“It has answered it with the roar of Decatur’s guns under the walls of Algiers!” thundered Harrington, with a look of fire.
Mr. Atkins, at this stunning demolition of his position, turned red, and then pale, and then all sorts of colors, and finally sat down with a working jaw, and a face of utter confusion.
“That is the way the sober, sound, conservative statesmanship of the Union answered that question of national right,” sternly continued Harrington. “It answered from the blazing muzzles of Decatur’s cannon, that the nation that undertakes to hold innocent men in slavery is a nation of pirates. By its own answer it stands condemned. Every State in this Union, that holds innocent men in slavery, is an organized piracy. The Union that sanctions the crime, and makes it possible, is another. And you, Lemuel Atkins, trampling on your sister’s heart, in your scoundrel zeal to thrust an innocent and wretched man into that pirate hell from whence his own bravery freed him, you are the vilest, because the meanest, pirate of them all. The most degraded slaveholder is white beside such a wretch as you. Never let me hear again of Southern infamy. You, a Northern merchant, kidnapping your brother—kidnapping a man whose right it is to say with you, in his prayers to Heaven, ‘Our Father’—not respecting even the miserable forms of pirate law in your infernal zeal for wickedness—what wretch is there, however black, that does not whiten into virtue beside you! Lafitte himself sees in you a depth of mean vice to which his self-respect will not permit him to descend. God forgive me, that I lowered myself to prune my speech, and curb my heart, and strain my conscience, in the effort to win and bribe you from your ghastly crime against mankind. Go on with it now. Blacken down into your pit of iniquity. Wrench from the world of living men to which he yet clings, the poor victim of your accursed avarice, and send him back as you and your muck-rake tribe sent Sims, to shriek his life away under the bloody scourge. So live your life, and gorging on your miserable gains till you drop into your grave, may you never know the fate it is to feel the curses of the poor!”
Gazing aghast, with glassy eyes, like one fascinated, into the white and terrible countenance of Harrington, with a horrible, blind look on his own visage, Atkins sat petrified under the low, magnetic voice in which, like wind and rain and fire and hail, these words burst upon him. A moment, and Harrington had gone; and rising to his feet, and shaking all over as in an ague fit, with that horrible blind look upon his furious face, and a mad-dog slaver gathering on his loose and livid lips, his sick-man’s voice strained and gasped into speech, such as might unnaturally tear its way in agonizing rage from the throat of one organically dumb.
“B-y G-a-ud, I’d sa-end him ba-eck,” he drawled agasp, “e-ff I-i ha-ed t-a be sa-ent t-a ha-ell!”
I would send him back if I had to be sent to hell. With these words, which sounded as if they were torn from him, as the fabled mandrake was said to be torn from the earth, with low shrieks and dripping blood; and which seemed to cling as they were wrenched away, as the demon vegetable was said to cling when dragged from the soil, he tottered backward, and fell with a heavy slump into his chair. There he sat gasping, with his face turned to the wall.
Driscoll had slunk away into the outer office as Harrington left the counting-room, and the young man passed down into the street without seeing him, and crossed to where Wentworth was standing. The young artist gazed with a shocked expression into his colorless face as he approached him.
“Heavens! Harrington, how white you are!” he murmured.
“I have failed, Richard,” returned Harrington in a deep and quiet voice. “He has no heart, no reason even. Trade has eaten the one and the other out of him. I made my plea as well as I could. I appealed to his mean self-interest, so that even he felt the force of my appeal, and wavered. But he refused me, and I flung upon him the bitterest words that ever passed my lips, and left him.”
Wentworth looked in silence on the marble countenance, white in the shadow of the slouched hat, with the vertical sunlight just touching the beard below.