“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.”