It was a confused scene which Gwinnan had left. Harshaw’s friends
pressed about him, animated equally, perhaps, by curiosity and surprise.
His self-restraint had given way. He swore with every breath he drew,
repeating, in answer to questions, the unlucky threat over and again.
“I said that he would be impeached, and that I would introduce the
resolution in the House myself. And so, by God, I will!”
His face was hot and scarlet. The perspiration stood out on his forehead.
He ground his teeth and clenched his hands. He would walk forward a few
unsteady steps, then pause to reiterate and explain, and swear that if
Gwinnan were not at death’s door he would cowhide him within an inch
of his life. The progress of the group, slow as it was, with these
frequent interruptions, was in the direction of the stairs. It was
chiefly composed of members of the legislature, and, there being a night
session, they mechanically took their way to the Capitol. A few gentlemen
lounging about the corridor were watching their exit with the gusto
of disinterested spectators, as they disappeared down the staircase,
reappearing below in the rotunda,—Harshaw still in the van, his florid
face bloated with rage, his hat on the back of his head, his hands thrust
in the pockets of his trousers. His friends wore a becoming gravity, but
Harshaw was too thoroughly a man of this world not to suspect that they
valued more the diversion he furnished than his interests as affected
by the episode. They all crossed the office, and disappeared finally
through the street door, and the spectators on the corridor shifted
their postures, and tipped off the ash grown long on their cigars, and
commented.
“Biggest blatherskite out of hell, Harshaw is,” remarked a young fellow,
who flung himself diagonally into a seat, hanging his long legs over one
arm of the chair and resting his back against the other. He put his cigar
into his mouth, and puffed at his ease. He had a pale face, thin dark
hair, irregular features, straight black eyebrows, and wide, black eyes,
quickly glancing, but with a suggestion of melancholy. He was handsomely
dressed, although he wore his clothes with a slouching, irreverent air,
as if he gave his attire scant heed. Despite their cut and quality, there
was nothing dapper about him. He had a lank, listless white hand, and
a foot singularly long and narrow. His forehead was remarkably high,
austere, and noble; one might look in vain for correlative expressions
in the other features. He was languid and inattentive, but this manner
suggested affectation, for it did not eliminate the idea of energy. He
smoked a great deal, and drank not much, but discriminatingly; he was
proud of seeming reckless, and of being more reckless than he seemed.
He had other qualities more genial. He knew a good dog when he saw
him. He knew a good horse, and he loved him. He was the possessor of
a liberal hand and a long purse. He had an enthusiastic admiration
of fine principles, and he had—the pity of it!—his own definition of
fine principles. He entertained a horror of anything base, and he had
a command of very strong language to characterize it. He arrogated to
himself the finer attributes. He strained for the heroic poise. He would
feel nothing, believe nothing, do nothing, that was unbecoming of what
he esteemed the noblest expression of man and gentleman. Nevertheless
he had no serious objects in life, no absorbing ambition, no ability to
originate. But he could espouse another man’s cause with a fervor of
unselfishness. The excitements and vicissitudes of the affairs of others
rejoiced the voids of his capacities for emotion. He was of the stuff of
which adherents are made, essentially a partisan. His prototypes have
ridden in the ranks of every losing cause since the world began. He was
of the essence of those who are born for freaks of valor, for vagrant
enthusiasms, for misguided fantastic feuds, for revolution.
“Do you think, sir, that Mr. Harshaw had no foundation for his threat,”
said an elderly granger, who leaned against a pillar,—“no foundation for
this charge against Judge Gwinnan?”
“Gwinnan may have ruled against him a time or two,” said Kinsard. “That’s
about the size of it.”
He had a pedigree as long as his favorite colt’s, but this was the way he
talked.
“It is a gross slander, then; it implies a stealage, or taking a bribe,
or some malfeasance in office,—the judicial office,” said one of the
by-standers.
“It was very shabby in Harshaw to say it; then, thinking Gwinnan
had never heard of it, to go fawning up, pretending to be so mighty
friendly,” rejoined another.
Kinsard’s black eyes turned slowly from one speaker to the other.
“If I had been Judge Gwinnan, I would have killed him for it,” he said,
with his cigar held tightly between his fingers. “I would have spilt his
brains, not his blood; and I would have had some scientific man to find
the precise section of the brain structure which ideated that theory,
and I would have had it comminuted, and vaporized, and transmuted into
nothingness.”
He spoke with calmness, as if these things were done every day for the
vengeful in Tennessee.
The granger took off his spectacles suddenly. He wanted to see this
extraordinary young man, who he had an idea was too dangerous to be at
large.
The others looked at him with a less serious air. They had before heard
him talk.
“Well,” said a certain Mr. Forsey, also a young man, who had dropped upon
the broad window-seat and lounged there, holding one knee in his clasped
hands, and smoking too, “do you think Harshaw would have ventured to say
it if there were no foundation for it,—if Gwinnan had done nothing to
suggest such a proceeding? What motive had Harshaw?”
He was a different manner of man. He had close-cut fair hair, a face
broad across the cheek-bones and narrow at the chin, sparse whiskers and
a light gray, wide-open eye. He had a sedulously neat appearance, a soft
tread, and delicate white hands, in one of which he held his hat.
“What motive? What motive for slander? Go to first principles. Gwinnan
has got something that Harshaw wants.” Kinsard put his cigar into his
mouth and went on talking as he held it fast between his teeth. “What
fools we all are! We make laws against predatory beasts and decree their
extermination. Pay a bounty for the scalps of the marauding men, I
say,—the sharp fellows who ravage and pillage and have contrived so far
to keep the law on their side. But pshaw!” he shifted his legs over the
arm of the chair impatiently. “He can’t hurt Gwinnan. Talk can’t compass
the impeachment of a judge. Gwinnan is one of the strongest men on the
bench. Made the stiffest show that ever was seen when he ran against old
Judge Burns, who had sat on the bench in that circuit till everybody
thought he owned it. Old man could have mortgaged the bench,—could have
raised money on it, I haven’t a doubt. Gwinnan couldn’t have beat Burns,
if he hadn’t been above reproach and suspicion; it’s a tremendous thing
to upset an old fixture like that.”
Mr. Kinsard’s views, as his colleagues in the legislature had discovered
to their confusion, were apt to confirm his hearers in the opposite
opinion. A bill was much safer when he arrayed himself against it. Mr.
Forsey was not convinced that so serious a charge would have been made
with absolutely nothing to support it. The idea of the blurtings of
an uncontrolled rage occurred to neither of them. Forsey sat looking
so steadily at the dapper toe of his boot for a time, and yet with so
stealthy a stillness, that his manner might have suggested the bated
exultation of a cat that had had a glimpse of a frisking mouse in that
neighborhood, and was waiting to pounce upon it.
“Judge Gwinnan has the reputation,” gravely remarked the granger, who
looked as if he might be a pillar of the church, “of being a very upright
man, a most worthy man, and a Christian gentleman.”
“Of course he is,” said Kinsard; “no question about it, and nobody but
a fool would have thought of anything else. I am going to introduce a
bill,” he added seriously, “to make the fool-killer a State officer. We
need him more than a geologist, or a governor, or anybody but a sheriff.
A fool-killer ought to be on the State pay-roll.”
No one said anything further, for Kinsard was lazily pulling himself out
of the contortions into which he had sunk in the chair.
He was very striking when he stood at his full height. There was an
air of dash and bravery about him engaging to the imagination. His
high, broad forehead gave nobility and seriousness to a face that would
otherwise have been only sparkling, or sneering, or melancholy, as
his mood dictated. One might have hoped that should he wear out his
fantastic, aimless, erratic spirit, should some blow subdue it and give
it into his control, he would develop great gifts hitherto dwarfed and
denied. He was aware of them in some sort; he bore himself as a man
endowed with some splendor of preeminence. And others accorded it. Youth
has much credit given to its promise, despite that it so often falls in
the bud or fails in the fruit. But it rarely has so brilliant a prospect
as here; and after he had strolled off at a leisurely, swinging gait,
saying that he was going to the House, where a bill was coming up that
he wanted to kill, they all looked after him, and commented on him, and
called him a fine, high-minded young man, and said that it was a good
thing for young fellows to have political ambition, and that it was dying
out among that class generally, who was too fond of making money and of
using their time to their own advantage.
He stood for a moment on the steps of the hotel, drawing on his gloves.
Despite the snow, there was a faint suggestion of spring in the air. A
thaw had set in. He heard drops slowly pattering down from the cornice
above. The blue-white splendors of the electric light, with its myriad
fine and filar rays whorled out into the darkness, showed a deserted
street. A carriage, looking with its two lamps like some watchful-eyed
monster, pulled up in front of the door, and the colored driver, with a
wide display of a toothful grin, alighted with a “Want a hack, boss?”
“Jim, Tom—oh, it’s Dick,” said Kinsard, glancing at the dusky face in the
lamplight; he knew all the colored folks in town. “Well, drive me to the
Capitol, and don’t be all night about it, either.”
He flung himself upon the seat, lifted his long, slender feet to the
opposite cushions, and with a complete collapse of anatomy resigned
himself to the transit. The vehicle moved from the curb with something of
the sound of a boat pushing off from shore, so splashing was its progress
through the deep slush of the streets. The hoof-beats of the horses were
muffled; the voice of the driver sounded, and was still again. Kinsard
smoked in idle abstraction, hardly thinking, perhaps, even of his mission
and the slaughter of the “innocent William,” as he slangily called the
bill which he intended to kill. When the carriage had climbed the Capitol
hill, on which the fair edifice towered, glimmering vaguely white against
the purple night, its rows of illuminated windows all gleaming yellow,
and casting dim shafts of light adown the snowy slopes of the grounds
below, he roused himself and looked out. Even after he had alighted and
ascended the long flights of stone steps, between the groups of great
figures that stand beneath the flaring gas lamps, he turned, and more
than once walked the length of the stately portico, gazing down with
a vague attraction which he could hardly have explained at the snowy
roofs of the city, on its many hills, amidst the dun-colored intervals
of the streets and the misty depressions. The heavens were purple above
it; the stars palpitated in the infinite distances; a late moon was
rising. He recognized the outline of Fort Negley to the south against
the sky; he saw the steely gleam of the river. Spires, long glancing
lines of light, domes, turrets, mansard roofs, mingled in picturesque
fantasies of architecture. A bell rang out a mellow note; the icy air
had crystalline vibrations. Here and there the aureola of an unseen
electric light, the mere fringes of lustre, seemed the rising of some
more cheerful orb; for melancholy hung upon the progress of the moon.
In the tower of a public building Time lifted a smiling face in an
illuminated dial, and far away to the west he saw a planet touch a spire,
in an unprophesied conjunction. The lights of homes, yellow, steady,
gleaming in some fantasy of form, seemed themselves a constellation of
more genial suggestion than the pallid keener clustered scintillations of
the chimeras of the skies. The gilded cross of the cathedral held aloft
over the city was sublimated in the moonbeams and the fair nocturnal
influences; it was mystic, effulgent, seeming to radiate light like the
consecrated sign in a vision. He did not feel the cold; he stood for
a long time, with his hands in his pockets, his overcoat falling back
on his shoulders, watching with his restless eyes the quiet snowy town
suffused with dreamy yellow light and pervaded by long, pensive shadows.
Suddenly he turned and went within.
The House of Representatives presented a spectacle not altogether
unprecedented in his experience. A spirited debate was in progress.
Sixteen men were trying to speak at once. The seventeenth earnest orator
was forcibly held in his chair by his friends. The speaker’s gavel
sounded continuously, but produced little effect upon the incoherency of
the discussion. Other members were talking in low tones of alien matters;
one had fallen asleep. His snores might have been generally noticed but
for the commotion. Kinsard glanced at him as he took his seat close by.
“That’s the best oratorical effort I ever heard McKimmon make,” he said
to a friend. “Observe how he sticks to the point: iterative, it is
true; tautology might be urged against it as mere diction; but I admire
its simplicity, its comprehensibility, its continuity. There are no
digressions; nothing is done for effect; plain, cogent, impressive. It is
a fine display of natural eloquence.” His colleague burst out laughing,
and Kinsard looked at him in apparent surprise, lifting his straight
black eyebrows a little. Then he asked if the bill to remove the county
seat of Kildeer County had yet been reached.
“No,” said his friend, “but Harshaw has been around here after you three
or four times.”
The speaker’s gavel had succeeded in securing order, and now the sixteen
men’s statements and counter-statements were elicited in decorous
routine. The sudden cessation of noise roused Mr. McKimmon, whose
somnolency ended in a snort and a conviction that he had not closed
his eyes. He perceived a suspicion to the contrary in the minds of his
nearest neighbors, and he could not account for it.
After the House had voted upon the question of public policy which had so
agitated it, various minor bills were taken up, and there was a good deal
of quiet movement, groups of two or three colloguing together here and
there, and Harshaw came up again to talk to Kinsard.
“I want to know whether you’ll coöperate with us against the bill for
moving the county seat of Kildeer County.”
He stood leaning one arm upon Kinsard’s desk; the other was akimbo. He
knitted his brow meditatively, and pursed up his red lips, and looked not
at Kinsard, but at his inkstand. He had not altogether recovered from the
rebuff so publicly given in the hotel corridor.
It is always a misfortune when a man of Harshaw’s stamp has to contend
with any degree of injustice. He had repeated to Gwinnan the truth, and
for it he had been given the lie direct in circumstances under which
he could not resent it; even the original threat was only the blurtings
of an honest rage and for another man’s sake. He was clever in adroitly
justifying means and ends. To be armed with the truth, a genuine
grievance endowed him with a force, a self-respect, all-potent in their
way, and a wonderful driving-wheel to an already lubricated and too alert
machinery. He had an imperative serious air which seemed to intimate to
Mr. Kinsard that this was no time for fooling.
Kinsard was eccentric, ill-balanced. He was made up of prejudices, and he
obeyed the impulse of the moment as other men obey interest or law. He
was not predisposed in Harshaw’s favor. He took a different view of the
scene upon which Harshaw presumed. He looked up, a whimsical light in his
grave eyes, as he allowed Harshaw to waste his breath in urging him to
vote against a bill which he was already pledged to kill.
“The county line of those portions taken from Cherokee and Kildeer
counties to form a new county in no instance approaches the county seat
of Kildeer within eleven miles. There is no use for the people of Kildeer
to commit the extravagance of a new court-house when they already have
one,—a frame building, it is true, but spacious.”
He looked very spacious himself, as he stood erect and waved his arm, the
mental vision of the commodious Temple of Justice of Kildeer before him.
“Then, sir, it is thought there may be a railroad to the present county
seat, a branch of the T. C. V., which will aid in developing the
resources of the country.”
“Well, I don’t believe in railroads,” said Kinsard, unexpectedly.
“Whenever they get to talking about running a railroad from one little
town where there is nothing to another little town where that nothing is
not wanted, I understand it as developing the resources of the country.”
Harshaw was not in a mood to be bantered.
“Mr. Kinsard,” he said, “you are either a fool absolute, or you think I
am.”
“As far as you are concerned,” said Kinsard with mock courtesy, “I have
the highest opinion of your intelligence; ergo, it is more than probable
that I _am_ a fool.”
Harshaw endeavored to recover himself. He reassumed his more genial
manner. “Admit that we are a choice brace. Well, now, we want you on our
side; all the solid, substantial people of Kildeer County are arrayed
against it.”
“Oh, there are some solid citizens for it,” said Kinsard perversely, “or
you’d be willing for it to be put to the popular vote.”
Harshaw looked keenly at him. “Judge Gwinnan has been talking to you,
hasn’t he? We’ve had to fight his influence all the way through.”
“Well, Judge Gwinnan is a prominent citizen of that county and a very
sensible man, and if he is in favor of the change he must have good
reasons,” said Kinsard, seriously. “That’s enough to take it through.”
Harshaw cast an indignant glance upon him. “Well, before I’m done with
it I’ll show you that this General Assembly isn’t run by Judge Gwinnan’s
influence and by his myrmidons. I am glad you have let me know at last
whose mouthpiece you are!”
He walked away with that extraordinary quickness and lightness so
incongruous with his portliness. Kinsard’s black eyes, that seemed
kindled with actual flames, followed him for a moment. Then, as
comprehension slowly dawned upon him, and with a wrench as if he broke
from actual physical restraint, he started from his seat to follow.
“No, you won’t, now; no, you won’t.” His nearest neighbor had locked his
arm into Kinsard’s, and held it like a vise. He was a square-built, slow,
muscular man, solid as granite. His eyes were fixed upon Harshaw, who was
already speaking against the bill. “What is that man saying?”
Kinsard at once lapsed into attention. Harshaw was a clear and forcible
speaker, and with lucid arguments ranged upon the side of conservatism
and economy he was giving the advocates of the measure a very stiff
fight. They got on their feet time and again, and came at him. He had
a great fund of pugnacity, and on principle fought every point. His
face was flushed; his eyes were grave and intent; his frequent gestures
ponderous and forcible. Now and then he tossed back his mane of yellow
hair, as if its weight vexed him. He sought to show the ephemeral nature
of the advantages urged, the solid interests relinquished. Presently his
old slogan was resounding on the air. He was representing that the sacred
interests of the people were imperiled by the machinations of the bloated
plutocracy of Kildeer County. He wanted it to be distinctly understood
that he did not charge any nefarious practices, any corrupt influences;
only that most subtle, insidious, and pervasive sway always exerted by
the views of men of position, men of family, men of “prawperty,” against
the simple will and simple needs of the Plain People. The high-toned
folks, the few rich folks, wished the county seat moved to Damascus,
because they had “prawperty” there. (He pronounced “prawperty” with so
contemptuous an intonation that one felt one could never take pleasure
in paying taxes again.) They had “prawperty,” and railroad stock, and
thus from the people, the many of moderate means, who had built up the
present county town and made it what it was, who spent their money right
there instead of going off to patronize merchants and schools in Glaston,
as was the habit of the wealthy,—from this class would be wrenched those
privileges which they had made valuable. All those advantages which had
been nursed for years, which were so much actual materialization of the
efforts of the Plain People, would go to—not to Tophet, as one might have
expected from the tone, but to—Damascus!
But he would champion their rights; he would be heard; he would not heed
the ostentatious reference of the gentleman from Cherokee to his watch.
Why, he could tell the speaker that these same influential men had their
personal representation in this House. A member confessed to him that
because one of these little great men wanted a thing it had to go through
this General Assembly. “And so his mouthpiece repeats his wish, his tool
does his will!”
A murmur arose.
Kinsard was on his feet in an instant.
“Mr. Speaker,” he thundered, “the member means _me_!”
There was sudden silence.
He stood at his full height, his head thrown back, his brilliant eyes
fixed angrily on Harshaw.
Harshaw was dumfounded. He had expected Kinsard to quake silently and
secretly under the lash; to quiver in terror lest his identity be hinted.
This open avowal had routed him. He was in an ill-humor, but he had no
desire to seriously attack Kinsard on a point like this. He wanted to
punish him, to intimidate him; to threaten that most sensitive possession
of the young and spirited, his reputation, or, as Kinsard would have
phrased it, his “sacred honor.” He had the usual contempt of a man of
forty for youth,—its self-assertion, its domineering. He intended the
chance allusion as discipline. He had fallen under his own lash. He stood
in dismay as Kinsard reiterated, “He means _me_!”
There was a general laugh; the imputation, in view of his character, his
prominence, his wealth, his very eye, was so absurd.
“But,”—Kinsard’s tones were grandiloquent,—“in view of the publicity of
this charge, I consider that I am wounded in my reputation, and I demand
reparation.”
“I can make no formal retraction,” said Harshaw, hastily, “for I have
imputed no discredit, except being easily dominated.”
Kinsard fixed upon him a look of amazement. He turned again to the chair.
“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “the member from the floterial district of
Cherokee and Kildeer”—he sedulously avoided the word “gentleman”—“labors
under a mistake. I do not demand the retraction of a word. Perhaps he
will understand this token.” He took his glove, and cast it in the open
space before the speaker’s desk.
Only a nineteenth-century kid glove, with two porcelain buttons at the
wrist, but it was flung down with as splendid and gallant a gesture as if
it were a gauntlet of mail.
The old fellows, who had outlived folly such as this, were grinning at
the revival of their ancient manners. The younger men, profiting by the
traditions of their elders, were grave and quivering with excitement.
Harshaw was in a quandary, conscious of being ridiculous in the eyes of
one class, and of being defied in the eyes of the other. He would not do
so absurd a thing as to lift Kinsard’s glove. Yet with the significance
of the “token” he was ashamed to let it lie.
And the speaker had a big job on his hands.
The gavel sounded now and again. Someone, with a pious view of making bad
worse, was calling attention to the anti-dueling legislation. Another
reminded Mr. Kinsard of his “sacred obligations” to his constituents,
to the people of Tennessee, to the House, all of which seemed to have
escaped him for the moment. Kinsard’s colleague had sprung forward,
recovered the somewhat ridiculous glove, and, crumpling it up, put it
into his own pocket. He succeeded in attracting the attention of the
chair and of the House. He wished—he spoke in a labored way, with a pause
between each phrase, and a rising inflection—to remark that the House was
disposed to take a great deal on trust. The gentleman had not given any
challenge. Did a member ask what that glove meant, then? Why, defiance!
Dueling was with a _deadly_ weapon; _deadly_ weapon was of the essence of
the offense. The gentleman might have preferred to have a round or two
at fisticuffs, or, perhaps, simply to engage in debate. (Derisive cries
and laughter.) Defiance only! It was a breach of all the proprieties
to mention the anti-dueling laws in this connection. Too much taken
for granted, Mr. Speaker. If I should be heard to say to a man that I
would see him before dinner, it would be highly preposterous to have me
arrested. We might be going to kill each other, it is true, but then,
again, we might be only going to “smile.”
The speaker sat listening gravely, much wishing to further the acceptance
of this view, for he considered the demonstration mere boyish wrath and
folly. He made strong efforts for the adjustment of the difficulty.
Harshaw rose presently, and begged to call attention to the fact that he
had named no names, had given no intimation as to identity. He had spoken
indefinitely, and the gentleman had insisted upon revealing himself. He
would say that he desired to provoke no quarrel; he had no ill-will to
the gentleman in question. He begged to withdraw what he had said, and he
tendered his apologies.
Kinsard, under the pressure that was brought to bear, could hardly do
less than accept them, and thus, it seemed at the time, the matter ended.
It had been a stormy evening for Harshaw. He was, however, well
accustomed to contention. It was not this that irked him; he writhed
under the sense of disadvantage, of being brought in propinquity to
defeat. He was a man not susceptible of the finer emotions of success,
of gratulation because of the thing attained rather than the plaudits
of attainment. His sensibility to achievement was manifested in a
certain sordid inversion of values. He made popularity, position,
social opportunity, political preferment, the end of mental supremacy,
rather than its humble incident. And thus it was that, rough as he was,
courageous, obstinate, full of rugged nodules of traits, hard, strong,
but limited, there was no solid substratum of absolute sincere purpose
in his nature, no bed-rock impervious to all infiltration of temptation,
all extraneous influence; whatever he might build would fail at the
foundation.
His world had changed to him in some sort during the short hours since
the darkness had fallen. He strode into the hotel feeling a different
man. He found it necessary to assert himself. All the fight in him was
on the alert. He cared little for Kinsard or for the scene itself in
the House, but it was peculiarly obnoxious to him that it should have
been another chance allusion to the man he hated which precipitated the
collision. He revolted from the fact that it might seem a reiteration of
the lesson received earlier in the evening. He knew that many commented
upon the coincidence, and that doubtless he was recommended to leave
Gwinnan alone. Now submission was not what he was prepared to offer. He
preferred that it should seem a persistent attack on Gwinnan. Once more
he returned to the charge.
He was serious, lowering, formidable. He did not go at once to his room,
as the lateness of the hour might have impelled him. He was quick to
observe the faces of the legislators about: some were merely curious;
others held a half-cloaked triumph; and still others an open gloating
satisfaction. It was with a manner which was a distinct replication to
all three manifestations that he lounged about the reading-room with a
striding gait, his hat on the back of his head, his hands in his pockets,
and his cigar fast between his teeth. He finally threw himself into a
chair by the table before the open fire in the inner room, and said
in a meditative undertone to a gentleman with whom he had sufficient
association to make it seem a confidence to a friend, “I reckon I’ll have
to write to Judge Gwinnan.” The others heard it, however, and it was
to several that he read the letter when it was completed. They thought
it very bold; to show that it was not empty bluster, but written with
all the sincerity of immediate intention, he rang for a bell-boy, and
dispatched it in their presence to Gwinnan’s room.
That gentleman’s physician still urged his patient to cultivate a more
vivid interest in life, in passing events; to seek to absorb himself;
to rouse himself. Mr. Harshaw’s letter very effectually compassed this
result.
The writer begged to call Judge Gwinnan’s attention to sundry facts
which he proceeded to set forth in due detail. He premised that he would
endeavor to take no other notice of an insult offered him by a man who
was virtually at death’s door, and who might uncharitably, perhaps,
be supposed to have taken advantage of that circumstance; such as the
advantage was, he made Judge Gwinnan most heartily welcome to it. In
defense of his reputation for veracity, however, he felt it necessary
to state his authority, besides his own observation, for saying that
Judge Gwinnan had taken such notice of a very beautiful girl, who
was a witness, as to render her lover, who was the prisoner, wildly
jealous, and to result in the injuries from which Judge Gwinnan was now
unfortunately suffering. His authority was the deputy sheriff and the two
guards, to whom the prisoner stated these facts, swearing that he would
get even with Judge Gwinnan. Mr. Harshaw begged to remark in addition
that he fully realized that he was ill advised in saying he would like to
introduce a resolution to impeach Judge Gwinnan. He knew that the action
of a court in a matter of contempt committed in the presence of the court
is wholly a matter of judicial discretion not liable to be reviewed by
the court above, and therefore it should have been free from impotent
criticism, which could avail naught to either counsel or prisoner, who
have absolutely no resource nor recourse. He deeply regretted his words,
and their futility.
The mock apology, which had been highly appreciated by the coterie in
the reading-room, the whole tenor of the letter, the revelation which it
made, had important results to Judge Gwinnan, who was accustomed to deal
with larger motives and finer issues than Harshaw’s wrath or satire could
furnish.
He had such exceeding confidence in the dignity and decorum of Gwinnan as
judge that at first it seemed almost impossible that he should have taken
such notice of the witness as to attract the attention of others. But
there was a sort of coercive evidence in the circumstance that the girl’s
face had lingered in his mind with a luminous distinctness, a surprised
pleasure, a newly awakened sense of beauty, which he had associated with
no other face that he could remember. He was not a sentimental man.
He had had few romantic experiences, and the flavor they had left was
vapid and foolish. Alethea had not primarily impressed him as beautiful.
She looked so noble, so true, so radiantly good. It was altogether an
abstract sentiment, a tribute to the lofty qualities which he revered and
she embodied.
He cared so little for Gwinnan as Gwinnan that he entertained the mildest
resentment toward the man who had struck him on the head with his iron
shackles. The indignity offered by the foreman of the jury, and afterward
by Harshaw, to Gwinnan the judge had burned into his consciousness, and
the scars would be there on the judgment day. The knowledge that the
attack was not in revenge for some fancied wrong in the trial, but that
it was the frenzy of a madly jealous lover in chains and in expatriation,
altered the whole aspect of the case for Gwinnan as Gwinnan.
The judge could not, perhaps, have sufficiently condemned Gwinnan’s state
of mind as he sat down and wrote to Mr. Kenbigh, the attorney for the
State at Glaston, requesting that no action should be taken in regard to
the assault, as he was not willing to prosecute.