The Henchman | Page 3

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.