CHAPTER XIII
THE FOURTH MESSENGER OF JOB
The rain Caleb Conover had so eagerly desired as a check on fair weather reformers’ Election Day zeal began soon after midnight, and with it a gale that is still remembered as the “Big November Wind.”
The wind-whips lashed the many-windowed Mausoleum, and the roar and swirl of dashing water echoed from roof and veranda-cover. The autumn gale-blasts set the naked trees to creaking and groaning like sentient things. Here and there a huge branch was ripped from its trunk and ploughed a gash in the lawn’s withered turf. More than one maple and ash on the Conover grounds crashed to earth with a rending din that was drowned in the howl of the storm.
A belated equinoctial was sweeping the Mountain State, driven on the breath of a tornado such as not one year in twenty can record, east of the Mississippi. Its screaming onset unroofed houses, tore up forest giants, wrecked telegraph lines, buffeted fragile dwellings to their fall and dissolved hayricks into miles of flying wisps.
Yet none of the three members of the Conover family, sheltered within the Mausoleum, were awakened by the bellow of the cyclone, for none were asleep. Letty, alone in her great, hideous bedroom, lay alternately praying and weeping in maudlin comfortlessness over her absent daughter; and at sound of the hubbub outside wept the more and prayed with an added terror.
Gerald, despite the early start he must make in the morning, was still dressed, and was slouching back and forth in his suite of apartments, muttering occasionally to himself, and at other times pausing to gaze lifelessly ahead of him. As the ever-louder voice of the storm broke in on his thoughts, he stopped short in his aimless march, his dry lips twitching and on his face the nervous terror of a suddenly awakened child. He shambled into an inner chamber, unlocked and opened a drawer in his chiffonier, fumbled for a moment or two with something he took therefrom, then closed and locked the drawer and returned to the light. In a few moments the nervousness had died out of his face and bearing, and with a return of his habitual listless air he had resumed his walk.
Caleb Conover, stretched on a camp-bed in the corner of his study, smiled contentedly as the rain beat in torrents on the panes. But when the gale waxed fiercer and the rain at last ceased, he frowned.
“Going to blow off clear and cold after all!” he grumbled, turning over. “And the Weather Bureau’s the only one that can’t be ‘fixed.’”
But even the shriek of the storm could not long hold his attention. The Railroader was vaguely troubled as to himself. Heretofore, like Napoleon’s, his steel will had been able to dictate to Nature as imperiously as to his fellow-man. When he had commanded the presence of Sleep, the drowsy god had hastened on the moment to do his bidding. He had slumbered or awakened at wish. On the eve of his greatest crisis he had been unable to sleep like a baby. Yet for the past few weeks he had been aware of a subtle change. Sleep had deserted him, even as had so much else that he had loftily regarded as his to command.
He had acquired an unpleasant habit of lying awake for hours in that big lonely study of his, of seeking in vain to recover his old-time power of perfect self-mastery. Thought, Memory, Unrest—a trio that never could unduly assail him in saner hours—now had a way of rushing in upon the insomniac with the extinguishing of the last light. To-night these unwelcomed guests were lingering still longer than usual, and all the Conover’s dominating will power failed to banish them.
At length he gave over the struggle and let his vagrant fancies have their will. Was he growing old, he wondered, that his forces—mental, physical and political—thus wavered?
Worry? He had heard others complain of it, and he had laughed at them. Nerves? Those were for women. Not for a man with an eighteen-inch neck. Then what ailed him? He had been this way ever since—ever since—Yes, it was the night Anice Lanier left that he had first lain awake.
Anice Lanier! He had never analyzed his feelings toward her. He had been dully satisfied to know that in her presence he ever had an unwonted feeling of content, of sure knowledge that she would understand; that she was as unlike his general idea of women as he himself differed from his equally contemptuous estimate of other men; that he was at his best with her. Had he been less practical and more given to hackneyed phrases of thought, he would have said she inspired him.
But now? The Railroader could not yet force himself to dwell on the jarring end of all that. He tried to think of something else. Blanche? Yes, there was a nice sort of complication, wasn’t it? Another international marriage and the usual ending thereof.
“These foreigners can give us poor Yankee jays cards and spades at the bunco game!” he mused, half-admiringly. “They beat our ‘con’ men hands down, for they don’t even need to pay out cash in manufacturing green goods and gold bricks, and they don’t get jugged when they’re found out. When’ll American girls get sense? When their parents do, I presume.”
And this unwelcome answer to his own question brought him back to the memory of his joy at hearing of Blanche’s proposed marriage to d’Antri. It had seemed to him to set the capstone of fulfilment to his social yearnings. As father of a princess, he had in fancy seen himself at last exalted amid the close-serried ranks of that class to whom only his wealth had heretofore entitled him to ingress. And money—even his money—had failed to act as open sesame. But surely as father-in-law to a prince——
Even the very patent fiasco attendant on his one effort to use this relationship as a master key to the portals of society had not wholly discouraged him. Later, when, practically by acclamation, he should have won the Governorship, and when the Princess d’Antri’s European triumphs should be noised abroad in Granite, surely then——
But now there was no question of acclamation. If he should win it would be by bare margin. He knew that. And, as for Blanche—well, if he could keep the worst of the scandal out of the American papers and make people think his daughter had come home merely because her husband abused her, or because she was tired of her surroundings—if he could achieve this much it would be the best he could expect.
Gerald, too; he had hoped so much from the boy’s glittering New York connections. Now that illusion was forever gone. Though his son’s more recent behavior had in a slight measure softened the hurt to paternal pride and hope, yet the hurt itself, Caleb knew, must always remain. And that particular pride and hope were forever dead.
The Railroader was not in any sense a religious devotee. For appearance sake, however, and to add still further force to his liberal gifts to the Catholic clergy, he semi-occasionally attended mass at the Cathedral. He also, for other reasons, occupied now and then, with Letty, his higher-priced pew in the Episcopal church of St. Simeon Stylites, religious rendezvous of Granite’s smart set.
At one of these two places of worship—he could not now remember which—and, after all, it didn’t matter—he had heard, some time recently, a Scripture reading that had held his attention more closely than did most passages of the sort. It was a story of some man—he could not remember whom—the recital of whose continued and unmerited ill-luck had stamped itself on the hearer’s mind. The man had been rich, prosperous, happy. Then one day four messengers had come to him in swift succession, with tales of disaster to goods and family, each narration telling of worse misfortunes than had its predecessor. And the fourth had left its recipient stripped of wealth and family.
In a quaint twist of thought Conover, as he lay staring up into the dark and listening to the noisy rage of the storm, fell to fitting the biblical story to his own case.
“The first message I got,” he reflected, becoming grimly entertained in his own analogy, “knocked over my plans for Jerry. Then the second stole from me the only square woman I ever knew and all my chances of a campaign walkover. The third smashed my idees for Blanche, and for making a hit in society. The fourth—well, I guess the fourth ain’t showed up yet. Will it clean me out when it does come, I wonder, like it did the feller in the Bible? Let’s see, he had a whiny fool for a wife, too, if I remember it straight. Yes, there’s a whole lot of points in common between me and him. I wonder if he ever run for any office. How was it all those messages of his wound up? ‘And—and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’ That was it.
“I wonder was he the same chap that had all those devils cast out of him. I don’t just remember, but whoever it was that had ’em cast out, I’d like to ’a’ known him, for he was a man. Most folks’ natures ain’t big enough to hold a single half-size devil, let alone a whole crowd of ’em. If that Bible chap had all those it showed he was a man enough to hold ’em. And if only one of ’em had been cast out it’d ’a’ been a bigger thing he did than it would be for a dozen ordinary men to turn into saints. Maybe I’m a little bit like that feller, too.”
After which plunge into the theological exegesis—the first and last whereof he ever was guilty—Caleb Conover turned his thoughts to the morrow’s election, and thus communed with himself till dawn caught him open-eyed and unsleepy, his splendid strength and energy in nowise diminished by forty-eight hours of wakefulness.
It was a tattered, desolate world that met the Railroader’s eyes as he gazed down from his window across the broad grounds and over the city that lay at their foot. The wind had fallen, and a pink-gray light was filling the clean-swept sky. Nature seemed ashamed to look on the results of her own violence, for the dawnlight crept timidly over the sleeping houses.
Everywhere were strewn signs of the hurricane. Tree branches, toppled chimneys, unroofed shanties, swaths of telegraph and telephone wires, overturned fences; these and a thousand other proofs of the gale’s brief power lay broadcast throughout Granite’s streets.
And, with the first glimmers in the east, the people of city and State were afoot, for history was to be made. Election Day had begun.
Midnight had again come around. The election was long since over, yet the city did not ring with the uproar incident on such affairs. For the result was not yet known. The storm of the previous night had cut off telegraph and telephone communication in twenty parts of the Mountain State. Granite itself was isolated. Hundreds of mechanics were at work repairing the various lines of broken wire and replacing overthrown poles. But the work had not yet sufficiently progressed to allow the full transmission of election returns from the up-State counties.
Train service remained unimpaired, save for an occasional broken trestle on one or two of the minor branches of the C. G. & X. And since nightfall some of the returns had been brought to Granite by rail, but these merely proved the closeness of the conflict, and gave no true hint as to the actual outcome. The Granite vote was all in, hours ago. From the slums and the dark places of the city’s underworld the long-trained servants of the Machine had swarmed to the polls, overwhelming all opposition from the smaller and more respectable element, and had carried Granite tumultuously for Conover.
The Railroader, with a dozen or more men—district leaders, ward captains and picked adherents of his own—sat about the big centre table of his study, an Arthur, somewhat changed in the modernizing and surrounded by equally altered Paladins. A telegraph operator sat at an instrument in a far corner of the room, jotting down and carrying to the table such few despatches as were at last beginning to trickle in. At Conover’s left a ticker purred forth infrequent lengths of message-laden tape.
The table was littered with papers, yellow sheets of “flimsy,” bottles, glasses and open cigar boxes. The henchmen lounged about, drinking and smoking in nervous suspense, fighting over again the day’s battle, and hazarding innumerable diverse opinions on the bearing each new despatch would have on the general result. All were in a greater or less state of tension, and relieved it by frequent resource to the battalion of bottles that dotted the board.
Conover, alone of them all, touched no liquor. Before him was a big cup of black coffee, which a noiseless-treading footman entered the room every few minutes to renew.
“Ain’t that li’ble to keep you awake to-night, Boss?” asked Shevlin, as he watched the fourth cupful vanish at a swallow.
“It don’t bother me any more,” returned Caleb, “I’m too used to it. But I can remember when a single cup of it at Sunday morning breakfast would make me so I couldn’t sleep a wink all church time. I’d toss from one end of my pew to the other the whole morning. I couldn’t seem to drowse no matter how long Father Healy’s sermon was. ’Nother county heard from?” as the operator laid a message before him. “Read it, Billy.”
“Delayed in transmission,” spelled Shevlin. “Jericho County, with two precincts missing, gives Conover 7,239, Standish 4,895.”
A yell went around the table. Bourke scribbled hurriedly on a pad, then announced:
“That offsets the Standish lead in Haldane by 780. Two to one you’ve got Bowden, too.”
A purr from the ticker, and Caleb caught up the tape.
“This machine don’t agree with you,” he reported. “Bowden complete gives me 5,861 and Standish 6,312. That cuts us down a bit.”
“Did you ever see such a rag-time ’lection!” growled Shevlin. “It’s like a seesaw board. One minute it’s you, and the next minute it ain’t. What’s the hay-eaters up-State thinkin’ about, anyhow? A year ago they’d no more ’a’ dared to——”
“A year’s a long time, son, in a country that makes a hero to order one day and puts him into the discard the next.”
“Oh, if you’d ’a’ only just let us work like we always have before! We’d ’a’ sent this Standish person screechin’ up a tree. He’d ’a’ thought a whale had bit him! But with all this amachoor line of drorin’-room stunts at the polls an’ givin’ him the chance to——”
“That’s my business,” replied Caleb. “Cut it out.”
And Billy relapsed into grumbling incoherence. Nor did any of the rest dare voice their equally strong opinions on the subject of Conover’s recent mystifying campaign tactics. Had a less powerful Boss dictated and carried out such a senselessly honest plan of battle, his leadership would have ended with the issuance of his first order. Impregnable as had been Conover’s position in the machine, he himself well knew he had strained his power and influence well-nigh to the breaking point. Should he, in spite of his self-confidence and the wondrous skill he had employed along this new line of warfare, lose the day——
“Coming in better now,” remarked the operator after a fusillade of clicks had held his attention to the instrument for a minute or two. “They’ve got the lines patched up enough to allow you straight service. The stuff’ll all be here in a rush pretty soon.”
“Here comes some more ticker reports!” cried Staatz, leader of the Third District, and strongest man, next to Conover himself, in all the Machine. “Why can’t it hurry up? Here—‘Pompton County complete gives Conover 28,042, Standish 6,723.’”
Another and louder yell from the tableful, and a battering of bottles and glasses on the board. Conover alone sat calm through the din. Bourke again did rapid figuring.
“Hooray!” he yelled. “That brings it up all right. Pompton County and the city of Granite together give you enough plurality to stall all the jay counties except——”
“It hangs on the one city of Grafton now,” interposed Caleb, who had as usual gripped the whole situation before his lieutenant had jotted down the first line of figures. “We’ve got enough reports to bring it up to that. We know where we stand everywhere else, except in a few places too small to count. As Grafton goes, the State will go. That’s a cinch.”
“That’s right,” admitted Bourke after another spasm of ciphering. “But how’d you get onto us when the rest of us——?”
“If I didn’t get onto things before the rest of you did, one of you would be sitting at the head of this table instead of me.”
The Railroader glanced, as by accident, toward Staatz, who coughed raucously and plunged at once into talk.
“Pete Brayle tried to backtrack us on the sly in Pompton County, I hear,” said the latter. “Thought it’d get him a soft place in the reform gang in case they won. A lot of good it did him.”
“Brayle’s always looking for soft places,” observed Caleb dryly. “And he ain’t the only one. Such fellers gen’rally end up in a soft place, all right. Only it’s apt to be a swamp, and that’s——”
“Jericho County complete returns,” translated the operator aloud, as his machine began again to click out its news, “Conover 7,910, Standish 5,495.”
“Why don’t we hear from Grafton?” asked Staatz.
“They’re patching up the connection now,” answered the operator. “It’s farthest city on the line. You’ve got all the rest of the returns from its county.”
“That place is a regular nest of reformers, from the mayor down,” commented Bourke. “And besides, Standish won a lot of votes by his grand-stand scrap in the op’ra house there last month. It looks bad.”
“Most reform places do after they’ve tried a dose of their own medicine for awhile,” answered Caleb. “But we’ve spent enough good dough there to square the whole noble army of martyrs. I guess Grafton’s O. K.”
“Boss,” said Billy Shevlin, “you’re the only man in this whole shootin’ match what ain’t all hectic over this fight. An’ you’re the one man who’s It or out in th’ woolly white snow accordin’ to th’ way that genial beast of prey th’ free an’ independent an’ otherwise bought-up voters jumps. Ain’t you worried none?”
“What good’d that do? No use paying twice, if there’s anything to worry about. And if there ain’t, what’s the use of wasting a lot of good anxiety? Start my phonograph going.”
“Phonograph?” hotly protested Staatz. “At a time like this, when everything hangs on the next half hour and——”
“Well,” drawled Caleb, and if his words were light, his steady eyes fixed the district leader’s vexed gaze as a wasp might pierce an angry, blundering bumblebee, “I don’t believe the voters of the Mountain State’ll rise in arms to any extent and demand a new election and a new Boss just because they hear I wanted a little music. I like the phonograph. It’s the only musical instrument I ever had time to learn to play. And it’s the only one that’ll play over the pieces I like as often as I want to hear ’em, and won’t make me listen to a lot of opera war-whoops in Dutch and Dago. But, say, Staatz, I’m not forcing other folks to listen to it. If you’re not stuck on the way I amuse myself, there ain’t nobody exactly imploring you to stay on here.”
Staatz, his red face redder than its wont, and his great gray mustache abristle at the Railroader’s tone and look, nevertheless mumbled some apology. But Caleb did not hear him out. He broke in on the words with a curt nod, then said to Shevlin:
“Start it up, Billy. Any old tune’ll do. There’s none there but the kind I like. Might try——”
Again the footman came in. This time not with coffee, but with a card.
“I thought I told Gaines I wasn’t to be broke in on this evening,” began Conover, glowering at the intruder. “Say I can’t see anyone. I’m busy, and——”
He had taken the card as he spoke. Now, as he read it, his order trailed off into perplexed silence, even as Billy Shevlin, his face one big grin at Staatz’s discomfiture, started the phonograph on the classic strains of “Everybody Works but Father.”
“Turn off that measly racket!” roared Caleb. “Ain’t you got any better sense than to go fooling with toys a time like this? I’ll be back in a few minutes, boys. My New York lawyer wants me for something.”
He left the study and hurried downstairs to where, in the hall, a man stood awaiting him.
“Come in here, Wendell,” directed the Railroader, shaking hands with his new guest, and leading the way to the library. “What’re you doing in this part of the country? Glad to see you.”
“I bring you bad news—very bad news, I am afraid,” began the lawyer as Conover closed the library door behind them.
“I know that,” snapped Caleb. “I knew it as soon as I saw your face, but I didn’t want you shouting it out in the hall where my butler could hear you. That’s why I—well, what is it? Tell me, can’t you?”
“Your son——”
“Yes, Jerry, of course. I knew that, too. But what’s he done this time?”
“This is, as I said, a very serious——”
“Good Lord, man! I didn’t s’pose you’d took a four-hour train ride from New York a night like this to tell me he’d won a ping pong prize or joined the Y. M. C. A. The chap that’s got to have news broke to him has a head too thick for truth to be let into it any other way. Don’t stand there like a lump of putty. What’s up?”
The lawyer, flushing at the coarse invective, spared the father no longer. He spoke, and to the point.
“Your son,” he said, “is in the West Thirtieth Street police station on a charge of murder.”
Conover looked at him without a start, without visible emotion. For a full half minute he made no reply, no comment. Nor did his light, keen eyes flicker or turn aside.
Then—and Wendell feared from his words that the tidings had turned Caleb’s brain—the Railroader muttered, half to himself:
“‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’”