
to be his, and his alone, made to his order, and the docile register of
his will. That this victory clinched his ownership of the delegation
to the national convention of next year was self-evident; and that a
presidential candidate with New York's backing would attract allies
from several eastern and at least two southern boss-ruled states, was
well warranted by the tale of the great politician's excursions into
national affairs in the recent past. By implication of the April
banquet the leader's personal choice, Shelby, had therefore no trivial
chance of capturing the nomination; and in the Boss's opinion the
favored pawn owed a decent deference to the master chess-player. So
Shelby thought, too; but they split over definition of terms in the
same old way.
"You juggled millions like a Napoleon of Finance," complained the Boss
at a breakfast for two shortly after the state convention. "Is that
the kind of talk for people just recovering from hard times?"
His tone chafed the governor.
"It's the kind of talk for a proper handling of the canal problem," he
retorted crisply. "The canal has been the prey of peanut politics too
long."
"The speech was ill-advised—ill-advised," persisted the Boss,
irritably. "You should have consulted somebody."
Shelby provoked him with a smile.
"That was my idea, precisely," he returned. "I thought I'd consult the
people."
A difference springing from the November elections strained their
relations farther, and goaded Shelby's patience to its utmost reach.
Although they favored the organization as a whole, the elections
wrought certain damaging changes in detail, one of which involved the
fortunes of Handsome Ludlow. Early in his term the governor had
appointed the man to a temporary commission, at the urgent plea of the
Boss, who painted the ex-senator in the light of a faithful soldier
haply fallen outside the breastworks by reason of the ingratitude of a
fickle city constituency. Ludlow had regularly drawn a salary, which
his subordinates earned, and divided his abundant leisure between the
diversions peculiar to Mrs. Tommy Kidder's coterie and schemes for the
recovery of his senatorial seat. In the latter business he met with a
defeat more telling than he had yet experienced. But Ludlow was an
office-seeker of resource. Through a channel which he did not
disclose, he got wind of a judgeship whose forthcoming vacancy was
known to the governor and those in his confidence, and promptly
undertook a still-hunt for the place. Presently his name came to
Shelby with the strong recommendation of the Boss.
The governor was angry to the core. As a lawyer alone he recoiled from
raising even temporarily to the bench a man whose activities had been
notoriously political, and his law practice innocent of a single case
in a court of record; as a husband whose ears tingled with gossip of
this same Ludlow's summer attentions to his wife, which the Boss, whom
nothing escaped, must have heard too, his hurt was shrewder. His
refusal was curt.
The Boss met the governor's move with silence, but under his own roof
Shelby had crossed a politician less self-contained. Ludlow owed his
fore-knowledge of the judicial vacancy to Cora, who flew in high
dudgeon to her husband to demand why he had refused this favor to her
valued friend.
Shelby was dumfounded.
"These affairs don't concern you," he said, after a moment's
incredulous scrutiny of her face.
"Why did you refuse to make him a judge?" she repeated hotly.
"Ludlow is a discredited political hack. I had no alternative."
"It's jealousy."
Shelby whitened.
"If you mean to press the thing into that region," he answered sternly,
"I'll own that there is an element of jealousy. I've had to open my
eyes lately to many things which concern you and Ludlow. Bar Harbor
stories, Saratoga stories, Albany stories, too, of things you've kept
from me—God knows what hasn't filtered my way. I am jealous—jealous
for your good name, and mine, and Milicent's."
She wept at that, saying that he misconstrued her warm sympathy with
the unfortunate; and he, proof against anything but the feminine
tear-gland, as she knew, protested his faith. It was near his lips at
this moment to beg her to treat Ludlow henceforth with mere civility,
but he refrained. When he broached it afterward her pliant mood had
vanished.
"You would have Albany saying that you believe its tittle-tattle," she
argued; and he deferred for the hundredth time to her superior
perception of the mental processes of the social world.
Till the Legislature met in January, the governor was absorbed in the
writing of his annual message, whose recommendations he proposed to
devote almost exclusively to the canals. His committee had completed
its work, and his great plan was muscular and vertebrate in all its
structure, for he contemplated a far-reaching system of legislation
rather than a simple makeshift appropriation of the out-worn type; and
the ultimate goal of it all was to lift the politics-ridden waterway
out of politics altogether. Before he gave his final revision to the
printers, he submitted a proof to the Boss, who returned it with the
comment that his intellect was of an order quite too everyday to
criticise a project obviously framed for the millennium. From the man
reputed to own the Legislature, whose committees, certainly, were cut
and dried in his office weeks before it met, this sarcasm was gloomily
prophetic; but since his Tuscarora speech, Shelby had personally
sounded many senators, assemblymen, and representatives of the several
canal interests, and he was not dismayed.
The reception given by the newspapers to what they styled "The
Governor's Splendid Dream" heartened Shelby, though he deprecated its
form. He insisted that the scheme was no more his than the
committee's, whose elaborate report he submitted with his message, and
that it was no dream at all, but the businesslike remedy for an
admitted ill. As in De Witt Clinton's case, however, the public
brushed aside the idle question of genesis, and honored the untiring
advocate.
There were plenty who agreed with the governor. Famous economic
experts and civil service reformers wrote their approval, great
financiers wired congratulations, and the public hearings on the bills
embodying his ideas, which friendly legislators shortly introduced,
were attended by representatives from the exchanges, boards of trade,
merchants' associations, and chambers of commerce of every city
directly concerned.
A reporter remarked upon this striking showing to the Boss.
"Yes," said the great man, "the governor seems to have the unanimous
support of the college professors and the New Yorkers who claim
residence in Newport, Rhode Island; but I wonder what the taxpayer
thinks."
This figurative taxpayer personified for him the rural vote whose
strength was his strength, and whose thought he made his own. He was
hearkening to the murmur of the counties which the canal did not touch,
but whose memory of its flagrant abuses was long, and the conclusion
that he reached the country newspapers of his system began speedily to
express. One editor bewailed the "Hundred-Million-Dollar-Millstone"
which the governor proposed to hang about the people's neck; another
attacked the consistency of the man who would to-day scatter like a
prodigal what he had scrimped yesterday to save; while a third
pertinently inquired whether such a spendthrift were fit timber to put
in Washington as a check upon the waxing extravagance of Congress? By
dint of repetition these things attained wide currency.
Shelby was untroubled.
"Millions, to be sure," he replied to a query of his wife's. "The
commercial supremacy of a state is perforce a question of millions."
"But they're saying you risk your presidential chances," she lamented.
"Do take every care to strengthen yourself. It's the fondest dream of
my life to see you President. You must let nothing stand between you
and the nomination."
"Thank heaven I'm not stung that badly!" the governor ejaculated.
"But for my sake! If I should ask you—beg you on my knees?"
"I'd say you should be in better business."
He answered her lightly, and playfully pinched her ear, but she saw
that no word of hers could sway his purpose, and hated him. For the
hour, however, even this teasing vision of herself as first lady of the
land paled before the very present topic of Milicent's début. Despite
Shelby's advice and her own pleadings, the girl had not been allowed to
return to her school in the autumn; for when they met at the summer's
end, the revelation of her daughter's good looks and unconscious
girlish charm, by her mother called manner, revived a shadowy project
of Cora's for an elaborate coming-out ball which had enticed her in the
early days of life in Albany. Neither Milicent's reluctance nor her
stepfather's protest against the launching of so young a girl availed.
"Only last week I saw her playing with a doll," said Shelby, routed at
every turn.
"What an argument! I played with dolls after I was married to Joe. If
you postponed a woman's début till she tired of dolls, you would
conflict with her funeral."
This sally displayed such unexpected humor that Shelby laughed, and his
wife seized the favoring moment to end discussion.
"It's my duty to my child," she declared; "and of that, a mother is the
best judge."
Although the event was to be deferred till late February, as the
crowning glory of the season which Lent would close, Cora's plans were
on foot by Thanksgiving Day. Among her earliest preliminaries was the
enlisting of Mrs. Van Dam, whose friendship for Milicent she had
determined to exploit as soon as she learned of its existence. This
was not difficult. Of the wisdom of the thing Mrs. Van Dam said
nothing,—she had had her fill of advising Mrs. Shelby,—but her
sympathy for Milicent was keen, and it drew her into a rather
distasteful share in Cora's programme, in the hope of lessening the
girl's ordeal. Where Mrs. Teunis Van Dam led, Albany naturally
followed; and with Albany subdued, Cora directed her conquering march
toward other worlds. In the year of her publicity she had, through
Mrs. Tommy Kidder and other agencies, brushed here and there at the rim
of the magic inner circle of metropolitan society, for every inch of
which she now encroached an ell. Shelby gained his first knowledge of
the astonishing extent of his wife's acquaintance when he scanned the
invitation list of a thousand names, and was told by the military
secretary that New York's quota was coming by special train.
About five o'clock on the evening of the ball, the governor came home
fagged and depressed. Aside from canal reform, still drifting through
seas of talk, the legislative session presented several insistent
public questions which seemed to have imposed their cumulative worry on
his morning hours; later had come an acrimonious hearing over the
removal of an incompetent district attorney; then a quarter-hour's
fencing with the press correspondents, who wanted to know things which
it was inexpedient to tell; and, finally, a rasping conference with the
Boss, who, using the ball as a cover for one of his rare pilgrimages to
Albany, had, throughout the day, held levee in his hotel parlors with
such vogue that at moments both Senate and Assembly all but lacked a
quorum.
Mrs. Tommy Kidder's brougham blocked the porte-cochère as Shelby
mounted the steps of the executive mansion, and at the door he met the
volatile lady herself.
"I've been watching the workmen give the finishing touch, governor,"
she gushed. "You are about to set foot in fairyland."
Shelby put her in her carriage, and entered the house. It did not seem
fairylike. Only a dim light shone here and there through the dusk, and
the floors were not yet clear of the rubbish of the decorators. From
one of the smaller rooms came the sound of Handsome Ludlow's voice. He
too, apparently, had been watching the finishing touch. The governor
passed on to his own apartments in quest of peace. It was a vain
search. His quarters had been invaded and curtailed for the event, and
the corner left him was confused and forlorn. He lit a cigar, smoked a
brief moment, heard a feminine cough on the farther side of a door
leading to one of the rooms from which some guest had dispossessed him,
and desisted.
He went downstairs presently, and left the house for the conservatory,
a favorite haunt of his, usually troubled by no one else save Milicent.
He scarcely knew one flower from another, but he delighted to potter
about, smelling here and there, and the Scotch gardener idolized him as
heartily as he detested the wife, who cared nothing for these treasures
in themselves, and openly avowed that she preferred the odor of
patchouli.
The greenhouses proved rather forlorn too, denuded as they were of so
many potted things for the glory of the mansion; but their quiet
obscurity ministered to Shelby's jaded mood. Then he perceived that he
was not alone. Low voices drifted from another aisle—Ludlow's and
Cora's—doubtless still absorbed in the finishing touch. After an
instant's hesitation the governor moved toward them, till a vivid
little picture framed by the fronds of a drooping fern brought him to a
standstill. He beheld a deliberate kiss.
CHAPTER VII
The scene so nearly paralleled that crucial moment in his own life,
under Joe Hilliard's roof, that the quarry owner seemed fairly to
twitch his sleeve. Then, as the dead man had done before him, Shelby
stayed his hand. Hilliard had respected his hearthstone because it
held the ashes of a burned-out love; the governor respected his office.
Unseen by the rapt pair, he left the conservatory, and regained his
disordered room.
How should he act? There was scant opportunity for reflection. The
dinner hour was presently upon him, with a chattering tableful of
Cora's friends who were staying in the house. Shelby seldom shone in
these mixed companies, and to-night he seemed to himself to stand off
in wondering detachment, while somebody clothed in his likeness said
and did many things. He made clear a bit of political slang for the
woman in yellow on his right; he smiled appreciation of the quip of a
young thing in pink three places distant down the left; he explained to
a foreign gentleman, whose English was irreparably broken, that Albany
was not the capital of the United States; and all this time he watched
his vivacious wife at the table's end, and marvelled at her hypocrisy.
So Joe Hilliard had probably wondered. Hilliard was very real to him.
He seemed to have incased himself in Hilliard's personality. A little
later, when Milicent, all exhilaration now that the bursting of the
cocoon was instant, came in her bravery for his approval, he kissed her
like one who knows no care, and extravagantly admired the roses he
forgot that he had sent. The same mechanical self stood beside his
wife and stepdaughter at the coming of the guests, spoke its automatic
greetings, and extended its automatic hand.
For one brief instant the opiate lifted. The endless smirking
procession had cast Ludlow to the front. The man was lingering with
easy assurance between mother and daughter.
"Which is the débutante?" he asked.
Shelby could have felled him for taking the girl's hand—Cora's
mattered nothing. But what of his own hand? Milicent's fan suddenly
escaped its fastening, and as suddenly he caught at the pretext for
which he groped. Again in his place, Ludlow had drifted by with no
word spoken between them. He sighed with relief, and in the same
breath cursed himself and the conventions which compelled such cunning.
In a rational world he could have knocked him down.
Once again that evening they came face to face. It was late—past one
o'clock—and the governor issuing from the smoking-room met Ludlow at
the threshold. No one was within earshot; fate itself seemed to have
ordered the meeting, and till that moment Shelby had desired to
confront Ludlow with a fierce desire. Yet they passed with a nod.
Long uncertain before many offering courses, Shelby on the instant made
his choice.
The orchestra hushed, the last good night spoken, Milicent gone to her
dreams, the house half in darkness, he intercepted Cora in the corridor
leading to her apartments.
"Ten minutes of your time," he requested.
She stared, yawned, and stared again.
"At this hour?"
"Now."
She led the way into her dressing-room and sent away her maid. Shelby
waited silently by the open grate till they should be alone.
"You're rather pale," observed his wife, languidly, in passing to a
chair; and with finger tip lightly brushed his cheek.
He shrank involuntarily.
"Pale and nervous," she added, "and a fit subject for bed. Was Old
Silky disagreeable to-day? I thought him as sweet as peaches tonight.
Did you notice Mrs. Van Dam's famous diamonds? It's not often she
wears them all. Milicent got her to do it."
"I was in the greenhouse before dinner, Cora," said Shelby, speaking
with slow emphasis. "I saw you and Ludlow."
"Oh, yes," returned the woman, glibly, "we were wondering whether the
large drawing-room needed a few more palms."
"I saw you and Ludlow in one another's arms," pursued her husband in
the same hard staccato. "I saw him kiss you."
She half rose, eying him fearfully; then, reassured by what she saw,
sank back in her seat, fingering the long glove she had partly drawn
from one white arm. As on that other night, her faultless shoulders
rose from a black setting of laces and shining jet, and, manlike,
Shelby took the garment for the same which had helped to warp the
fabric of his life from its design. The remembrance maddened him.
"Speak, you devil," he charged.
"I love him," she returned defiantly. "I love him."
"And my wife!"
"I was Joe's wife—before."
"You've the right to say it," he owned.
"Well, then, meet me halfway. Since you know the truth, what do you
advise me to do?"
"Advise you?" he echoed.
"Precisely. Put yourself in my place. Suppose that you were in love
with somebody."
He started.
"I—"
"So hard, is it? Suppose it, anyhow. Suppose yourself a human being
instead of—well, say a personified canal; a human being married to
another human being—the wrong one—with your love for the right one
growing stronger every day. What would you do?"
"Master my passion. Preserve my self-respect."
She laughed at the trumpet note of his answer.
"You've the cocksure remedy of one who has never tried."
He strangled a retort.
"Try to comprehend my feelings," she pursued. "If you were in love
with me, I shouldn't ask it. But you're not in love with me. Frankly
now, are you?"
"I am your husband."
"And I'm your wife. Does that prove a love affair? No, no. The naked
fact is that neither cares, and because of that I ask you plainly how
we can best arrange the matter."
"This is nonsense."
"It isn't. It's common sense. A New York woman I know—I met her at
Narragansett—was in the same position. Her husband was broad-minded,
and they settled everything without an unkind word. She lived
somewhere in the Dakotas for a few months, married again as soon as the
judge signed the decree, and made a roundabout journey home her wedding
trip."
"And you would imitate this programme?"
"In some respects—yes. I've not thought it out in detail. Your
practical mind ought to shed abundant light. If you weren't my
husband, I'd retain you as my lawyer."
"By Heaven, I've stood enough of this!" flashed Shelby. "Are you
destitute of even the moral rags and tatters a Hottentot may boast?
You ask my advice. Have it you shall, and follow it you must. I have
forfeited the right to reproach you as man to wife—granted that I
never had it; as a man I waive my personal affront. But as the
governor of this state to the mistress of this, the state's house, I
warn you that this brazen mockery of decency must end. When I am
governor no longer you may go your way in such fashion as you will.
Till then you must take no step which shall discredit my office or the
position to which my office raises you. You will tell Ludlow this, and
when you have told him, you will hold no private speech with him until
my successor takes his oath. Promise."
His volcanic outburst cowed her flippancy.
"I promise," she said.
Before the week elapsed the newspapers announced that Ludlow had
decided to resume the practice of law in New York. Cora made no
comment; but Shelby read into the retreat her purpose to keep their
sorry truce inviolate, and strove to shut his mind to every thought
alien to his work.
The public business was absorbing enough in truth. His great canal
project, which during a month of hearings, conferences, committee
enmeshments, and the like, had hung in jeopardy, was wrecked beyond
repair. Nor was this the worst. The governor's forcing of the issue
had convinced the Boss that a popular demand for canal legislation of
some sort really existed, and he prepared to respond with a measure
after his own heart. A vicious substitute, which it was given out that
the organization fully indorsed, glided facilely to its final reading
after the manner of bills bearing the mystic sign manual of the Boss.
Foreseeing disaster, Shelby sought at least to rescue the wise
provision of his plan which looked to the administration of the canals
along business lines, and to this end used his personal influence with
various members of the Legislature. Achieving little here, he even
appealed to the leader himself.
The Boss wrote him in his ironic mood.
"Naturally I cannot forecast the action of the Legislature," he said,
following his modest custom of disclaiming foreknowledge of the events
he shaped; "but in my opinion any measure which ignores the legitimate
expectation of patronage on the part of the party in power is too
idyllic for this workday world."
Shelby was at no loss to give this dictum its true interpretation. His
own scheme had secured the party's legitimate rights sufficiently—he
was too clear-sighted to overlook that. It was the party's illicit
greed for spoils which he had failed to satisfy—the greed which the
Boss had framed his makeshift to meet. The opportunity for jobbery was
left as wide as before, perhaps wider; for while under color of economy
the appropriation cut the reasonable sum Shelby had suggested as a
beginning, it was a vast amount still. So conceived, and at the
eleventh hour saddled with an amendment directing the building of a
costly feeder which the engineers had declared needless, the travesty
of all the governor's good intentions passed both Houses by a narrow
vote, and reached Shelby himself.
Jacob Krantz, whose interest in this particular bit of legislation was
keen, in his own vernacular hit off the situation.
"It's time for a show-down," said this observer of things as they are.
"The Boss has put it up to the Champion of Canals to make good his
bluff."
Shelby realized this truth clearly enough in the ten days given him by
the constitution for his decision; but he took no one into his
confidence, and fought his dreary battle alone. It was a hard choice
that destiny had offered him in the end—total shipwreck of his brave
dreamings, or a salvage of what perhaps might better sink. Had his
duty by the people been absolutely plain, he would have acted
instantly, for he had striven to be the people's governor; but in the
ten days of his ordeal the people seemed to speak with a hundred
differing tongues, whose single coherent message proclaimed what he
already knew—that for him there could be no middle way. The bill was
in the form of a concurrent resolution to submit the appropriation to
popular vote; but Shelby had no mind to dodge his responsibility. With
his record, with his conception of his trust, he must confront the
issue squarely—sign or reject.
One of the most clamorous of the newspapers favoring the bill phrased
his choice yet more narrowly, quoting copiously from his speeches and
bidding him "sign or stultify." But appeals to his consistency found
him deaf. The man who never changed his mind and the man who never
changed his coat were to him equally ridiculous; time had its sport
with each of them. Another attack, made when he had held the bill for
upward of a week and a rumor of a veto was rife, drew blood. Volney
Sprague's Whig which, without ever thinking good of Shelby, had long
since returned to the party fold, embraced the occasion to revive the
old scandals linking Shelby's name to unsavory canal contracts, with
the insinuation that the governor's real quarrel with the bill which
had passed lay in the fact that it exposed too few millions to
thievery. The erratic editor's virtual allegiance to the Boss whom he
once had flayed, might have caused Shelby a smile, had he not been
saddened by the thought that any human being could misunderstand him so
completely. To him it was a transparent truth that because he had
known the canal's abuses as a politician, so surely must he wish to end
them as governor of the state.
The veto rumor, which Shelby neither fathered nor encouraged,
precipitated two things: the Boss sent word through his nephew, a not
infrequent messenger, that the party's interests plainly required that
the party's governor waive his personal disappointment and sign the
bill at once; while Cora, for some days past of a repentent mind,
requested the same small favor as a reward of virtue.
"Show in this way that you forgive my folly," she cajoled. "You'll
never be President without the Boss's aid—everybody says so. Do as he
wishes and as I wish too."
"And give you a chance to intrigue with the Handsome Ludlows of
Washington?"
By and by, as he sat writing in his study, he would have unsaid the
taunt, and resolved that he would talk rationally with her of his
dilemma and of the course he was prepared to take; but no opportunity
befell that evening, and on the morrow, the last day left him but one,
he breakfasted alone. Partly with the intention of speaking to her,
partly for freedom from the button-holing of the grillroom where he
usually lunched, he left the executive chamber shortly before one
o'clock and set out on foot for his home.
As he turned from the capitol park into his own street, Mrs. Van Dam's
carriage halted abruptly at the curb, and the old lady beckoned him.
"I'll not ask you to get in," she said, "for I'm sure you need the
walk, but I've news to tell you of a friend of ours. Ruth Graves's
husband died in Los Angeles yesterday after an operation for
appendicitis."
Time had softened the rougher memories of his brief rivalry with the
dead man, and the circumstance that each had in some degree given
distinction to their common birthplace threw Bernard Graves into a
light which made his early taking off mildly pathetic, but in this
moment Shelby's mind could compass only the one great fact—Ruth was
free!
Canal, governorship, presidency forgotten, he stared into the muddy
street as the carriage whipped away, till a knot of school children
gathered at his heels with round eyes centred on the cobbles which
apparently engrossed him. Shelby recalled himself, and hurried on to
his own door.
"I shall lunch at home to-day," he said to a servant in the hall.
"Please tell my wife."
The man handed him a sealed note explaining:—
"Mrs. Shelby went out about an hour ago. She asked me to give you
this."
Shelby carried the note to his room before he opened it.
"I can't keep my promise," it ran. "I saw him to-day. He wants me.
Good-by."
CHAPTER VIII
He, no less than Ruth, was free! There was no dissociating the two
facts. They shouted their message together. He was rid of his
incubus—why mince the word now!—rid of her gadfly vulgarity, her
shallow emotions, her pinch-beck ideals, her hideous selfishness. By
her own rash act she had freed him to marry the woman he loved with all
his rugged strength—the woman who that memorable September day had
proved loved him. What was the transient chatter of the world beside
this verity! What might he not achieve in the new life! What station
could he not now find confidence to fill!
A knock distracted, without wholly rousing him. Milicent entered.
"I hear you're to lunch at home, father," she said. "The gong has
sounded twice."
He stared vacantly into her young eyes; her very existence had been
blotted from his recollection.
"Aren't you well?" She came to him. "I shall be glad when the
Legislature stops worrying you and goes home."
He crushed his wife's note into a pocket.
"Yes; I'm well," he answered slowly. "Just worried—as you say.
That's all. I thought an hour at home would help—home quiet, you
know—home—"
There was a frightened widening of her gray eyes, and Shelby pulled
himself together.
"But I can't lunch with you after all, little girl," he told her
hurriedly. "I find I must go back. It seems your mother is—is out.
Perhaps you know—"
He stopped. What did she know?
"I'm just in from a turn about Washington Park," explained the girl.
"The maple buds are all bursting. And you should see the crocuses."
"Your mother has been called out of town. She will be gone all night,
probably—perhaps longer. You had best ask some friends in to stay
with you. It will cheer us up. Now go down to your luncheon. You
mustn't let me spoil it for you."
"But you're not well," she insisted.
"I am—I am indeed." Out of a window he caught sight of his wife's
coupé. "I'll take that down town," he said.
They descended together. In the hall he warned again, "Don't let your
luncheon spoil."
His foot on the carriage step, he questioned the coachman:—
"Did Mrs. Shelby catch her train?"
"Yes, sir," the man replied cheerfully. "I saw to that. A close
shave, though. I heard it pull out as we drove away."
"That was at what time?"
"One twenty-five, sir."
"No baggage?"
"Just hand satchels," put in the footman. "Mrs. Shelby said her trunks
weren't ready."
"Drive to Canon North's," directed the governor, jumping in. "He's
near the cathedral, you know."
The carriage jolted from cobbles to asphalt, rounded the looming
capitol with its chateau-like red roofs cut sharply against the pure
spring sky, grated the stones again, and halted at the canon's door.
The governor had the carriage door open before the footman could leap
down, and told the man that he would make his own inquiries.
The maid said that he had missed the clergyman by five minutes.
Possibly he could be found at the cathedral; perhaps at the Beverwyck
Club.
Shelby bade the coupé follow, and hurried on foot to the church, which
lifted its temporary wooden roof above the clustering episcopal
buildings near at hand. Two or three cabs waited at the curb, from one
of which fluttered a facetious knot of white ribbon tied to an
axletree. A smell of stale incense pervaded the vestibule. The
murmured words of a liturgy drifted down the long nave as he passed
within. North was reading the marriage service. Shelby bided
restively in the shadow of a column till the ceremony should end.
It was a small wedding party, merely a handful of onlookers, chiefly
teary women, grouped around the courageous pair, whose stanch "I will"
woke derisive echoes aloft.
"For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health
. . . till death do us part."
The youngsters pattered the awful words so glibly! Then North's prayer
went forth over their kneeling figures, they rose, took his hand an
instant, and turned to face an applauding world. The watcher pitied
them with a great pity.
Shelby followed North from chancel to vestry. The priest had laid
aside stole and surplice, and stood meditatively in his cassock as the
caller entered. Some men the cassock effeminates; not so North, whose
virile shape it emphasized, modelling his muscles like an antique
drapery. He seemed to radiate strength.
The canon remarked his friend's strained face, greeted him as if
governors made a practice of popping into his vestry unannounced, and
bade a negro, who was folding vestments, to finish his task later.
"What has happened to you?" he asked, directly they were alone.
"My wife has eloped."
North started at the bald announcement, but asked quietly:—
"Did she leave by the one twenty-five train?"
"You saw her?"
"I saw him." Ludlow needed no naming. "I came in from the west at
that time for this wedding."
Shelby jerked out his watch.
"That train is an accommodation, making nearly all stops. They were
probably too excited to consider the fact, or care. Any one taking the
Southwestern Limited twenty minutes from now would make New York half
an hour before them—provided they're bound for New York. Of course,
there's the chance that they will change at some point to the express,
which left a quarter of an hour ago. Somebody must intercept them."
"And it's your present misfortune to be governor of New York," added
the canon, ripping at the buttons of his cassock. "Permit me to fill
your place."
"It's a hateful thing to ask of you. I could ask it of no other man."
North nodded, and caught up his hat and coat.
"You did right to come to me, my friend."
"Say to her"—they passed again into the silent nave on the way to the
carriage—"say that one of the best little girls who ever lived is
waiting for her mother to return from—from shopping, what you please.
Say that I—" He broke off, and fronted North in the stillness. "By
God! no," he burst out suddenly. "No message from me yet. I can't do
it yet—"
The governor went back to the executive chamber, and heard, one by one,
the stories of the callers who had massed the antechamber during his
prolonged absence. From all sections, of all degrees, of all political
types, their importunities were variants of a single theme—the thing
he could give. Him they gave nothing, not even encouragement. Five
o'clock came at last, and he left the plain little work-cell behind the
sumptuous panelling of the executive chamber for a ten-minute bout with
the press correspondents. Was it true that he had decided to sign the
canal bill? Was a veto imminent? Did he propose to let it become a
law without his signature? Had he and the great leader severed their
relations? Was a breach in the party machine a possibility? What was
his position with regard to the presidential nomination? Did he
approve of an out-and-out indorsement of the gold standard?
He was through with them finally, and the office-seeking, news-hungry
world, supposing him gone to his home, left him alone in his cell to
complete his interrupted work. Half-past five o'clock! His thoughts
strayed to follow the course of two trains. By now the fugitives were
below the Highlands; North must already be entering the city. Fort
George and the bridges of the Harlem were above his head, the long,
straight streets reeled away like the spokes of a giant wheel.
Presently he would pace the platform at Forty-second Street. In an
hour they would meet.
Shelby forced his mind back to his desk. The closely written sheets of
manuscript which had filled his evening yesterday lay before him. He
called his private secretary from the adjoining room.
"Have the stenographers all gone?"
"All but one, governor," said the secretary. "He is working past hours
on a personal matter for me."
"Let me borrow him."
For an hour the governor slowly dictated from his sheets.
"You will miss your regular dinner over this," he said to the man, at
the end, and pressed a bank-note upon him. "We'll need several copies,
of course."
The stenographer went to his typewriter, and Shelby walked out to his
secretary's desk.
"He's working on this," he explained, showing him a page of the
manuscript. "I suppose he doesn't leak news?"
The secretary flushed a little over the hasty reading.
"He is wholly trustworthy," he replied.
"There is nothing of the Star Chamber order about the matter, but I
always prefer to be the source of information. I should have put this
through to-day if a personal affair hadn't prevented. Have the
formalities in readiness for the morning. Good night."
He again consulted his watch. They had met! Without seeing him he
walked past an orderly with a telegram. The man overtook him at the
elevator.
"So soon?" said the governor, absently.
The orderly exchanged glances with the elevator boy.
Shelby tore open North's message. It said "Come," and named a
Forty-second Street hotel. One of the fastest trains in the world was
due in less than a half-hour. In fifteen minutes he gained the
station. With the time which remained he wired North of his coming,
and telephoned Milicent a cheery message that he should not return till
late. She told him that she had her friends with her, and he even
caught a gay little echo of their chatter.
It occurred to him that he had eaten nothing since morning, and as the
train cleared the river and raced southward on its long flight, he
ordered food. But he scarcely tasted it. No food could appease the
hunger of his mind, the starvation of a lifetime, which the canon's
message prefigured. His ugly thoughts kept pace with the roaring
monster which bore him; but, unlike the monster, he made no real
progress; spun vainly, rather, like a top. After all, what was he,
what was human striving everywhere, but a vainly spinning top. He
dozed over his drear philosophy, and from dozing slept.
He woke as the train swung at Spuyten Duyvil from the valley of the
Hudson to the valley of the Harlem, freshened his face with cold water,
and stepped from the car at his journey's end clear-eyed and alert.
Beyond the iron barrier of the train shed stood North.
Shelby caught his hand.
"Well?"
"It is well."
"Where is she?"
"Waiting at the hotel—waiting for the word you could not send."
They made an intensely quiet islet amidst the buffeting human tide.
The governor's face was drawn, and in the electric glare looked pasty
white.
"That is why you sent for me?" he asked.
"That is why. Believe me, it was necessary."
"I believe you," Shelby answered slowly. "Tell me what you have done."
"It's a short story. About five o'clock I passed them. Their train
was at a standstill, mine was running slowly because of a washout. I
saw your wife at a window. Then we made an unexpected stop near a
station, and I left my train for theirs."
"Then?"
"That's all. I think neither was sorry to see me. I came at the
reaction—the psychological moment."
Shelby thought North wished to spare him the recital, which was true in
a measure. Yet the canon's reticence had its taproot in the natural
man who perforce did his strong deeds simply.
"Good night," he added cheerily, putting out his hand. "I find that I
can get a train back soon."
CHAPTER IX
A few minutes before eleven o'clock Shelby and his wife got out of a
carriage at a west-side ferry. With North's assurance that her husband
was surely coming, Cora's thoughts turned to the conventions which in the
morning she had blithely whistled down the wind. It happened that a
friend in the Jersey suburbs had within the week suggested that they
visit Lakewood together, and the invitation no sooner recurred to her
than she sent a message saying that she had found it possible immediately
to join her at her home. Shelby had assented to this plan, and directly
set about escorting her to her destination. No dread of Ludlow prompted
this vigilance. He discerned that that glamour had forever waned. The
woman's jerking nerves made him fear a collapse. Stripped of shams for
once, she had his pity.
As he paid the cabman at the ferry-house entrance an incoming boat
discharged its passengers, who from habit scurried forth as if it were
morning, and the day's work lay all before. Two men issued with the
foremost, one of whom spied Shelby as he followed his wife through the
dingy swinging doors.
"Great guns!" he said; "the governor!"
The Boss wheeled.
"What's that, Krantz?" he demanded sharply.
Without replying Jacob Krantz darted into the ferry-house, slipped into
the waiting line before the ticket-office, and watched Shelby make his
purchase. The governor left the window without noticing him, and joining
his wife at the wicket passed on to the boat.
Krantz shot out of doors with his heavy lids propped wide.
"He bought tickets for Orange, and there's no return train before
daylight—I heard him inquire. Do you see what he has done for us? He's
out of the state—out of the state! See? The lieutenant-governor can
sign the bill!"
The Boss drew him quietly aside.
"No, no," he returned. "This is New York—not Montana."
Staring out at the clamoring cabbies, the leader reflected. If this
secretive governor intended either to veto or to sign the canal bill, he
would scarcely leave Albany the evening before the last day given him to
act. Did his absence not argue that he meant to let the measure become a
law without his signature? Despite his representations to Shelby, this
was the course the Boss actually expected the governor to take. It was
the course which he, given the man's difficulties, would himself follow
were he in Shelby's place. But he had found it unsafe to forecast this
man's actions by his own, and by temperament he counted nothing certain
till he knew it as a fact accomplished. The governor would undoubtedly
return to Albany sometime to-morrow; it therefore behooved him to delay
that return until the time for hostile action should expire. Searching
out a telegraph office, he ascertained the point at which a message would
intercept the train, and wired Shelby a peremptory request for a meeting
in New York on the morrow at ten o'clock.
"I'm making a morning appointment with the governor," he told Krantz.
The satellite slanted his head knowingly. Past midnight the answer
reached the club where the Boss made his bachelor home. If Shelby was
amazed at Old Silky's intimate knowledge of his movements, his message
did not betray it. Nor did the Boss betray his own amazement at his too
apt pupil's prompt evasion of a snare. What he read was this:—
"The governor's office hours are nine to five."
Krantz in his eagerness would have laid profane hands on the missive, but
the Boss permitted him neither to touch nor see.
"It seems that he intends returning to Albany to-night," he said calmly.
"It occurs to me, after all, that he can reach New York by trolley.
Probably he'll take the paper train which leaves about three. Energetic
man—very."
"Then you'll see him to-night?"
"No; not to-night," rejoined the Boss, dryly. "I'm going to bed."
Krantz watched the reverend figure out of the smoking-room with his
narrow eyes, and for a time sat as motionless as a dozing crocodile.
Finally he roused and lounged toward the door, where he received a
revelation. Bag in hand, the Boss, whom he imaged above stairs between
sheets, was unostentatiously letting himself out into the night.
Shelby went directly to his berth on reaching the station, and while the
car remained in the train shed, slept. The departure wakened him, and
after useless striving he resigned himself to his insomnia, raised his
window curtain, and lay watching the staid procession of Dutch-named
towns picketting the river banks. A mimic tempest fretted the Tappan
Sea, whose bravado dwindled to mere guerilla marauding in the Highlands,
and vanished altogether where the Storm King held the pass and heralded
the dawn. Presently the purple Catskills marched and countermarched into
line with cloud banners streaming rose-red in the sunrise. Yesterday was
blotted in to-day. The watcher also put yesterday away, dressed, and
left his train all in a tranquillity which even the knowledge that a
stateroom door neighboring his berth had just emitted the Boss could not
have ruffled.
At his accustomed hour the governor entered the executive chamber. Like
the steaming earth and the park elms without in their tender green, this
stately room seemed swept by the breath of spring. The warm tones of the
hangings, the Spanish leather, the lavish mahogany, glowed responsive to
the fingering sunlight, and the painted simulacra of his predecessors
looked down almost benignantly from their gilded frames. The little cell
behind the wainscoting, into which the increasing complexity of affairs
had forced the recent executives, claimed him during most of his working
hours; but it was as rightful tenant of this vast chamber that he felt
most the governor of New York. It epitomized for him not merely the
commonwealth of the present, huge as it was, but the whole historic past
since the September day when Hendrik Hudson's Half Moon dropped anchor
down yonder in the stream. He felt himself no more the successor of
these frock-coated moderns whose oil presentments covered panelling and
frieze than of the periwigs who ruled before them. He was the heir of
Stuyvesant, Dongan, and Lord Lovelace no less than of Cleveland, Van
Buren, and John Jay. There had been sturdy souls among that company; men
who had hoped mightily, striven mightily, sometimes achieved mightily.
Some few had attained the presidency of the United States; some barely
missed the prize; some pursued it to their bitter graves. Where would he
rank? According to a newspaper he carried in his hand, it lay with him
this day to determine. Yet for one so omniscient, the editor was chary
of counsel.
Shelby went on to his little inner room and took up the day's routine
with his secretary, who casually dropped the news that the Boss had that
morning arrived in Albany and begun to receive the faithful at an early
hour. Whether owing to this cause or not, Shelby's own quota of
legislative callers was small. At ten o'clock he met briefly the
delegates of a labor organization, who in an embarrassed fashion had much
to say of plutocrats and trusts; and with their departure came a
fluttering invasion from a young ladies' boarding-school, headed by a
chaperone laboriously intent on improving the girlish mind. All
requested autographs, which were readily supplied from the stock in hand,
and a round half-dozen asked the private secretary in strictest
confidence if the governor were a married man.
He had but just returned to his desk when an orderly handed him the card
of the Boss.
"You'll see him here?" asked the man.
"No. In the executive chamber," answered Shelby.
The Boss stood beside the massive fireplace, gazing pensively up at a
portrait of Washington.
"Ah, good morning, governor," he called, turning slowly. "I trust I'm
well within the official hours."
"Quite."
"Mahomet is somewhat stricken in years, and night travel impairs his
digestion, but if need be, he can come to the mountain still."
"It was the governor of the state your message offended," said Shelby,
quietly. "Personally I'm not thin-skinned, as you know."
"Yet, in my poor way—" the Boss included the chamber in a comprehensive
gesture.
"Yes; in last analysis you put me here. I don't forget that."
The leader shrugged.
"You were always so devilishly direct, Ross," he let fall good-humoredly.
"It's your besetting sin, and spoiled the making of a clever politician.
You lack the diplomatic instinct."
Shelby proved him in the right immediately.
"You've come about the canal bill," he said. "Sit down."
"Yes; the canal bill—and other matters."
He laid his hat and stick upon a desk, and drawing a chair beside
Shelby's near a window embrasure, leaned to him, chin in hand, as in the
days of their hand-in-glove intimacy. "Between us two plain speech after
all is best," he went on. "You've no mistaken notions about me. You
recognize the newspaper bogy which goes by my name as a caricature. You
know that I am as proud of this state in my way as you are in your way.
You know also the manner and method of my ascendency in state affairs,
and by the same insight you know its scope."
"Yes. I know its scope."
"So far as knowledge of method goes, you are as capable of party
leadership as I. Indeed, if that were all, you might set up a rival
shop, as some of the editors kindly suggest, and attempt to put me out of
business. Naturally you don't share that delusion."
"No."
"No; you're too sane. My tenure doesn't rest on mere control of the
purse-strings. My great asset is forty years' dealing with all sorts and
conditions of men. Nobody else has quite my equipment."
"Why tell me what I know? All talk of my setting up a machine of my own
is idle. I am aware of the extent of your influence. You have tacitly
offered me the state delegation to the national convention in June, and
it is within your power to deliver it—probably to name the candidate.
Have you come to withdraw the offer?"
The Boss straightened.
"I have come in a spirit of compromise," he returned. "We've differed
widely on this question of a greater canal. You have evolved a plan best
suited to Utopia; my own is aimed to meet the human nature I know
best—the human nature De Witt Clinton, in whose steps you evidently
aspire to tread, comprehended and took into the reckoning. Be practical
as he was practical—as you were in the early days of our acquaintance.
I no longer ask you to sign the bill; I respect your punctilio. I only
beg that you will permit this measure which your party has espoused to
become a law without your signature. Everybody will understand your
position. You will occupy an honorable middle ground."
"For me there is no honorable middle ground. It lies with me to approve
or reject."
The Boss got upon his feet.
"I dislike coercion," he said.
The governor rose.
"You need use none. No amount of it could hypnotize me into seeing a bad
bill as a good bill."
"Do you count the presidency so lightly?"
"No American can count it lightly."
"You face political suicide. Do you fancy your renomination for this
office possible?"
"No. I have weighed that, too."
"And your virtue is unshaken?"
The governor smiled at the sneer.
"Oh, I'm past all that," he said. "I took the precaution to veto the
bill before you came to tempt."
With uncertain step the old leader turned and made his way to the door,
where he paused to vent his bewildered, yet sincere judgment.
"I've never met anybody quite like you in politics, Shelby," he owned,
almost kindly. "You are a paradox—a sort of admirable fool."
