Albert Payson Terhune

“ It was like him to array in battle-order all the contrary arguments of the case; that with the brute force of his domination he might batter them to pieces. And a long array they were.
First,—his own social yearnings, his golden dreams of a secure place within the inner charmed circle of Granite society! The only road of ingress had been through marriage with a daughter of that circle. ”

“ Rex laid back his ears and rolled up his eyes in beatific quiescence.
“The beauty!” applauded Desirée. “See, Caleb! [272] He’s trying to look like a Numidean lion. He worships children. Look at him!”
“You forget, Desirée,” said Mrs. Hawarden, in icy pleasantry. “Rex is not a tripe sandwich. To a rare soul like Mr. Conover’s, even a sunset,—to say nothing of a mere dog and a child—must yield to the charms of supper. Come. We’re all keeping him.”
“I had an idee,” muttered Caleb, as he passed her on the way to the dining room, “that it was ’tother way round.” ”

“ To Caine’s casual warning anent Blacarda, Caleb gave no heed whatever. He had conquered the man once. Should the need arise, he could do so again. In the meantime he had no time to waste in following his victim’s crawling movements.
[237] Great was Caleb Conover. He was fighting. He had always been fighting. Just now, battle was as the breath of his nostrils. For he was waging a winning fight; warring and winning on a scale to which he had never before been able to attain. And the militant bulldog part of him was strangely elate. ”

“ Before them lay a natural vista winding between ranks of black trees. Starlight filtered through, giving an uncanny glimmer to the still darkness.
“It is like breaking into fairyland!” gasped the girl, tense and vibrant with the hushed wonder of it all, “We are mortals. We have no right in Oberon’s domain. But he sees what very very nice, harmless mortals we are. So he doesn’t change us to bats or fireflies. He just lets us trespass all we want to. And perhaps he’ll even let us see a real fairy. An elf, anyway.”
Caleb laughed, in sheer happiness. ”

“ Pompton Avenue was hard hit.
Nor was this the sum of Caleb’s warm weather activities. There were other deals less widely blazoned, yet quite as remunerative; deals that plunged so far beneath the surface of practical politics as to emerge black with the mire of the bottom. But it was gold-bearing mud, and Caleb knew the secret of assaying it. These submerged ventures brought at odd hours to the stuffy private office a succession of slum-dwellers; even as the mergers brought, at other hours, the Pompton Avenue element. Long were the conferences and deeply was the Underworld stirred thereby. ”

“ There is something very soporific, to the Philistine outlander, in a rendition of ultra-classical music long sustained. Conover shook himself impatiently to scare off the drowsiness that threatened to enmesh him. Desirée glanced at him with merry encouragement as the tireless pianist’s last reluctant note was followed by a ripple of civil applause. The clapping and Desirée’s look combined to bring Caleb’s drowsy senses back to normal wakefulness.
“That chap,” he whispered, “can’t play anywhere near as good as you do. Lord, but he did hit that old pianner some cruel ones! ”

“ It isn’t every man who finds himself guardian to an exquisite bit of animated Sevres china. I’m lying back to watch for the time when some scared youth comes to ask your leave to marry her.”
“What’s that?” snarled Conover, stopping and glowering up at the tall, clean-cut figure at his side.
“Don’t get excited,” laughed Caine. “You can’t expect as lovely and lovable a girl as Desirée Shevlin to live and die an old maid. If you’re so opposed to this imaginary suitor I’ve conjured up, why not marry her yourself?”
“Marry? That kid? Me?” ”

“ Caleb filled his lungs and shouted across the sea of mist. Again and again he bellowed forth his long-drawn halloo. To anyone on the nearer hilltop islands his call might readily have been heard. But human voice could as readily have penetrated a mountain of cotton-batting as carry sound through that waste of cloud-reek.
At length the two fugitives realized this. A last shout, a final straining of ears for some answering cry; then Conover turned again to the girl. ”

“ A hatless man,—dripping wet, mud-smeared, grimy as a coal heaver,—took the State House steps three at a stride. In less than two minutes it was known throughout the Assembly that Caleb Conover had come. A word here, a hint there, a pulling of mysterious wires:—and the wavering backbones of his more doubtful satellites in the Legislature were miraculously stiffened. The Starke Bill had not yet come to a vote; thanks to Bourke and his colleagues [90] who had wearied the Assembly to desperation and maddened Blacarda to frenzy by a continuous series of the most glaring filibuster tactics. ”

“ One could hardly fancy Caleb Conover in love. And then—unless you count this evening’s affair—I doubt if he was ever in an adventure of any sort in his life. His character, from a literary viewpoint, doesn’t lend itself to action or analysis. In making the study of human nature my hobby, I have—”
“I see!” broke in Letty, almost sharply. “You are quite right. He would be impossible in a story—as he is in real life!”
“I hardly think so,” demurred Caine. “Not impossible. Improbable, at worst. I am afraid a great many people in Granite will find that out before he is through.” ”

“ Conover felt he was getting on finely. A most flattering attention—far different from the slight aloofness of the evening’s earlier moments—greeted his every word. Caine, however, seemed actually jealous of his friend’s popularity; for he cut in now with a complete change of subject.
“I wonder,” he conjectured, addressing no one in particular, “why tenors invariably are born without intelligence. When Providence gives a man a great tenor voice, He gives him nothing else. Perhaps, though, he needs nothing else.”
But an avalanche of trite sayings could not have halted Caleb. ”

“ Why hadn’t the old fool who built the engine made one that could travel faster than a hand car?
The express—thanks to Caleb’s track-clearing telegram—rolled into Granite station a full half hour ahead of time. Long before the cars came to a lurching halt under the sheds, Conover, with all an old-time railroad man’s deftness, had swung off the moving train and had started down the platform at a run. Through bevies of departing passengers he clove a rough, unapologetic way. Station hands leaped nimbly aside and gazed in gaping amaze after their hurrying President. ”

“ As he turned to leave, the canvas curtains slowly parted and a gold-red collie stepped into the tent. He glanced about him with the air of one quite at home, and proceeded, with majestic friendliness, to walk across to where Conover stood.
“What’s the measly dog doin’ in here?” demanded Caleb, somewhat taken aback at the visit.
“Why, it’s Rex,” answered Jack, as though that statement explained everything. “He goes wherever he wants to. Desirée thinks the world of him.” ”

“ Each envelope that met Caine’s inquisitive eye bore Desirée Shevlin’s handwriting. Selecting one from the budget, Caleb opened it with a strangely gentle motion of his stubby fingers, glanced in silence over a few lines, then read aloud:
“‘It’s like some wonderful dream; and every day I’m afraid I shall wake up and find it isn’t so. The air is like crystal that has been dipped in balsam.’ Why in blazes,” interpolated Conover, in perplexity, “should anybody want to dip crystal in balsam. ”

“ Caleb, in obedience to Desirée’s gesture rowed closer. The oarsman of the other boat proved to be Jack Hawarden who was returning with his mother from a climb of the Crags.
“Isn’t this sunset well worth traveling all the way from Granite to see?” called Jack.
“It is kind of pretty,” assented Caleb.
“‘Pretty!’” repeated Mrs. Hawarden in gentle scorn. “What a word for such a scene! It brings out all that is highest and most beautiful in one!” she went on soulfully. “I wish, instead of rowing back to the Antlers to supper, I might drift on here forever.” ”

“ Ugly at first glance, but with a hundred-year-old charm that somehow grips one. Sea, sunshine and wind; and the eternal roar of the surf.”
“H’m!” grunted Caleb, disapprovingly, “Nice, lively sort of a joint for a busy man to go lookin’ for fun! ’Bout as jolly as its own jail, I should think.”
“It has no jail,” retorted Caine, “No jail, no almshouse, no asylum. There hasn’t been a criminal, nor a pauper, nor an insane person on the whole island in a century. ”

“ A man who can plan what you are planning, and who can boast of it, isn’t fit to speak to any woman. You went to that house as a guest—and you asked mens’ opinions in the smoking room—”
“It was the dressin’ room, Dey,” he pleaded, “An’ it was only me an’ Caine—”
“You ask mens’ opinion,” blazed on Desirée, unheeding, “as to whether you are likely to gain anything in a social way by wrecking an innocent girl’s life. ”

“ But mere cold could not quench Desirée’s pleasure in the simple escapade.
“We are runaway slaves!” she cried, her mood shifting from fairyland to a newer fantasy, “We are escaping from a fearsome Simon Legree named Conventionality! Conventionality is a wicked master who has whipped us and piled chains on us ever since we were born. And now we’ve put him to sleep in two tents and we’re running away from him. He’d be furious if he woke up. But he’s snoring very industriously. And he surely won’t wake,—in either tent—for at least an hour. ”

“ Desirée had translated the words for Caleb. She had told him the pictured man was Siegmund; who, pausing in his flight to a place of refuge, with the fainting Sieglinde whom he loved, beheld the Valkyr, Brunhilde, and was told by her that a hero’s death and a hero’s reward in Valhalla were in store for him. There in the Viking Paradise, waited the warrior-parent he had lost; there Wotan the All-Father would welcome him. The Valkyries were preparing his place. The heroes of olden days would be his boon companions. ”

“ More than once it occurred to Letty to tell Caine all her fears. But, stripped of woman’s formless, illogical intuition, what was there to tell? She had no shadow of actual fact to go on; and men demand facts. So she continued to puzzle her lover by alternate [246] spells of effusive demonstration and chilling sulks. ”

“ And so, like a sleepless Galahad before some old-world forest shrine,—like Stylites on his pillar,—worshipping yet in infinite suffering,—he sat the long night through.
At length his body grew numb, his blood congested. Aching discomfort and cold had wrought their worst on his frame of iron and had left it hardily impervious to further ill. His mind, when bodily surcease came, awoke to new activity. ”

“ Colfax, hearing it, came out from the inner room to meet him. Caleb gazed at the man with dull vacancy. He did not remember having seen him before.
“Miss—Miss Shevlin?” asked Conover, thickly; his throat agonizingly raw from the long hours of tireless, unremittent calling.
“She will get well, I think,” answered the specialist. “The crisis is past. The spine was not injured. But convalescence will be slow. Nursing is the only thing left to do now. I am leaving for New York by the six o’clock train.” ”

“ You sit by her at dinner—at her own father’s table—and plan in smug complacency how to separate her from a man she really loves,—and to compel her to marry you. Why, you aren’t fit to marry her chambermaid. There isn’t a groom in her stable that hasn’t higher, holier ideals. Now go! This is the last time I want to see you as long as I live!”
A swirl of soft skirts, the sharp slam of a door, [195] and Caleb Conover, aghast, wordless with dismay stood alone on the little moon-lit porch. ”