His limbs were long, and their movements slow, yet nervous as from some internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt within them.
The heaped-up curly profusion of his brown wig gave a weird impression to the spread of his mobile features. His eagle-beaked nose had three distinct lines and angles. His chin was broad and bold, and his brows beetling and projecting. His mouth was wide, marked, and grim; when opened, deep and cavernous; when closed, it seemed to snap so tightly that the lower lip protruded.
Of all his make-up, his eye was the most fascinating, and it held Ben spellbound. It could thrill to the deepest fibre of the soul that looked into it, yet it did not gleam. It could dominate, awe, and confound, yet it seemed to have no colour or fire. He could easily see it across the vast hall from the galleries, yet it was not large. Two bold, colourless dagger-points of light they seemed. As he grew excited, they darkened as if passing under a cloud.
A sudden sweep of his huge apelike arm in an angular gesture, and the drollery and carelessness of his voice were riven from it as by a bolt of lightning.
He was driving home his message now in brutal frankness. Yet in the height of his fiercest invective he never seemed to strengthen himself or call on his resources. In its climax he was careless, conscious of power, and contemptuous of results, as though as a gambler he had staked and lost all and in the moment of losing suddenly become the master of those who had beaten him.
His speech never once bent to persuade or convince. He meant to brain the opposition with a single blow, and he did it. For he suddenly took the breath from his foes by shouting in their faces the hidden motive of which they were hoping to accuse him!
“Admit these Southern Representatives,” he cried, “and with the Democrats elected from the North, within one term they will have a majority in Congress and the Electoral College. The supremacy of our party’s life is at stake. The man who dares palter with such a measure is a rebel, a traitor to his party and his people.”
A cheer burst from his henchmen, and his foes sat in dazed stupor at his audacity. He moved the appointment of a “Committee on Reconstruction” to whom the entire government of the “conquered provinces of the South” should be committed, and to whom all credentials of their pretended representatives should be referred.
He sat down as the Speaker put his motion, declared it carried, and quickly announced the names of this Imperial Committee with the Hon. Austin Stoneman as its chairman.
He then permitted the message of the President of the United States to be read by his clerk.