Part 34
The House had already received an intimation of what he was about to say, and although his animosity to Gwinnan impugned his credibility and relaxed the surprise which had been occasioned, his bold overt allusions to his antagonism, his sturdy, undaunted address, had their effect. He said he must impinge upon the indulgence of the House for some personal explanation. Had he consulted his own inclinations he would have let the matter pass. It had come to his knowledge with no solicitation, no suspicion, by accident, or—with a reverent intonation—providentially, he might better say. But (suspended effect) he was sworn (with a wag of the head) to serve the interests of the people of Tennessee, and (he thumped the desk) right zealously would he discharge that precious and supreme trust! The duty of laying this matter before the representatives of the people was the more distasteful to him because he was personally in antagonism to Judge Gwinnan, whose title to the judicial office it controverted and whose integrity it assailed. He did not seek to disguise the truth; he wished it to be understood—and let the fact have what weight it might—that he would be glad to see Judge Gwinnan removed from the office which it was charged he had profaned. Apart from all else, he had practiced in Gwinnan’s circuit; he had experienced his tyranny; he had seen a jury snatched from their deliberations and clapped into jail for some petty ignorant infringement of the deep reverence which Judge Gwinnan exacted for his presence. No!—and the walls rang with the strong, robust tones,—he would esteem Judge Gwinnan’s removal a source of great gratulation and a furtherance of justice. But he would be glad, for his own private considerations, if the circumstances upon which the motion would presently be made could have come to the ear of some other member; he appreciated that there was (sneering and smiling) a lack of grace, of seemliness, in the emanation of the proposition from him, an avowed personal enemy; moreover, he might expose himself to suspicions of his motive.
“Right for once!” cried the unruly Kinsard, striking in suddenly.
The gavel sounded, and the interruption subsided.
Harshaw’s opaque blue eyes turned mechanically in the direction of the voice, but with a preoccupied air of seeing nothing he went on, holding the lapels of his coat, as he stood squarely beside his desk.
He could have evaded; he could have delegated the duty to another member,—have made the facts known, have had the witnesses canvassed, have set the machinery in motion, without himself appearing at all. “But, Mr. Speaker,” with an arrogant port, “it is not my habit to beat about the bush. I may be maligned by my foes, I may be misinterpreted by my friends, I may be misjudged even by my constituents, but it is my principle to come forth openly, and let my personal feeling weigh for whatever it may be worth.”
He paused for a moment, stroking his yellow beard with an excited gesture, his flushed face grave, his eyes intent, absorbed; his whole presence instinct with determination, a hazardous tenacity, a ponderous force. Then dropping his voice to the artificial dead-level elocutionary intonation, he proceeded to make a formal motion that a committee be appointed to investigate and report upon the accusations brought against Judge Gwinnan, charging him with having fought a duel, thus being disqualified for office; and with perjury in taking the official oath.
There was an interval of absolute silence when he had resumed his seat. Significant glances were interchanged. It seemed that the motion would be lost, until a little bland, cat-like fellow arose to say in a falsetto voice, “Mr. Speaker, I second the motion.”
Kinsard turned his indolent anatomy about and looked with a scathing eye at the little man, as, flushed and flustered, he took his seat. There was no possible propriety in the charge of collusion; the two members had all the liberties of consultation and coöperation. Then why, he argued within himself, should Forsey look like a cat stealing cream? Bestirring his recollection, he recalled in him a certain willingness to think ill of Judge Gwinnan when previously threatened by Harshaw; and still dredging for a motive, he remembered, though it happened some years ago, that Gwinnan, sitting as special judge, had blocked the game of a big public contract swindle, in which Forsey had had a large money interest.
Forsey had not the nerve of Harshaw, who was looking about him in reddening displeasure and frowning prognostication of the baffling of his vengeance. If he had indeed no backing but the irresolute Mr. Forsey, the measure would be defeated by a most triumphant majority. The prospect roused all his belligerent spirit, and he held up his head with a snort of defiant welcome, like a war-horse smelling the battle from afar, when, the question being stated from the chair, a member rose to say that he doubted the jurisdiction of the House.
“If this matter be reported correctly as I have heard it during the last two or three days,—to my very great surprise,—if Judge Gwinnan be disqualified by reason of having before his incumbency fought a duel, then he never was a judge except _de facto_. As I understand it, only an officer _de jure_ can be impeached for crimes committed in office.”
Forsey wanted to know if perjury in taking the official oath were not a crime committed in office.
Another member asked whether it was the commission of the crime itself which disqualified, or the conviction of the crime.
The gavel sounded, and the member who had the floor persisted.
“I take it that the House cannot prefer articles of impeachment against a private citizen who has unlawfully usurped an office. If he is removed at all, it should be by proceedings in the chancery court in the nature of a _quo warranto_.”
Mr. Kinsard rose, half leaning against his desk with a swaying negligence of posture, to call attention to the fact that anything in the nature of _quo warranto_ wouldn’t begin to do. To have a little one-horse chancellor way up yonder in the seclusion of the mountains dump Judge Gwinnan out of his office would not serve the purpose. Could any man imagine that that proceeding, known merely to the members of the bar and the few intelligent citizens of that benighted district who took note of such matters, would satisfy such an animosity as the member from the floaterial district of Cherokee and Kildeer had avowed, with a cheek which might be contemplated only in astounded admiration? Would the infliction of that limited degradation glut the member’s ravening greed for revenge for his personal grudges? No! the member wished to disgrace Judge Gwinnan with all the publicity that even the attempt to impeach would entail—he designed that it should be canvassed throughout the length and breadth of the State. It should resound through the clarion columns of every newspaper. Every State in the Union should know that the Senate of Tennessee had organized as a court of impeachment, and the name of Gwinnan should be the synonym of contumely. Upon his word, he could hardly take in the vastness of the effrontery that emboldened the member to acknowledge, to proclaim to this House, his gross, his sordid personal motives, in attacking one of the most able, most respected, most diligent, most upright, of the State judiciary. He appealed to the higher feeling of the House. He begged that they would not be driven like so many sheep into an investigation which was in its very inception an insult, an outrage, and a scandal.
A member demanded from his seat if it were not an obligation imperatively imposed upon the House to inquire into such a rumor, for the purpose of ascertaining and eliciting the truth or falsehood it promulgated. Since such a rumor was abroad, it behooved Judge Gwinnan’s friends to advocate an investigation, for it was his only hope of vindication if he were maligned.
Harshaw, leaning forward, both arms on his desk, attentively listening, pursed up his red lips meditatively and nodded with abstracted affirmation, as if pondering the position. He gave no outward expression of gratulation, but he was quick to mark the accession of recruits to his ranks. He could command a stalwart and callous fortitude. He could receive without wincing, without anger, without shame, Kinsard’s jeers and thrusts, for the sake of the aroused antagonism which seemed the natural sequence of the young man’s insistent arguments.
“It specially becomes the House,” continued the member, “to countenance no leniency in regard to dueling and all that pertains to it, after the will of the people has been so unequivocally expressed in regard to the matter of the challenge, or what was so construed, upon this floor.”
The member was rebuked here for infringement of parliamentary usage in upbraiding, as it were, the previous actions of the House and interrupting the member who had the floor.
Kinsard, restive under the interpolation, seized the opportunity to resume. “There is no pretense of justification for adopting formal resolutions to asperse the oath of an honorable man, least of all at the instigation of his avowed personal enemy. The story we have heard is at its worst merely a country boy’s ‘taking up a dare.’ I will venture to say that there is not a man within the sound of my voice who has not had similar affrays,—has not in the days of his youth ‘taken up a dare,’ has not fought by appointment.”
“Will the member explain what he means by a duel?” demanded Harshaw. He did not turn his big yellow head; he only cast his opaque blue eyes at Kinsard, and once more looked down at his hands clasped on his desk.
For a moment Kinsard, taken unaware, was checked.
“Perhaps the member had best begin at the beginning, and define a challenge,” suggested a satiric voice from the rear.
There was a sharp call to order from the chair, and Kinsard, rallying himself, went tumultuously on.
“I am not a dictionary,” he proclaimed angrily. “I am not here to enlighten your ignorance.”
Harshaw, elated by the allusion to the old question of the challenge, intimating anew a flocking to his standard, interrupted cleverly: “I have a dictionary right here,—a law dictionary.” He read aloud, “Dueling is the fighting of two persons, one against another, at an appointed time and place, on a precedent quarrel.”
Kinsard vociferously claimed the floor, although it had become very evident to the House that the interest he advocated fared hardly less severely at the hands of its friend than its foe. In debate he was no match for the wily Harshaw,—his natural endowments, his enthusiasms, his finer emotions, succumbing to a practiced logic, and a militant habit, and an instinctive discernment of the vulnerable point.
“It is impossible to seriously maintain that a fight between a couple of country boys is a duel,” he vehemently insisted. “Everybody knows that the common acceptation of the idea of a duel is a combat between men—men of station” (Harshaw leaned forward with an air of mock attention, placing his hand ostentatiously behind his ear)—“on some question of honor, fighting under the control and direction of their seconds, at a specified number of paces, and with pistols”—
“Enactment provides that they shall be silver-mounted, hair-trigger?” sneered Harshaw.
Once more there was a call to order. But Kinsard, badgered, turned at bay.
“I heard Judge Gwinnan tell you once that unless you kept out of his way he would beat you with a stick, like a dog. How you do tempt the cur’s deserts!”
Harshaw rose hastily to his feet. He stood for a moment, his head lowered, his eyes flaming from under his knitted brows; he looked like the champion mad bull of an arena, about to charge. Suddenly he turned, and without a word resumed his seat. There was a storm of applause from every quarter of the House. A dozen voices were crying that the offensive words should be taken down; the clerk hastily obeyed; they were read aloud, and the speaker called upon Kinsard to deny them or retract.
Kinsard could have said with all the fervor of truth that he was sorry indeed, but it was in an inapplicable sense. He saw, with a sinking of the heart, the havoc he was making in another’s fate,—the moral murder that hung upon his hands. He looked about with despair at the faces around him: they had been friendly, partisan, when he began to speak against the motion; now they were reluctant, alienated, antagonistic. It were better for Gwinnan had he had no friend but his own repute. The impetuous young fellow felt that he had done the worst that was possible. He would not now eat his words. He looked at Harshaw with an indignant divination of his motives, when that gentleman, begging the indulgence of the House, moved that the matter be dropped. He was not here to maintain personal consequence. He was willing—nay, eager—to waive any individual considerations which hindered the deliberations of the House and the course of justice. If the member were so ungenerous as to decline to apologize for words spoken in heat, confirming them in cool malice, he himself was able to overlook them, the more as his character was, he trusted, too favorably known to be injured by these reflections.
He sat down in the midst of a clamor from a number of eager occupants of the floor,—one of whom the speaker presently recognized,—protesting against the unparliamentary nature of the proposal. The objectionable words were again read, and the speaker called upon Kinsard to apologize or to deny them.
Perhaps Kinsard alone appreciated in this edifying demonstration Harshaw’s policy. He could not be tempted to run counter. He would not slack his pursuit of Gwinnan for another trail, however alluring. He had higher game in view than the stripling’s insults could furnish. And he had made himself an example of marvelous tolerance, forbearance, and dignity.
Kinsard, lowering and pierced with all the barbed realization of futility and defeat, adopted his words, refused to retract or apologize, and, being commanded by the speaker to withdraw, took up his hat, and, with a scornful, indifferent manner that angered every member as if charged with a personal relation, strode out of the room.
Harshaw had followed his motions with narrowing eyelids. His attention had relaxed with momentary exultation at this result. He was smiling a little in his beard, and he glanced in a debonair preoccupation out of the window near his seat. The sky was red, for the sun was going down. He noted the flush with a casual eye, unprescient how it should be with him when the day, fading now and dropping its dulling petals on every side, should whitely bloom again. Then he reverted with zest to the proceedings within.
Kinsard walked slowly along the portico to the flight of steps. A belt of clouds, their edges glinting with gold, obscured the scarlet disk of the sun, but from their lower verge a great glory of yellow light gushed down, each of the multitudinous rays distinct, giving a fibrous effect, upon the blue hills of the horizon, upon the city in the foreground. Here and there they struck upon a spire or a tin roof that responded with a glister fiercely white. The intervals showed soft shadows of restful tints, the tops of the budding trees, the silver-gray shingles of an old house, and here and there an open space where the renewed blue-grass grew apace. It wore a dark richness all adown the slopes of the Capitol hill. Somehow as he noted it there was borne upon him for the moment a subtle intimation of the serenity of that life of Nature close to our artificial existence,—mysterious, inevitable, quiescent. The contrast gave a sharpened sense of the turmoils of his heart, the weariness of his spirit, the rasping jars of his petty cares. He paused on the sidewalk and looked about him. Then he produced a cigar, and took his way down into the city.
He did not fear the sentence of the House. He was resolute in the position he had taken, but he carried throughout the evening an imperative sense of abeyance. He noticed with a secret scorn the clumsy efforts of his legislative friends to sound his state of mind, when they came down from the Capitol; he divined their fear of a collision, their anxiety that the asperities with Harshaw should be allowed to quietly drop. They sought to have him observe that they considered he had the best of it, and that an apology now from him would mean merely a desire to promote public interest. Only the age of another adviser—his father’s friend as well as his own—restrained him from openly ridiculing the deep satisfaction which this mentor evidently derived from the fact that the young man’s mind would be occupied with lighter themes during the evening, and he might forget the rancors of the debate. His thoughts, however, were incongruous enough with the scene of a fashionable wedding, where he officiated as an usher, and he paced the aisles of the church with as mechanical a notice of his surroundings as a somnambulist. His attention hardly pretermitted its hold upon the subject that had absorbed him, and when again at liberty he went at once to his room at the hotel, with a view of changing his dress to attend the night session of the House.
It was the slightest matter that attracted his notice. He had lighted the gas, and as he glanced into a drawer of the bureau some trivial difference from the usual arrangement of his effects caught his eye. He stood for a moment in motionless surprise. Perhaps it was accident, perhaps his alert divination, but he slipped his hand beneath the pile of garments and touched a wooden case of pistols. He flushed slightly, and for a moment he was ashamed. He had doubted if it were still there. He had thought that perhaps his cautious friends might have robbed him, pending the time when he was in anger, of the means to do more than war with words. He had taken instant fire at the idea of an interference with his liberty. It was the smouldering embers of this thought that actuated him rather than any serious expectation, but suddenly he turned back to the bureau and lifted the case. He opened it slowly. It was empty. He gazed at the vacant space, his eyes flashing, his cheek flushing. The pistols had been abstracted and the case left that his attention might not by its absence be directed to the weapons. He could easily divine all of his friends’ arguments. He would not notice the disappearance of the pistols, they must doubtless have said, unless he wanted them. He would not want them unless he were intent upon some fatal folly. He could not supply himself anew, for all the shops were closed, and by to-morrow he would be in a cooler frame of mind.
His indignation was natural enough. He took heed, too, of contingencies of which his anxious friends, accustomed to him always in the character of assailant, lost sight. “I should be helpless,” he said, “if that man should attack me. I should be incapable of self-defense.”
Suddenly he caught up a light spring overcoat, threw it over his arm, and left the room. As he went down the staircase into the rotunda of the hotel, he seemed the embodiment of handsome, gay, fortunate youth. His cheek was flushed; his eyes were very brilliant. He paced up and down the floor for a moment in front of the counter, for strangers were registering their names and the clerks were busy. The fountain tossed up its spray, and the tinkling drops fell into the basin; around it plants were blooming. Somebody journeying from the South had presented the hotel with a little alligator, that splashed about in the water and was a source of diversion to the out-comers and in-goers, many of whom paused to rouse it up with their canes and punch the head of the infant saurian. Kinsard walked presently to the desk.
“I want to borrow a pistol,” he said to the clerk, to whom he was well known.
The official, fancying that the guest contemplated a journey or a long nocturnal drive into the country, and that the request was a matter merely of precaution, turned with alacrity, took a pistol out of a drawer, and laid it on the counter. He was looking for the cartridges, when an acquaintance of Kinsard’s demanded casually, “What do you want a gun for?”
Kinsard lifted his brilliant, reckless eyes. “To shoot Bob Harshaw,” he declared.
The clerk turned hastily from his search and made a motion to clutch the pistol.
Kinsard’s grasp had closed upon the handle.
“Man alive!” he cried angrily, “do you think I would use it except for self-defense?”
He hastily thrust it into his pistol-pocket and went out into the night.
It was moonless and very dark, despite the myriads of scintillating stars. The Capitol was visible only as suggested in the irradiations of its great, flaring, yellow windows and the lights without on either side of the long flight of steps. As Kinsard ascended he noticed on the broad portico a group of men, separating at the moment, three of them going within and one approaching the steps.
He could not fail to recognize Harshaw’s bluff manner, his portly figure, his long, yellow beard, and his brisk, light step; and as the younger man walked along the portico, Harshaw’s eyes, glancing out sharply from under the brim of his slouch hat, identified him. There was no one by to note how they should meet; the significance of the encounter might have rejoiced the lovers of sensation. Kinsard was about to pass without salutation, but Harshaw, whirling half round on his light heel, paused, and with a bantering smile on his dimpled pink face showing in the gaslight above their heads, “Great news!” he exclaimed. “They’ve appointed a committee to investigate ‘the jedge’!”
Kinsard experienced a sharp pang of dismay for Gwinnan’s sake.
“And I suppose you are satisfied now,” he said, bitterly.
“Oh, no, my dear little sir. I am not half satisfied!” cried Harshaw, with his liquid rotund laugh. His foreshortened shadow swayed on the blocks of white limestone as if it could scarcely contain itself for laughter.
He had lost the poise which he had endured so much to maintain that day. He was intoxicated with his triumph; and indeed he could afford to indulge it, for he felt that there was nothing now at stake.
“And that is the reason,” continued Harshaw, “that I feel I owe you an obligation which I must not let pass without acknowledgment. In your able and cogent speech this afternoon you did more to effect Judge Gwinnan’s impeachment than, unaided, I could possibly have compassed. Let me beg you to accept my thanks—ha! ha! ha!”
Deeply wounded by this thrust, and conscious of the injury he had done Gwinnan’s interests, Kinsard turned upon him, but not without dignity.
“Mr. Harshaw,” he said, “if I believed you to be sincere in this matter, if I thought you were not ingeniously perverting the facts and the law, I should most willingly coöperate with you. But I know your motives to be a rancorous jealousy and an insatiable spite. And if I have not done anything to nullify them, it is not because I am without the will.”
He looked at his interlocutor from head to foot, as if he found a source of surprise in his very embodiment.
“I cannot imagine how a soul so petty should be so corpulently lodged. It might appropriately animate some tiny writhing worm that, showing venom, could be crushed by a foot.”
“Look here, youngster,” said Harshaw, sneering and showing his strong white teeth, his eyes gleaming under the brim of his hat, “I know you mean you’d take my life if you could defy the consequence. But you’d better mind how you go to extremes in Gwinnan’s service. I have a contempt for you, but a pity, too. I know you are only his miserable tool, his abject creature.”
Kinsard sprang forward with the suddenness of a tiger. A stinging thrill ran through Harshaw’s face before he could realize that with an open palm he had been struck upon the cheek.