CHAPTER VII
CALEB UNDERGOES A “HOME EVENING”
“There’s no use glowering at me every time you speak of poor Clive,” protested Mrs. Conover with all the fierce courage of a chased guinea-pig. “It isn’t my fault he’s running against you, and it isn’t my fault that he’s my nephew, either.”
“I guess both those failings would come under the head of misfortunes, rather’n faults,” retorted Caleb. “And they’re both as hard on him as they are on you, Letty. I wasn’t glowering at you, either. Don’t stir up another spat.”
The idea that Mr. Conover was capable of inciting any such disputation so flattered that poor, spiritless little creature that she actually bridled and looked about her to make sure Anice and Gerald, the only other members of the household present, had heard.
The quartette were seated in the Conover library, whither they had gathered after dinner for one of those brief intervals of family intercourse which Caleb secretly loved, his wife as secretly dreaded and Gerald openly loathed. The Railroader, at heart, was an intensely home-loving man. He had never known a home. Least of all since moving into the Mausoleum. He had always, in increasingly blundering fashion, sought to make one.
The wife he bullied, the son he hectored, the daughter with whom he had forever quarrelled, the secretary who met his friendliness with unbroken reserve; all these he had tried to enroll as assistants in his various homemaking plans. The results had not been so successful as to warrant description.
Finally, Conover had centred his former efforts on one daily plan. He had read in the advice column of the Star about the joys of “pleasant evening hour in the bosom of one’s family” and the directions therefor. The idea appealed to him. He ordained accordingly that after the unfashionably early evening meal the household should congregate in the library, and there for at least one hour indulge in carefree confidential chat. This, Caleb mentally argued, was a capital opening wedge in the inculcation of the true home-spirit which had been his lifelong dream.
The household obeyed the order, even as all Conover’s orders—at home and abroad—were obeyed. The session usually began in laborious efforts at small talk. Then an unfortunate remark of some sort from Mrs. Conover, or an impertinence or sneer from Gerald, and the storm would break. The “pleasant evening hour” oftener than not ended in a sea of weakly miserable tears from Mrs. Conover, a cowed or sotto voce profane exit on Gerald’s part, and in Caleb’s stamping off to his study or else around to the Kerrigans’ for a blissful, shirt-sleeved, old-time political argument in front of the saloon’s back-room stove.
On this present evening Caleb had just received Shevlin’s report of the Standish tour. He was full of the theme and strove to interest his three hearers in it. In Anice he found, as ever, an eager listener. But Gerald yawned in very apparent boredom, while Mrs. Conover shed a few delightfully easy, but irritating tears at the account of the opera house fight. Caleb had silently resented these moist signs of interest, and his glare had called forth an unusual protest from his weak little spouse.
“I’m sure,” she went on, nervously taking advantage of the rare fit of courage that possessed her, “I’m quite sure somebody else must have put this Governorship idea into poor Clive’s head. He’d never have thought of such a rash thing by himself. I don’t believe that at heart he really wants to be Governor at all. He——”
“If he don’t,” remarked Conover, “I guess that makes it unanimous. I wish that idiot Shevlin hadn’t given him the chance to play to the gallery, though, in a fist fight. It’ll mean votes for him. Folks have a sort of liking for a man who can scrap. By the way, Jerry, if you go around to Headquarters to-night, tell Bourke I want him to run to Matawan for me to-morrow on that floater business. He——”
“I don’t believe they can spare Bourke at Headquarters just now,” began Gerald, with a faint show of interest. “You see——”
“If he was the sort of man they could spare, he wouldn’t be the sort of man I’d want to send on a ticklish job like this. Has Brayle showed up at any of our rallies yet?”
“No. And I don’t believe he will. He’s done with politics, Shevlin tells me. Got religion, Billy says, and——”
“If Pete Brayle’s got religion, you can gamble he’s got it in his wife’s name, like every other asset of his. ‘Done with politics,’ eh? Well, politics ain’t done with him. I’ll see Shevlin about it in the morning.”
“I thought Mr. Brayle was an atheist,” put in Letty. “It’s an awful thing to be. How do you suppose he ever became one?”
“By thinking too hard with a mind that was too small; same as most atheists do,” suggested Caleb. “Say, Jerry,” he added, “it won’t do you no harm to know I’m rather tickled at the way you’ve took hold at Headquarters this past week or so. You won’t lose by it.”
“She wrote me to,” answered Gerald, flushing. “You owe it to her. Not to me.”
“She?”
“Yes. My——”
“Ugh! I might ’a’ known it! Well, so long as you do your work I don’t care where the inspiration comes from. I ain’t too finicky to hit a straight blow with a crooked stick. Why’d she tell you to hustle?”
“She said she ‘hoped it would touch your hard heart.’ Wait, and I’ll read you what she——”
“No, you won’t. My hardness of heart isn’t a patch on my hardness of hearing when it comes to listening to that sort of pink paper drivel. I——”
“Now, father,” whined Mrs. Conover, persuasively, “why be so hard on the poor boy? Perhaps——”
“Perhaps he’s wheedled you into thinking a yeller-haired high-kicker would make the ideel daughter-in-law for the next Governor of the Mountain State. But his golden eloquence hasn’t caught me yet. So, as long as there’s one sane member of the Conover family——”
“Oh, Caleb, how can you treat your own child——”
“Yes!” snorted Caleb, “my own children have a right to expect a fine line of treatment from me, haven’t they? Blanche and Jerry, both. What is it Ibid says about ‘A serpent’s tooth and a thankless——’”
“That was Shakespeare,” contradicted Mrs. Conover, with the tact that was her chief charm. “And you’ve got it all wrong. There’s no such person as——”
“I tell you it was Ibid,” growled Caleb, always tender on the subject of his learning. “It says so in the ‘Famous Quotation’ book. Maybe you can look down on my education. But I guess I can stand pat all right on the things I have learned. And——”
The butler entered with a card, which he carried to Caleb. After one glance at the pasteboard Caleb crushed it in his fingers and threw it to the floor.
“Turn her out!” he ordered.
“Why, who is it?” squeaked his wife in high excitement.
“It’s some woman for Jerry. Gaines brought me the card by mis——”
“For me?” cried Gerald, jumping up, his face aflame. “Why, it—it can’t——”
“Yes, it can. And it is, or rather it was, for I’ve sent her away. Maybe you forget I made you promise——”
“Stand aside!” spake a dramatic contralto voice from beyond the portières, “I have a right here.”
The curtains were thrust apart, revealing the protesting, discomfited butler; and, pushing past him, a tall, slender young woman, quietly but prettily dressed, pompadoured of hair, and very, very determined of aspect.
“Good Lord!” grunted Caleb under his breath, “she ain’t even a blonde. I thought they all——”
But she was in the library itself, and facing the amazed master of the house. Gerald, at first sight of her, had sprung forward and now grasped the newcomer ardently by both hands and drew her to him.
“I was sure,” murmured the intruder in that same throaty contralto, rich, yet insensibly conveying a vague impression of latent vulgarity, “I was sure your man was mistaken, and that you couldn’t have meant to turn me away without a word when I had come so far to see my precious truant boy. Did you? We women, Mrs. Conover,” she went on, eyes and voice claiming alliance of the meek-faced little nonentity who shrank behind Anice Lanier, “we women understand how hard it is to keep away from the man who has taught us to love him. Don’t we? Men never can quite realize that. Not even my Gerald, or he wouldn’t have stayed away so long or made me stay away from him. Would he?”
“It was Dad,” broke in Gerald. “I told you that in my first letter, darling. He won’t stand for our marriage, and——”
“Ah! that is because he doesn’t know,” she laughed archly. “Mr. Conover, this big splendid boy of mine is too much in love to explain as he should. And he’s so high-spirited, he can’t listen as patiently to advice as he ought to. Can you, Gerald? So I came myself, when I couldn’t stand it any longer to be away from him. I knew I could make you understand. Can’t I?”
“I can tell better when you’ve tried,” answered Caleb, watching with a sort of awed fascination the alternate plunges and rearings of the vibrant black pompadour, which, in deference to the prevailing style of the moment—and of the chorus—was pendent directly above the visitor’s right eye.
His curt rejoinder rather took the caller aback. She looked about the group as if for inspiration. Anice Lanier had risen, and was at the door. Caleb saw her.
“Please don’t go, Miss Lanier!” he called.
“I would much prefer to,” answered Anice, “if you don’t object. This seems to be purely a family affair and——”
“And at least one person with a decently-balanced brain ought to be present. Our affairs are your affairs as far as you’ll allow. Please do me the favor of staying.”
The visitor had, by this diversion, regained grasp on her plan of action.
“Mr. Conover,” she said, stretching out her suède-gloved hands toward the Railroader in a pretty gesture of helpless appeal as to an all-powerful judge, “I am your son’s wife. He loves me. I love him. Does that tell you nothing?”
“Yes,” said Caleb judicially, “it tells me you love each other; if that’s what you mean. For the sake of argument we’ll take that for granted, just for the present. Now get down to facts.”
“I am your son’s wife,” repeated the woman, somewhat less throatily, but still with brave resolve. “He sought me out and wooed me. He told me I should receive a welcome in his home. He made me love him. Didn’t you, Gerald? And I married him. Ah, but we were happy, we two! Then, like a thunderbolt from the blue sky fell your command that we part. He and I. For long—oh, so long—I have tried to be patient, to wait for time to soften your heart. But at last I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear it, so I came here to meet you in person, to cast myself at your feet if need be. To——”
She paused. The cold, inscrutable gaze of the Railroader’s light eyes did not tend to inspire her very creditable recitation. As a matter of fact, Caleb was at the moment paying very little attention to her words. He was noting the hard dryness of her skin and the only half-hidden lines about mouth, brow and eye; and contrasting them with Anice Lanier’s baby-smooth skin and the soft contour of her neck and cheek.
Had the stranger been saying anything of import Caleb would have missed no syllable. But, through long years of experience with the dreary windiness and empty pothouse eloquence of politicians, the Railroader had learned by instinct, and without waiting to catch so much as the first word, whether anything worth hearing was being said, or if the case were, as he was wont to express it, “an attack of rush-of-words-to-the-mouth.” He had already placed his present caller’s oration in the latter category. But her pause brought him back to himself.
“So I am here to implore you to be just, to be generous,” resumed the girl, slightly raising the pitch of the scene as she approached a climax. “I throw myself on your mercy. I, Enid Conover——”
“Enid Conover!” snorted the Railroader. “Why——”
“Yes. Enid Conover! How I have learned to love that name!”
“Have, hey? Then take my advice, young woman, and stifle that same wild adoration for my poetic cognomen, for you aren’t going to have the renting of it any longer’n I can help.”
“Not——?”
“Oh, you’ll get over it easy! Just as you got over your love for that high-sounding title, Enid Montmorency. And just as, before that, when you left your mother’s Germantown boarding-house, you got over any passion you may have had for your original name, Emma Higgs. You see I know some little about you. I took the trouble to have you looked up. You and your family. You told Gerald your family’s old. From all I hear, I guess the main difference between you and that same family is that one’s older’n you make out and the other’s younger. Take your choice as to which is which. And now——”
“You insult me!” declaimed the girl, her eyes flashing, her figure drawn to the full height of a really excellent pose, her pompadour nestling protectingly above the arched brow.
“No, I don’t. I couldn’t. (Jerry, you sit down there and behave yourself or I’ll spank you!) If you think I’m wrong, maybe you’d like me to tell my son the way you first happened to go on the stage. No? I guess I’ve got this thing framed up pretty near straight. It’s a grand-stand play, and Papa is It, eh? A masterstroke of surprise for the old man, and a final tableau of the bunch of us clustering about you and Gerald in the centre of the stage, while you fall on each other’s necks and do a unison exclamation of ‘God-bless-the-dear-old-Dad! How-much-will-he-leave-us? And-how-soon?’ You waited in town awhile. But Papa didn’t relent and send Hubby back to his lonely wifie. Then you sick Gerald on to acting like a human being, hoping to win Papa over by being a good boy. No go. Then as a last play you butt in here on a sudden with all your lines learned down pat, and do a grand appeal. Well, Mrs.-Miss-Emma-Higgs-Enid-Montmorency-Conover, it doesn’t work. That’s all. If you’ve got the sense I think, you’ll see the show’s a frost, and you’ll start back for Broadway. Take my blessing, if you want it, and take Jerry along for good measure, if you like. It’s all you’ll ever get from me, either of you.”
To Caleb Conover’s unbounded horror and amaze, Enid, instead of spurning him haughtily, burst into a crescendo, throaty gurgle of contralto weeping, and flung herself bodily upon him; her long-gloved arms twining about his neck, her pompadoured head snuggling into his bosom.
“Oh, Father! Father!” came a muffled, yet artistic wail from somewhere in the region of his upper waistcoat buttons. “How can you? You’ve broken Gerald’s heart. And now you’re breaking mine. Forgive us!”
“Miss Lanier!” thundered Caleb, struggling wildly to escape the snake-like closeness of the embrace, “for heaven’s sake won’t you come and—and unwind this person? She’s spoiling my shirt-front. Lord, how I do hate to be pawed!”
“Do not touch me! Do not dare to, menial!” commanded the bride, relinquishing her hold, and glaring like a wounded tigress at Anice, who had made no move whatever in response to Caleb’s horrified plea. The visitor drew back from Caleb as though contact with him besmirched her.
“Well!” she gasped, and now the throaty contralto was merged into a guttural snarl, ridiculously akin to an angry cat’s. “Well! Of all the cheap tight-wads I ever struck! Think you can backtrack me, do you? Well, you lose! I’m married to him all right, and I’m not giving him up in a hurry. You try to butt in, and you’ll find yourself in a hundred thousand alienation suit! Oh, I know my rights, and no up-country Rube’s going to skin me out of ’em. You old bunch of grouchiness! And to think they let you boss things in this jay town of yours! Why, in New York you’d never get nearer Broadway than Tenth Avenue, and you couldn’t even boss a red light precinct. My Gawd! I’ll have to keep it dark about my coming to a hole like this or my friends’ll think I’ve been playing a ten-twenty-thirt’ circuit. No civilized person ever comes here, and now I know why. They’re afraid they’ll be mistook for a friend of yours, most likely. You redheaded old geezer, you don’t even know a lady when you see one. Keep your lantern-jawed, pie-faced mutt of a son. I’m going back to where there’s at least one perfect gentleman who knows how to behave when a lady honors him by——”
“Enid!” cried Gerald, who had sat in dumb, nerveless confusion during the recent interchange of courtesies, “you don’t mean—? You mustn’t go back to him! You mustn’t! Has he met you again since I left? Tell me! I said I’d kill him if he ever spoke to you again, and, by God, I will! He shan’t——”
A timid, falsetto screech, like that of a very young leveret that is inadvertently trodden beneath a farmer’s foot in long grass, broke in on the boy’s ravings. Mrs. Caleb Conover collapsed on the floor in a dead faint.
Anice ran to the unconscious woman’s aid. Even Gerald, checked midway in his mad appeal, stopped and stared down in stupid wonder at his mother’s little huddled figure.
Caleb seized the moment to cross the room quickly toward the furious chorus girl. He caught her by the shoulder, and in his pale eyes blazed a flare that few men and no woman had ever seen there. The color, behind the artistic paint on the visitor’s face, went white at the look. She, who was accustomed to brave the rages of drunken rounders, shrank speechless, cowering before those light eyes. One arm she raised awkwardly as if to avert a blow. Yet Caleb’s touch on her shoulder was gentle; and, when he spoke, his voice was strangely dead and unemotional. So low was it that his meaning rather than his exact words reached the actress.
“This is my city,” said he. “What I say goes. There is a train to New York in thirty minutes. If you are in Granite one minute after it leaves, my police shall arrest you. My witnesses shall make the charge something that even you will hardly care to stand for. My judge shall send you to prison for a year. And every paper in New York shall print the whole story as I choose to tell it. Now go!”
The fear of death and worse than death was in her eyes. She slunk out, shrunken in aspect to the form of an old and bent woman. Not even—most beloved trick of stage folk!—did she turn at the portières for a parting look. The patter of her scared, running feet sounded irregularly on the marble outer hall. Then the front door slammed, and she was gone.
The final scene between Conover and his son’s wife had endured less than twenty seconds. It was over, and she had departed before Gerald realized what had happened. Then, with a cry, he was on his feet and hurrying to the door. But his father stood in front of it.
“If you’re not cured now,” said Conover, “you never will be. Go back and ring for your mother’s maid.”
The boy’s mouth was open for a wrathful retort. But embers of the blaze that had transformed Caleb’s face as he had dismissed the chorus girl still flickered there. And under their scorching heat Gerald Conover slunk back, beaten but still muttering defiant incoherences under his breath.
Mrs. Conover, under Anice’s gentle ministration, was coming to her senses. She opened her eyes with a gasp of fear, then sat up and looked apprehensively around.
“She is gone, dear,” whispered Anice, divining her meaning, “and Gerald didn’t mean what he said. He was excited, that was all. He’s all right again now. Shall I help you upstairs?”
But Mrs. Conover insisted on being assisted to the nearby sofa, from which refuge she feebly waved away her maid and vetoed Anice’s further offices.
“I am all right,” she pleaded under her breath. “Let me stay here. Caleb hates to have me give way to these heart attacks. I’ll stay till he has gone to his study. Then——”
“All right again, old lady?” asked Caleb, walking across to the sofa. “Like me to send for the doctor?”
“No. Yes, I’m quite well again now,” stammered his wife. “Thank you for asking.”
It was not wholly indifference which had kept Conover from the invalid’s side. So great had been the unwonted fury that mastered him, he had dared not speak to either of the women until he was able to some extent to curb it. His usually iron nerves were still a-quiver, and his voice was unlike its customary self.
“Until further notice,” he announced dryly, looking from one to the other, “these ‘pleasant home hours’ are suspended. By request. They’re too exciting for a quiet man like me. I hope you’ll all try to smother any disappointment you feel. And now,” turning to the butler, who had come in answer to his ring, “I’ll see if I can’t get the taste of this farewell performance of the pleasant hour series out of my mouth before I start my evening’s work. Gaines, order Dunderberg brought around in ten minutes.”
“Where are you going?” asked Mrs. Conover, who had imperfectly caught the order.
“To get into my riding clothes,” answered her husband from the doorway.
“But you spoke about Dunderberg. You’re surely not going to ride Dunderberg when I’m so shaken up. I shall worry so——”
“Why? You ain’t riding him.”
“But why not ride Sultan? He’s so gentle and quiet and——”
“Letty! do I look as if I was on a still hunt for something gentle and quiet? I want something that’ll give me a fight. Something that’ll tire me out and take my mind off black, floppy pompadours and stocking-leg gloves! Jerry, you come along with me. I want a talk with you.”
“Oh, if only that dreadful horse would die!” sighed Mrs. Conover. “I never have an instant’s peace while you’re riding him.”
“Rot!” growled Caleb, grinning reassurance at the pathetic little figure on the sofa. “There never yet was a horse I couldn’t manage or that could harm me. Come along, Jerry.”
He stamped upstairs to his dressing-room followed by the reluctant, still muttering Gerald.
This was by no means the first time Mrs. Conover had plucked up courage to entreat her lord not to ride his favorite horse, Dunderberg, the most vicious, tricky brute in all that horse-breeding State. And never yet had the Railroader deigned to heed her request. In fact, such opposition rather pleased him than otherwise, inasmuch as it enhanced, to all listeners, his own equestrian prowess.
Caleb Conover was a notoriously bad rider. Horsemanship must be learned before the age of twenty or never at all. And Conover was well past forty before he threw leg over saddle. But he loved the exercise, and took special joy in buying and mastering the most unmanageable horses he could find.
How so wretched a horseman could avert bad falls or even death was a mystery to all who knew him. It was seemingly by his own sheer will power and brutal strength of mind and body that he remained triumphant over the worst horse; was never thrown nor failed to conquer his mount.
It was one of the sights of Granite to see Caleb Conover careering down the main avenue of the residence district, backing some foaming, plunging hunter, whose wildest efforts could never shake that stiff, indomitable figure from its seat. With walloping elbows and jerking shoulders, the Railroader was wont to thunder his way at top speed up and down suburban byways; inciting his horse to its worst tricks, tempting it to buck, kick, wheel or rear. And when the maddened brute at length indulged in any or all of these manœuvres, a joy of battle would light the rider’s face as, with unbreakable knee-grip and a self-possession that never deserted him, he flogged the steed into subjection.
In telling Letty that there was no horse he could not safely manage and control Conover had but repeated an oft-made boast—a boast whose truth he had a score of times proven. He was not a constant equestrian. He never rode for the mere pleasure of it. In ordinary moments he cared little for such recreation. But when he was angered, or perplexed, or desired to freshen jaded nerves or brain, his first order was for his newest, worst-tempered horse.
As he rode so semi-occasionally, and as the horse he selected was usually one which even his pluckiest grooms feared to exercise, the brute in question was fairly certain to be in a state of rampant, rank “freshness,” and to require the best work of two men to lead him from the stables to the porte-cochère. As few steeds could long withstand such training as Conover inflicted, he was forever changing mounts. The horse of the hour would wax so tame and docile as to preclude further excitement, or would break a blood-vessel or go dead lame in one of the fierce conflicts with its master. Then a new mount must be sought out.
It was barely a month earlier that Caleb had discovered Dunderberg, and had bought the great black stallion at an outrageously high price. And thus far the purchase still delighted him, for Dunderberg not only showed no signs of cringing to the master’s fiery will, but daily grew fiercer and more unmanageable.
So, while Mrs. Conover trembled, wept and alternately prayed and watched the length of driveway beyond her window, the Railroader was wont to dash at breakneck speed along the farther country roads, atop his huge black horse, checking the mad pace only for occasional battles-royal with the ever-fractious beast.
To-night, coming atop the previous excitement of the “pleasant home hour,” the strain on Letty was too great. Clinging convulsively to Anice, the poor woman wept with a hysterical abandon that almost frightened the girl. Tenderly, lovingly as a mother the girl soothed the trembling old lady; comforting her as only a woman of great heart and small hand can; quieting at length the shuddering hysterics into half-stifled sobs.
Had Caleb Conover (upstairs wrestling with an overtight riding boot) chanced upon the group, he would have been sore puzzled to recognize in this all-tender, pitying maiden the coldly reserved secretary on whose unruffled composure and steady nerve he had so utterly come to rely.
“Oh, it’s horrible—horrible!” panted Mrs. Conover, finding voice as the sobs subsided.
“Yes, yes, I know,” soothed Anice. “But it——”
“You don’t know. You can’t know. It isn’t only the horse. It’s everything! I sometimes wonder how I stand it. Each time it seems as if——”
“Don’t! Don’t, dear! You’re overwrought and tired. Let me take you upstairs and——”
“No. It does me good. There’s never been anyone I could talk to. And sometimes I’ve felt I’d give all this abominable money and everything just for one hour’s friendship with anyone who really cared.”
“But I care. Really, really I do. Let me help you, won’t you, please? I want so much to.”
“‘Help’ me?” echoed the weeping woman, with as near an approach to bitterness as her crushed spirit could muster. “Help me? How can anyone help one of Caleb Conover’s slaves? And I am the only one of them all who has no hope of escape. The others can leave him and find work somewhere else. Even the horses he loves to fight have the satisfaction of fighting back. But I haven’t courage enough to do either of those things. What can I do?”
It was the first time in their three years of daily intercourse that Anice Lanier had seen or so much as suspected the existence of this feeble spark of resentment in the older woman’s cowed soul. It dumbfounded her, and left her for the time without power of consoling.
“Do you know, Miss Lanier,” went on Letty, “at one time I hated you? Yes”—as she noted the pained surprise in the girl’s big, tear-swimming eyes—“actually hated you. You were all I was not. You were not afraid of him. He deferred to you. He never deferred to me, or to anyone else but you since he was born. He never cared for me. And he did care for you. If I were to die——”
“Mrs. Conover!”
Anice had shaken off Mrs. Conover’s clinging hands, and was on her feet, her eyes dry, her cheeks blazing.
“Don’t be angry with me! Don’t!” whimpered the invalid. “I didn’t mean any harm. You said you wanted to help me. And oh, if you only knew what a help it is to be able to speak out for once in my life without fear of that terrible will power of Caleb’s choking me silent! I don’t hate you now. I didn’t as soon as I saw you cared nothing for him. For you don’t. I see more than people think. And—I suppose it’s wicked of me to even think such things—but when I die it will be good to know Caleb will for once be balked in his wishes; for you’ll never marry him. I know that.”
“I can’t listen to you!” exclaimed Anice. “You are not yourself or you wouldn’t talk so. Please——”