XX.
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.