The Senator went back to his stenographers. He was thoughtful and did not get into full swing of his work for at least fifteen minutes. He felt a kind of envy of Richard Baskerville, who had no investigations to face and never would have. He had no divorce problem in hand and never would have. His love was not of the sort which had to be forced upon a woman, and the woman coerced and overborne and almost menaced into accepting it. On the whole, Clavering concluded, looking back upon a long career of successful villany, that if he had his life to live over again, he would live more respectably.
That day the last meeting of the committee was held, and within an hour the two men, Baskerville and Clavering, faced each other in the committee-room, each a fighting man and fighting with all his strength. Baskerville took no part in the oral arguments, but, sitting at one end of the long table in the luxurious mahogany-furnished and crimson-curtained committee-room, he supplied data, facts, and memoranda which proved Clavering to have been a habitual thief and a perjurer.
The committee-room was only moderately full. The hearings had been open, but the crush had been so great that it was decided to exclude all except those who were directly interested in the hearing and those lucky enough to get cards of admission. It was an eager and even a sympathetic crowd. The same personal charm which had been a great factor in Clavering’s success was still his. As he sat back, his leonine face and head outlined against the crimson wall behind him, his eyes full of the light of combat, cool, resolute, and smiling, it was impossible not to admire him. He had no great virtues, but he had certain great qualities.
As the hearing proceeded, Clavering’s case grew blacker. Against some of the most damning facts he had some strong perjured evidence, but the perjurers were exposed with the evidence. Against all, he had his own strenuous denial of everything and the call for proof. But proof was forthcoming at every point. And it was all Richard Baskerville’s handiwork. Clavering knew this so well that although perfectly alert as to the statements made by the keen-eyed, sharp-witted lawyers from New York, he kept his eyes fixed on Baskerville, who was handing out paper after paper and making whispered explanations—who was, in short, the arsenal for the weapons so mercilessly used against Clavering.
The two men engaged in this deadly and tremendous strife, which involved not only millions of money and a seat in the United States Senate, but also the characters and souls of men, eyed each other with a certain respect. It was no man of ordinary mould whom Baskerville had sought to destroy, and that Clavering would be destroyed there was no reasonable doubt. The last day’s work meant expulsion from the Senate, a disgrace so huge, so far-reaching, that it was worse than sentencing a man to death. Apart from the degree of honesty in Clavering’s own party, it was perfectly well understood that no party would dare to go before the country assuming the burden of the gigantic frauds of which he was being convicted. And it was due to Baskerville that the evidence to convict had been found. All that the other lawyers had done was insignificant beside the two years of patient research, the disentangling of a thousand complicated legal threads, which was Baskerville’s work. Some of the evidence he presented had been collected in the wildest parts of the West and South at the imminent risk of his life; all of it had required vast labor and learning.
Being a natural lover of fighting, Baskerville in the beginning had taken a purely human interest in tracking this man down and had thought himself engaged in a righteous work in driving him out of public life. He still knew he was right in doing this, but it had long since become a painful and irksome task to him. He had come to love this man’s daughter, of all the women in the world,—to love her so well and to confide in her so truly that not even her parentage could keep him from marrying her. But he knew that he was stabbing her to the heart. She had forgiven him in advance; like him, love and sacrifice had asserted their rights and reigned in their kingdom, but that she must suffer a cruel abasement for her father’s iniquities Baskerville knew. And, with this knowledge, nothing but his sense of duty and honor kept him at his post.
The committee sat from eleven in the morning until two in the afternoon. Then, after a short adjournment, it met again. It sat again, with another short recess, until nearly nine o’clock, and a final adjournment was reached at midnight. Not a person of those entitled to be present had left the room, during that long and trying stretch of hours. All were acting a part in a great tragedy, a tragedy of which the last act was to take place in the United States Senate chamber, and was to be one of the most fearful ever enacted in that historic spot. Clavering had gone down fighting. The committee recognized as much, and when, in the midst of a deep silence, the chairman declared the meeting adjourned and Clavering rose to go, every man present, acting involuntarily and quite unconscious of what he was doing, rose as if to do honor to the man whose infamy had been proved before them. A line was made for Clavering, and he passed out of the room. It was as if his crimes were so great, his audacity so huge, his courage so vast and unquenchable, that they saluted him, as a firing squad salutes a guilty officer condemned to be shot.
When James Clavering walked out into the sharp January night, the Capitol behind him showing whitely in the gleaming of the multitude of stars, he knew himself a beaten and ruined man, beaten and ruined by two men—James Clavering and Richard Baskerville.
Baskerville determined to walk the long stretch between the Capitol and his own house; he wanted the fresh air and the solitude, in order to recover himself—for he, too, had been under a terrific strain. As he walked rapidly down the hill Clavering’s carriage passed him—the same brougham in which Baskerville had told Anne Clavering of his love. An electric lamp shone for a moment into the carriage and revealed Clavering sitting upright, his head raised, his fists clenched; he was a fighting man to the last.