“Mr. Speaker, I rise;”—or, “If your Honor please”—
The forlorn, helpless earnestness of this mockery of life touched Horace’s heart; and yet he smiled to think how different were the methods and manners of his father from those of brother Hooper, whose requests still droned up to the reverberating hollows of the roof, and there were lost in a subdued boom and snarl of echoes such as a court-room only can beget.
Two generations ago, when the Honorable Horace Kortlandt Walpole was the rising young lawyer of the State; when he was known as “the Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence County,” he was in the habit of assuming that he owned whatever court he practised in; and, as a rule, he was right. The most bullock-brained of country judges deferred to the brilliant young master of law and eloquence, and his “requests” were generally accepted as commands and obeyed as such. Of course the great lawyer, for form’s sake, threw a veil of humility over his deliverances; but even that he rent to shreds when the fire of his eloquence once got fairly aglow.
“May it please your Honor! Before your Honor exercises the sacred prerogative of your office—before your Honor performs the sacred duty which the State has given into your hands—before, with that lucid genius to which I bow my head, you direct the minds of these twelve good men and true in the path of strict judicial investigation, I ask your Honor to instruct them that they must bring to their deliberations that impartial justice which the laws of our beloved country—of which no abler exponent than your Honor has ever graced the bench,—which the laws of our beloved country guarantee to the lowest as well as to the loftiest of her citizens—from the President in the Executive Mansion to the humble artisan at the forge—throughout this broad land, from the lagoons of Louisiana to where the snow-clad forests of Maine hurl defiance at the descendants of Tory refugees in the barren wastes of Nova Scotia”—
Horace remembered every word and every gesture of that speech. He recalled even the quick upward glance from under the shaggy eyebrows with which his father seemed to see again the smirking judge catching at the gross bait of flattery; he knew the little pause which the speaker’s memory had filled with the applause of an audience long since dispersed to various silent country graveyards; and he wondered, pityingly, if it were possible that even in his father’s prime that wretched allusion to old political hatreds had power to stir the fire of patriotism in the citizen’s bosom.
“Poor old father!” said the boy to himself. The voice which had for so many years been but an echo was stilled wholly now. Brief victory and long defeat were nothing now to the golden-mouthed orator.
“Shall I fail as he failed?” thought Horace: “No! I can’t. Haven’t I got her to work for?”
And then he drew out of his breast pocket a red silk handkerchief and turned it over in his hand with a movement that concealed and caressed at the same time.
It was a very red handkerchief. It was not vermilion, nor “cardinal,” nor carmine,—a strange Oriental idealization of blood-red which lay well on the soft, fine, luxurious fabric. But it was an unmistakable, a shameless, a barbaric red.
And as he looked at it, young Hitchcock, of Hitchcock & Van Rensselaer, came up behind him and leaned over his shoulder.