The Henchman
M >> Mark Lee Luther >> The HenchmanTHE HENCHMAN
BY
MARK LEE LUTHER
AUTHOR OF "THE FAVOR OF PRINCES," "THE RECKONING," "THE LIVERY OF
HONOR," ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1901,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
TO
GEORGE RICE CARPENTER
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Those familiar with the early history of Western New York will know the
"Tuscarora Stories" of this volume for twice-told tales which the
author has ventured to adapt from the suggestive "Pioneer History of
Orleans County," by Judge Arad Thomas.
BOOK I
The Henchman
CHAPTER I
It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple
somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful
comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot,
and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this
pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant
lion, his massy head thrust high in the North Country, his forepaws
dabbled in the confluence of the Hudson and the Sound, his middle and
hinder parts stretched lazily westward to Lake Erie and the Niagara.
Roughly speaking, in this noble animal's rounding haunch, which Ontario
cools, lies the Demijohn Congressional District whose majority party
was now in convention assembled. In election returns and official
utterances generally the Demijohn District bore a number like every
district in the land, but the singular shape lent it by the last
gerrymander had settled its popular title till another political
overturn should distort its outline afresh.
The spokesman of the defeated faction had been recognized by the chair,
and was moving that the convention's choice of the gentleman from
Tuscarora County be declared unanimous. His manner was even more
perfunctory than his words.
"The name of Calvin Ross Shelby," he ended colorlessly, "spells
success."
"Screws it out as if it hurt him," whispered the Hon. Seneca Bowers to
the nominee. "I tell you, Ross, there's no argument like delegates."
Bowers was a thick-set man of the later sixties, with a certain surface
resemblance to General Grant of which he was vain. So far as he could
he underlined the likeness, affecting a close-trimmed beard, a campaign
hat, and the inevitable cigar; when the occasion promised publicity
sufficient to outweigh the physical discomfort he even rode on
horseback; and he was a notable figure on Decoration Day and at all
public ceremonies of the Grand Army of the Republic. Shelby was his
protege.
The present member of Congress from the Demijohn District, whose seat
Shelby coveted, may be most charitably described as a man of tactless
integrity. His course in Washington had been a thorn in the side of
the organization by whose sufferance he rose, with the upshot that the
Tartar neared the end of his stewardship backed by a faction rather
than a party. The faction clamored for his renomination and pushed
their spirited, if poorly generalled, fight to the floor of the
convention. In debate they were eloquent, in logic unanswerable; nor
did any one attempt to answer them. With the best of possible causes
they lacked but the best of possible worlds to insure success. The
whole story of their failure was packed into the Hon. Seneca Bowers's
succinct phrase, "There's no argument like delegates."
The vanquished clustered in a little group apart marked by a suggestion
of tense nerves, but the gathering was noticeably of a kind. Country
lawyers, bankers, merchants, stockmen, farmers, in its units, it was
sealed as a whole with the seal of New England which had sent forth
these men's grandfathers and great-grandfathers in their ox-carts to
people and leaven the West. The transplanted New Englandism had
sloughed certain traits of the pioneers who laid the axe to the forests
of the Genesee Country and the Holland Purchase. Only the older people
of the Demijohn District now computed their dealings in shillings;
mentioning one's conscience on week-days was an eccentricity; the
doctrine of Original Sin had lapsed from among burning topics of
conversation; family records were less and less scrupulously kept; and
the _Mayflower's_ claim to consideration as the Noah's Ark of the only
ancestors worth reckoning had assumed a mask of comedy. Yet, all said,
the Yankee blood cropped out in face and limb and speech--particularly
in speech; the folk of the Demijohn District did not employ the dialect
of Hosea Biglow, nor a variant of it, but the insistent drawling R to
be heard on every second lip was of no doubtful lineage.
The victor, who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was
seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.
Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of
Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father
who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The
man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the
Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of
Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee,
and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got
the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive
scholarship in a narrow little sectarian college which boastfully
called itself a university. Here he acquired two wholesome things: a
perception that the college is but the beginning of education, and a
lasting disgust with bigotry of every stripe. There followed some
years of school-mastering by day and law-book drudgery by night, whose
end was his admission to the bar and a partnership with the man sitting
by his side. Then politics drew him, and, step by step, through rough
and ready service at the polls, in town caucus, county convention, what
not, he secured his footing and finally a seat in the lower house of
the State Legislature. In politics a hobby is often a useful piece of
property, and Shelby, who had a hobby, rode it to success; it made him
a marked man in the first month of his term, it gave him a popular
title, it compelled his renomination and reflection. Nowadays chairmen
always introduced him as the "Champion of Canals," and even at this
moment the catchword with cries of "speech" greeted him from every
quarter of the dingy convention hall. He unfleshed his strong teeth in
a wide-mouthed smile, rose, squared his shoulders, and walked alertly
down an aisle to the platform. Brought thus into the open, under the
yellow glare of a gas-light chandelier, he showed for a simply clad,
businesslike person, with a well-set head and a shaven jaw, whose
firmness a cushion of superfluous flesh could not disguise.
"Thank you, boys," he said.
The offhand fashion of address provoked a fresh demonstration which the
nominee acknowledged with a good-humored nod. His eye sauntered over
the delegates, and with a shrewd twinkle halted on the dejected group
which had fought his nomination.
"This happy occasion reminds me of a Tuscarora County story," he began,
with a little drawl; "the story of Tired Tinkham's election as overseer
of highways at Noah's Basin--a pioneer classic which some of you have
doubtless heard. It happened in the early days of Noah's Basin, when
that interesting village contained perhaps a score less people than
walk its changeless streets to-day. Tired Tinkham was the local Rip
Van Winkle--the children's friend and labor's foe. No one could
whittle green willow whistles in the springtime like Tired Tinkham, or
fashion bows and arrows with such fascinating skill. Like Rip also he
drank whenever a drink was forthcoming, but unlike Rip he did not hunt.
Minks, coons, and squirrels were plentiful, with here and there a deer
or bear, but Tired Tinkham was too weary to hunt. He fished; fished
day in and day out in the canal basin, which gives the place its name;
fished till the packet captains came to know him and point him out as a
fixture in the scenery. But, lazy as he was, Tired Tinkham didn't
monopolize all the laziness in Noah's Basin. In one particular
laziness was epidemic, even among the otherwise industrious, and it
took the form of shirking the road tax. No roads were wretcheder than
theirs; nobody cared less than they. In his personal view of life
Tired Tinkham was a fit exponent of the local theory of public duty,
and some village humorist accordingly hit upon the idea of nominating
him for overseer of highways. Tired Tinkham looked more than commonly
fatigued at the suggestion, but did not put the crown away. His
election was unanimous. Then Noah's Basin woke up. The jubilee
bonfires were scarcely ashes before Tired Tinkham delivered at the
corner grocery what he called his inaugural address. 'I cal'late I
know why I wuz 'lected; he said. 'T' loaf 'n' let ye loaf. I cal'late
ye've mistook suthin'. Ye'll work.' And work Noah's Basin did as it
had never worked before."
Shelby noted that the anecdote won even a thin-lipped grin from the
hostile camp.
"The Tired Tinkhams aren't so rare in politics," he went on. "We
sometimes put them in the White House. Americans have a way of growing
up to their responsibilities, and perhaps even I shall prove another
sort of man than I've been ticketed." His tone quickened suddenly, and
his glance fastened on the defeated anew. "I should count this honor
less had it fallen as a ripe fruit falls, the prize of the first comer.
We've had our battle; we wear our scars; no battle worth the name is
without its scars; but I assume to speak for every man present when I
say that the blows we give and take do not rankle to the prejudice of
the common cause. Our quarrels are wholly in the family, where speech
is free, for it is a fundamental article of our party creed that the
will of the majority should prevail. The will of the majority made
plain, it is our healthy custom to strip off our coats, and go to work:
The party, not the individual, is of moment;--the historic party of our
fathers, the party of the living present, the party of the future whose
bounds no man may set."
As he dropped into his seat, Shelby added a foot-note.
"If that didn't jam their duty down those soreheads' throats," he told
Bowers, "I'll take another guess."
CHAPTER II
Meanwhile the nominee's fortunes and traits of character underwent
dissection in his own town at the first autumn assembly of the Culture
Club which, as always, met with Mrs. Hilliard. There were two profound
reasons for this constancy to Mrs. Hilliard,--her house boasted the
largest double parlors in New Babylon, and her husband had a billiard
table. The intimate association of billiards with the pursuit of
sweetness and light may at first seem grotesque, but Mrs. Hilliard
proved it to be not without warrant in sound philosophy; by her simple
formula billiards stood to culture as the Salvation Army to the
decorous body of the Church Militant, both alliances resting on the
basic truth that some souls will prick ears only to the beating of
tom-toms.
Theory aside, the fact was not to be blinked that she knew how to clash
cymbals to the unregenerate and drum up in the name of culture such a
varied company as no other woman could muster short of a silver
wedding. In the winning of the cultivated, Mrs. Hilliard took no
pride. They lent their countenance to any educational project, and she
owned to herself that given a like cause any capable woman with double
parlors could have them for the asking. It was rather in the hooking
of men of the stamp of the Hon. Seneca Bowers and her own husband that
she gloried, for in their candid souls they styled great Shakespeare
rot and voted Ibsen and Tolstoi sheer bedlamites at large. While mind
met mind below stairs these honest gentlemen contentedly knocked the
balls about the green, smoked hospitable Joe Hilliard's cigars, and
sampled the choicest liquors of his sideboard. By such diplomacy every
important walk in the town's life came to have its representative in
what in her heart of hearts Mrs. Hilliard called her salon.
The first autumn meeting should have gladdened the hostess. Her house
had never lighted to better advantage; everybody admired the new
decorations; she herself felt no impulse to quarrel either with nature
or her dressmaker; the programme had run with consummate
smoothness,--Volney Sprague, the editor of the _Tuscarora County Whig_,
reading a scholarly paper on Shakespeare's anachronisms, and his fast
friend Bernard Graves leading the discussion in his usual clever way;
furthermore, the ices which had been ordered for this very special
occasion had proved everything that ices should be. Yet Mrs. Hilliard
was dissatisfied.
"The club positively loses a vital something of its individuality when
Mr. Bowers and Mr. Shelby are absent," said she.
Mrs. Bowers, a large placid personage of indefinite waist-line,
remarked that nothing except politics could have dragged her husband
away.
"What a pity that the Hon. Seneca had to miss your anachronisms,
Volney," murmured Bernard Graves, who was a personable young gentleman
of thirty.
"And Shelby," queried the editor, "hasn't that choice spirit your pity
too?"
Mrs. Hilliard caught nothing of their sarcasm save Shelby's name.
"I miss his criticism," she declared. "It's so practical."
The editor fell to polishing his eye-glasses for lack of a reply.
"And so helpful," pursued the lady. "He has the faculty of ending a
tangled discussion with a word."
"The dear man usually changes the subject," muttered the editor
savagely under cover of an amiable platitude put forth by Mrs. Bowers.
"Or fogs it round with one of his Tuscarora yarns," dropped Graves.
The topic apparently knew no bottom for Mrs. Hilliard.
"How he will shine in Congress!" she went on. "Of course he'll get the
nomination?" She referred the query to Sprague.
"Probably." His reply was lukewarm.
"And isn't there news of the convention? You ought to know, who get
straight from the wires what ordinary mortals must wait to read. Has
he won?"
"There was nothing definite when I left the office. They hadn't begun
to ballot."
Mrs. Hilliard sensed an increasing dryness in the editor's manner.
"We're not talking literature, are we?" she laughed.
Bernard Graves considered the moment ripe for a paradox.
"The by-laws of the ideal literary club would forbid all literary
talk," he declared. "Then there would be nothing else."
"Cynic," rebuked the lady, threatening punishment with her fan. "We
shall talk politics if we choose."
Disseminating culture and an odor of patchouli she drifted down the
drawing-room to join another group, and the two men caught a fragment
of feminine comment from a divan hard by.
"Cora Hilliard is handsome," asserted a voice. "Look at those
shoulders."
"She manoeuvres to show them. Besides, she's too stout."
"What can you expect, my dear, after thirty-three years of idleness?"
"She's thirty-six," came the scrupulous correction.
"You don't mean it? And a blonde!"
"Oh, I know it's so. We were classmates in the seminary. Besides, her
Milicent is a year and two months older than my Georgie, who will be
thirteen in October, and when Milicent was born her mother was
twenty-two."
"She says she feels twenty-two now."
"Well, she looks--" the gossip languished to an indistinct murmur.
"More literary discussion," said Sprague.
"It's as literary as politics."
"You're capable of saying it's as interesting."
"Why not? It's very human."
"So is politics."
"We are drifting on the rocks of an argument. You and I can't agree
about politics, and we'd better stop trying. What absorbs you bores
me--this tiresome Shelby above all."
"Oh, surely you're not serious," protested Sprague, eagerly. "It isn't
possible that you care nothing whether Shelby or the honest man he's
scheming to supplant represents you in Washington."
"He attracts me neither as a man nor as a problem in ethics. But don't
be harsh with me. The fault is congenital, I'm sure. Every masculine
American is supposed to be interested in politics,--I wonder if the
Irish invented the notion,--but I can't conform; I don't know why."
"Gad," fumed the editor. "Your indifference is criminal."
"I like to hear you say 'gad,'" Graves observed. "You remind me of
Major Pendennis."
Sprague shrugged his thin shoulders impatiently.
"I tell you it's a crime for you to sit by as unconcerned as a mud idol
while other men struggle for civic decency."
"Picturesque as usual," applauded the delinquent, unruffled; but he
added, more seriously: "It's natural that you should feel strongly
after your newspaper war on Shelby. Is he so sure of the nomination?"
"If he's not sure, there's no virtue in packed caucuses."
"There, that interests me," cried Graves, brightening. "I'd like to
see a caucus packed. The slang attracts me somehow. Is it very
shocking?"
Sprague laughed in spite of himself.
"In things political your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You
belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far
removed: he's politically immoral; you are politically unmoral."
"We'll go and talk to Ruth Temple," decided the younger man, his eye
lighting on the central figure of a group, chiefly masculine. "Who can
look at her and maintain that the higher education of women is a mere
factory for frumps?"
"Ruth has a quaint rareness all her own," Sprague answered, watching
the play of the girl's mobile face. "She had it as a mere tot. Is it
her mouth, her simple dress, her hair?--One can't say precisely what."
"Don't try. You're squinting at her like an entomologist over a
favorite beetle. Take her for what she seems, and chuck analysis. She
is decorative. She satisfies the optic nerve."
"Which is intimately allied with other nerves, my bachelor." He
counted the men around the sofa where the girl sat beside little
Milicent Hilliard, and announced, "Seven; it's Queen Ruth always."
"And, like a true monarch, bored to extinction by her courtiers.
Behold Dr. Crandall browbeating the Rev. Mr. Hewett like a hanging
judge. I'll warrant they're talking politics too. The atmosphere is
drenched with it."
Sprague bent his head to listen.
"Wrong," he chuckled slyly. "It's literature this time, or what passes
as such. They're threshing out the immortal ode on the 'Victory of
Samothrace.'"
Bernard Graves laughed, also, at some jest well understood, and moved
to watch this eddy in the astonishingly widespread discussion of an
anonymous poem, of a certain rhetorical vigor, which had been
Interpreted by some critics as a plea for woman suffrage. At this
juncture Mrs. Hilliard suddenly bore down upon them, flourishing a
yellow paper.
"Such news, such news!" she called. "Here's a telegram--a telegram
from our candidate. He is nominated! Mr. Shelby is nominated. Think
of it! One of our members! And he has wired the good news to us first
of all!" She searched vainly for her glasses--her big blue eyes were
astigmatic--and finally, with an impatient "You read it to them all,"
thrust the message into Volney Sprague's reluctant fingers.
He unfolded and read the paper, in lively quandary whether her choice
were as haphazard as it seemed:--
"Nominated on first ballot. Home ten-thirty. Coming directly to club.
It stands first.
"C. R. SHELBY."
"Isn't that simply dear of him?" demanded Mrs. Hilliard. "_We_ come
first. He remembers us in his hour of triumph. It shows the true
nature of the man."
"It does indeed," grumbled Sprague, shifting within pinching distance
of Bernard Graves, whom he had seen grinning in the background during
the reading. "It's a barefaced bid for votes."
Mrs. Hilliard's enthusiasm demanded a vent.
"He'll be here in five minutes," she exclaimed, peering at the hall
clock. "The message was delayed somehow, and his train is due now. We
must devise a reception. We owe it to him. He thought of us. We must
think of him. What shall we do? Think, think, you clever people!"
"That preposterous woman means to turn this into a ratification
meeting," groaned the editor under his breath. "I must get out."
His hostess was of another mind, however, and barred retreat when he
attempted to make his excuses.
"You shan't desert us," she declared roguishly. "You can't," she
immediately added, at the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel of the
drive. "He's here! The hall, the hall! Into the hall!" And into the
hall Mrs. Hilliard masterfully bundled the Culture Club of New Babylon,
grouping it theatrically around the newel-post and up the winding stair.
"Gad," muttered Sprague, struggling to efface himself, "knock me in the
head."
Bernard Graves gleefully struck an attitude behind a friendly palm, and
Mrs. Hilliard threw wide the door.
"Welcome to your own people," she cried, and Shelby, closely followed
by Bowers, crossed the threshold into the light. Then big Joe
Hilliard, whom the unwonted commotion had attracted from the billiard
room, led a boisterous cheer, which the candidate received with
modestly bowed head. He flushed, and wrestled with his diffidence like
a schoolboy, as the house grew still and they waited for him to speak.
"I--I don't claim the credit, friends," he stammered. "It's your
victory."
CHAPTER III
Midway in the following forenoon Shelby sat in his law office revising
for the seventh time the last will and testament of the Widow
Weatherwax. It was the seventh revision of her third last will and
testament, to speak by the card, for the widow had a bent for
will-making, which the lawyer had noticed was of periodic intensity.
Once, in a moment of drollery, he entered a jocose memorandum in the
"tickler," under the first week-day of several successive months:
"Revise Mrs. Weatherwax's will;" and such was his foresight that twice
only during that term did she frustrate his prophecy.
This day, as always, she attained the topmost step outside his office
door breathless, and, as always, Shelby gravely lent a hand to deposit
her plump little person in the softest of his old-fashioned office
chairs. The ceremony ended regularly with the panting announcement,
"The Lord has spared me for another month."
It was the man's custom at such times to allot equal praise to
Providence and the widow's marvellous vitality for this happy issue,
and to hazard a guess that she had thought of important changes for her
will. The widow would nod assent over a heaving bosom, and slowly fan
herself back to normal respiration. The relict of a leather-lunged
Free Methodist preacher, she affected a garb of ostentatious
simplicity. No godless pleats or tucks or gores or ruffles or sinful
abominations of braid defaced the chaste sobriety of her black gown;
buttons were tolerated merely as buttons, without vain thought of
ornament; and the strange little bonnet, which she perched above hair
whose natural coquetry of curl was austerely sleeked away, was of a
composition so harshly ugly that more worldly-minded women shuddered at
the sight. The worldly-minded, indeed, were prone to the criticism
that the material of Mrs. Weatherwax's garments was beyond cavil, but
this surely was her own concern. It were sheer impertinence to finger
the texture of a zealot's sackcloth.
Shelby busied himself with his papers, pending her recovery.
"Them stairs alluz give me sech a turn," she sighed, at length. She
enunciated her R's with the merciless fidelity of her section at its
worst, saying stair-urs and tur-urn.
"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized
Shelby.
"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give me
a wuss turn than the stairs."
"They're trying moving stairways in some places,--a French invention, I
believe."
"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless
people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."
Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he
held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced
upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips
of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally
held to have been green.
"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.
The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his
brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive becomes
a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past his
writhings to the ancient table.
"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"
"Yes. He used it in his place of business."
"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl,"
pursued the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement.
"Distillin's a wicked business."
"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's day."
The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top
desk?"
"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."