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!"