"I promise," she said.
Before the week elapsed the newspapers announced that Ludlow had decided to resume the practice of law in New York. Cora made no comment; but Shelby read into the retreat her purpose to keep their sorry truce inviolate, and strove to shut his mind to every thought alien to his work.
The public business was absorbing enough in truth. His great canal project, which during a month of hearings, conferences, committee enmeshments, and the like, had hung in jeopardy, was wrecked beyond repair. Nor was this the worst. The governor's forcing of the issue had convinced the Boss that a popular demand for canal legislation of some sort really existed, and he prepared to respond with a measure after his own heart. A vicious substitute, which it was given out that the organization fully indorsed, glided facilely to its final reading after the manner of bills bearing the mystic sign manual of the Boss. Foreseeing disaster, Shelby sought at least to rescue the wise provision of his plan which looked to the administration of the canals along business lines, and to this end used his personal influence with various members of the Legislature. Achieving little here, he even appealed to the leader himself.
The Boss wrote him in his ironic mood.
"Naturally I cannot forecast the action of the Legislature," he said, following his modest custom of disclaiming foreknowledge of the events he shaped; "but in my opinion any measure which ignores the legitimate expectation of patronage on the part of the party in power is too idyllic for this workday world."
Shelby was at no loss to give this dictum its true interpretation. His own scheme had secured the party's legitimate rights sufficiently—he was too clear-sighted to overlook that. It was the party's illicit greed for spoils which he had failed to satisfy—the greed which the Boss had framed his makeshift to meet. The opportunity for jobbery was left as wide as before, perhaps wider; for while under color of economy the appropriation cut the reasonable sum Shelby had suggested as a beginning, it was a vast amount still. So conceived, and at the eleventh hour saddled with an amendment directing the building of a costly feeder which the engineers had declared needless, the travesty of all the governor's good intentions passed both Houses by a narrow vote, and reached Shelby himself.
Jacob Krantz, whose interest in this particular bit of legislation was keen, in his own vernacular hit off the situation.
"It's time for a show-down," said this observer of things as they are. "The Boss has put it up to the Champion of Canals to make good his bluff."
Shelby realized this truth clearly enough in the ten days given him by the constitution for his decision; but he took no one into his confidence, and fought his dreary battle alone. It was a hard choice that destiny had offered him in the end—total shipwreck of his brave dreamings, or a salvage of what perhaps might better sink. Had his duty by the people been absolutely plain, he would have acted instantly, for he had striven to be the people's governor; but in the ten days of his ordeal the people seemed to speak with a hundred differing tongues, whose single coherent message proclaimed what he already knew—that for him there could be no middle way. The bill was in the form of a concurrent resolution to submit the appropriation to popular vote; but Shelby had no mind to dodge his responsibility. With his record, with his conception of his trust, he must confront the issue squarely—sign or reject.
One of the most clamorous of the newspapers favoring the bill phrased his choice yet more narrowly, quoting copiously from his speeches and bidding him "sign or stultify." But appeals to his consistency found him deaf. The man who never changed his mind and the man who never changed his coat were to him equally ridiculous; time had its sport with each of them. Another attack, made when he had held the bill for upward of a week and a rumor of a veto was rife, drew blood. Volney Sprague's Whig which, without ever thinking good of Shelby, had long since returned to the party fold, embraced the occasion to revive the old scandals linking Shelby's name to unsavory canal contracts, with the insinuation that the governor's real quarrel with the bill which had passed lay in the fact that it exposed too few millions to thievery. The erratic editor's virtual allegiance to the Boss whom he once had flayed, might have caused Shelby a smile, had he not been saddened by the thought that any human being could misunderstand him so completely. To him it was a transparent truth that because he had known the canal's abuses as a politician, so surely must he wish to end them as governor of the state.