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.