"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 role 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
reelection 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."