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.