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 debut. 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 debut 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-cochere 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 debutante?" 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 coupe. "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 coupe 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."

THE END