The Clansman Page 13

  “Where is he?”

  Her catlike eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about her full lips as she said:

  “You will find him at Hall & Pemberton’s gambling hell—you’ve lived in Washington. You know the way.”

  With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his two companions to the old Commoner’s favourite haunt. There could be no better time or place to approach him than seated at one of its tables laden with rare wines and savoury dishes.

  On reaching the well-known number of Hall & Pemberton’s place, the editor entered the unlocked door, passed with his friends along the soft-carpeted hall, and ascended the stairs. Here the door was locked. A sudden pull of the bell, and a pair of bright eyes peeped through a small grating in the centre of the door revealed by the sliding of its panel.

  The keen eyes glanced at the proffered card, the door flew open, and a well-dressed mulatto invited them with cordial welcome to enter.

  Passing along another hall, they were ushered into a palatial suite of rooms furnished in princely state. The floors were covered with the richest and softest carpets—so soft and yielding that the tramp of a thousand feet could not make the faintest echo. The walls and ceilings were frescoed by the brush of a great master, and hung with works of art worth a king’s ransom. Heavy curtains, in colours of exquisite taste, masked each window, excluding all sound from within or without.

  The rooms blazed with light from gorgeous chandeliers of trembling crystals, shimmering and flashing from the ceilings like bouquets of diamonds.

  Negro servants, faultlessly dressed, attended the slightest want of every guest with the quiet grace and courtesy of the lost splendours of the old South.

  The proprietor, with courtly manners, extended his hand:

  “Welcome, gentlemen; you are my guests. The tables and the wines are at your service without price. Eat, drink, and be merry—play or not, as you please.”

  A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth—cold and rigid.

  At the farther end of the last room hung the huge painting of a leopard, so vivid and real its black and tawny colours, so furtive and wild its restless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.

  Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magic green table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.

  The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, Government officials, officers of the Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, and professional gamblers.

  The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the last session of the House broken the “bank” in a single night, winning more than a hundred thousand dollars. He had lost it all and more in two weeks, and the courteous proprietor now held orders for the lion’s share of the total pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House of Representatives.

  Over that table thousands of dollars of the people’s money had been staked and lost during the war by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents in charge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with a stainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out by those handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth could point out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet which marked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has ever sounded.

  Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but he had just staked a twenty-dollar gold piece and won fourteen hundred dollars.

  Howle, always at his elbow ready for a “sleeper” or a stake, said:

  “Put a stack on the ace.”

  He did so, lost, and repeated it twice.

  “Do it again,” urged Howle. “I’ll stake my reputation that the ace wins this time.”

  With a doubting glance at Howle, old Stoneman shoved a stack of blue chips, worth fifty dollars, over the ace, playing it to win on Howle’s judgment and reputation. It lost.

  Without the ghost of a smile, the old statesman said: “Howle, you owe me five cents.”

  As he turned abruptly on his club foot from the table, he encountered the editor and his friends, a Western manufacturer and a Wall Street banker. They were soon seated at a table in a private room, over a dinner of choice oysters, diamond-back terrapin, canvas-back duck, and champagne.

  They presented their plea for a truce in his fight until popular passion had subsided.

  He heard them in silence. His answer was characteristic:

  “The will of the people, gentlemen, is supreme,” he said with a sneer. “We are the people. ‘The man at the other end of the avenue’ has dared to defy the will of Congress. He must go. If the Supreme Court lifts a finger in this fight, it will reduce that tribunal to one man or increase it to twenty at our pleasure.”

  “But the Constitution——” broke in the chairman.

  “There are higher laws than paper compacts. We are conquerors treading conquered soil. Our will alone is the source of law. The drunken boor who claims to be President is in reality an alien of a conquered province.”

  “We protest,” exclaimed the man of money, “against the use of such epithets in referring to the Chief Magistrate of the Republic!”

  “And why, pray?” sneered the Commoner.

  “In the name of common decency, law, and order. The President is a man of inherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like many other Americans, he is a self-made man——”

  “Glad to hear it,” snapped Stoneman. “It relieves Almighty God of a fearful responsibility.”

  They left him in disgust and dismay.

  * * *

  CHAPTER X

  Tossed by the Storm

  As the storm of passion raised by the clash between her father and the President rose steadily to the sweep of a cyclone, Elsie felt her own life but a leaf driven before its fury.

  Her only comfort she found in Phil, whose letters to her were full of love for Margaret. He asked Elsie a thousand foolish questions about what she thought of his chances.

  To her own confessions he was all sympathy.

  “Of father’s wild scheme of vengeance against the South,” he wrote, “I am heartsick. I hate it on principle, to say nothing of a girl I know. I am with General Grant for peace and reconciliation. What does your lover think of it all? I can feel your anguish. The bill to rob the Southern people of their land, which I hear is pending, would send your sweetheart and mine, our enemies, into beggared exile. What will happen in the South? Riot and bloodshed, of course—perhaps a guerilla war of such fierce and terrible cruelty humanity sickens at the thought. I fear the Rebellion unhinged our father’s reason on some things. He was too old to go to the front; the cannon’s breath would have cleared the air and sweetened his temper. But its healing was denied. I believe the tawny leopardess who keeps his house influences him in this cruel madness. I could wring her neck with exquisite pleasure. Why he allows her to stay and cloud his life with her she-devil temper and fog his name with vulgar gossip is beyond me.”

  Seated in the park on the Capitol hill the day after her father had introduced his Confiscation Bill in the House, pending the impeachment of the President, she again attempted to draw Ben out as to his feelings on politics.

  She waited in sickening fear and bristling pride for the first burst of his anger which would mean their separation.

  “How do I feel?” he asked. “Don’t feel at all. The surrender of General Lee was an event so stunning, my mind has not yet staggered past it. Nothing much can happen after that, so it don’t matter.”

  “Negro suffrage don’t matter?”

  “No. We can manage the negro,” he said calmly.

  “With thousands of your own people disfranchised?”

  “The negroes will vote with us, as they worked for us during the war. If they give them the ballot, they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  Ben looked at her tenderly, bent near, and whispered:

  “Don’t w
aste your sweet breath talking about such things. My politics is bounded on the North by a pair of amber eyes, on the South by a dimpled little chin, on the East and West by a rosy cheek. Words do not frame its speech. Its language is a mere sign, a pressure of the lips—yet it thrills body and soul beyond all words.”

  Elsie leaned closer, and looking at the Capitol, said wistfully:

  “I don’t believe you know anything that goes on in that big marble building.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What happened there yesterday?”

  “You honoured it by putting your beautiful feet on its steps. I saw the whole huge pile of cold marble suddenly glow with warm sunlight and flash with beauty as you entered it.”

  The girl nestled still closer to his side, feeling her utter helplessness in the rapids of the Niagara through which they were being whirled by blind and merciless forces. For the moment she forgot all fears in his nearness and the sweet pressure of his hand.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XI

  The Supreme Test

  It is the glory of the American Republic that every man who has filled the office of President has grown in stature when clothed with its power and has proved himself worthy of its solemn trust. It is our highest claim to the respect of the world and the vindication of man’s capacity to govern himself.

  The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson would mark either the lowest tide-mud of degradation to which the Republic could sink, or its end. In this trial our system would be put to its severest strain. If a partisan majority in Congress could remove the Executive and defy the Supreme Court, stability to civic institutions was at an end, and the breath of a mob would become the sole standard of law.

  Congress had thrown to the winds the last shreds of decency in its treatment of the Chief Magistrate. Stoneman led this campaign of insult, not merely from feelings of personal hate, but because he saw that thus the President’s conviction before the Senate would become all but inevitable.

  When his messages arrived from the White House they were thrown into the waste-basket without being read, amid jeers, hisses, curses, and ribald laughter.

  In lieu of their reading, Stoneman would send to the Clerk’s desk an obscene tirade from a party newspaper, and the Clerk of the House would read it amid the mocking groans, laughter, and applause of the floor and galleries.

  A favourite clipping described the President as “an insolent drunken brute, in comparison with whom Caligula’s horse was respectable.”

  In the Senate, whose members were to sit as sworn judges to decide the question of impeachment, Charles Sumner used language so vulgar that he was called to order. Sustained by the Chair and the Senate, he repeated it with increased violence, concluding with cold venom:

  “Andrew Johnson has become the successor of Jefferson Davis. In holding him up to judgment I do not dwell on his beastly intoxication the day he took the oath as Vice-president, nor do I dwell on his maudlin speeches by which he has degraded the country, nor hearken to the reports of pardons sold, or of personal corruption. These things are bad. But he has usurped the powers of Congress.”

  Conover, the perjured wretch, in prison for his crimes as a professional witness in the assassination trial, now circulated the rumour that he could give evidence that President Johnson was the assassin of Lincoln. Without a moment’s hesitation, Stoneman’s henchmen sent a petition to the President for the pardon of this villain that he might turn against the man who had pardoned him and swear his life away! This scoundrel was borne in triumph from prison to the Capitol and placed before the Impeachment Committee, to whom he poured out his wondrous tale.

  The sewers and prisons were dragged for every scrap of testimony to be found, and the day for the trial approached.

  As it drew nearer, excitement grew intense. Swarms of adventurers expecting the overthrow of the Government crowded into Washington. Dreams of honours, profits, and division of spoils held riot. Gamblers thronged the saloons and gaming-houses, betting their gold on the President’s head.

  Stoneman found the business more serious than even his daring spirit had dreamed. His health suddenly gave way under the strain, and he was put to bed by his physician with the warning that the least excitement would be instantly fatal.

  Elsie entered the little Black House on the hill for the first time since her trip at the age of twelve, some eight years before. She installed an army nurse, took charge of the place, and ignored the existence of the brown woman, refusing to speak to her or permit her to enter her father’s room.

  His illness made it necessary to choose an assistant to conduct the case before the High Court. There was but one member of the House whose character and ability fitted him for the place—General Benj. F. Butler, of Massachusetts, whose name was enough to start a riot in any assembly in America.

  His selection precipitated a storm at the Capitol. A member leaped to his feet on the floor of the House and shouted:

  “If I were to characterize all that is pusillanimous in war, inhuman in peace, forbidden in morals, and corrupt in politics, I could name it in one word—Butlerism!”

  For this speech he was ordered to apologize, and when he refused with scorn they voted that the Speaker publicly censure him. The Speaker did so, but winked at the offender while uttering the censure.

  John A. Bingham, of Ohio, who had been chosen for his powers of oratory to make the principal speech against the President, rose in the House and indignantly refused to serve on the Board of Impeachment with such a man.

  General Butler replied with crushing insolence:

  “It is true, Mr. Speaker, that I may have made an error of judgment in trying to blow up Fort Fisher with a powder ship at sea. I did the best I could with the talents God gave me. An angel could have done no more. At least I bared my own breast in my country’s defence—a thing the distinguished gentleman who insults me has not ventured to do—his only claim to greatness being that, behind prison walls, on perjured testimony, his fervid eloquence sent an innocent American mother screaming to the gallows.”

  The fight was ended only by an order from the old Commoner’s bed to Bingham to shut his mouth and work with Butler. When the President had been crushed, then they could settle Kilkenny-cat issues. Bingham obeyed.

  When the august tribunal assembled in the Senate Chamber, fifty-five Senators, presided over by Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, constituted the tribunal. They took their seats in a semicircle in front of the Vice-president’s desk at which the Chief Justice sat. Behind them crowded the one hundred and ninety members of the House of Representatives, the accusers of the ruler of the mightiest Republic in human history. Every inch of space in the galleries was crowded with brilliantly dressed men and women, army officers in gorgeous uniforms, and the pomp and splendour of the ministers of every foreign court of the world. In spectacular grandeur no such scene was ever before witnessed in the annals of justice.

  The peculiar personal appearance of General Butler, whose bald head shone with insolence while his eye seemed to be winking over his record as a warrior and making fun of his fellow-manager Bingham, added a touch of humour to the solemn scene.

  The magnificent head of the Chief Justice suggested strange thoughts to the beholder. He had been summoned but the day before to try Jefferson Davis for the treason of declaring the Southern States out of the Union. To-day he sat down to try the President of the United States for declaring them to be in the Union! He had protested with warmth that he could not conduct both these trials at once.

  The Chief Justice took oath to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws,” and to the chagrin of Sumner administered this oath to each Senator in turn. When Benjamin F. Wade’s name was called, Hendricks, of Indiana, objected to his sitting as judge. He could succeed temporarily to the Presidency, as the presiding officer of the Senate, and his own vote might decide the fate of the accused and determine his own succession. The law forbids the Vice-p
resident to sit on such trials. It should apply with more vigour in his case. Besides, he had without a hearing already pronounced the President guilty.

  Sumner, forgetting his motion to prevent Stockton’s voting against his own expulsion, flew to the defence of Wade. Hendricks smilingly withdrew his objection, and “Bluff Ben Wade” took the oath and sat down to judge his own cause with unruffled front.

  When the case was complete, the whole bill of indictment stood forth a tissue of stupid malignity without a shred of evidence to support its charges.

  On the last day of the trial, when the closing speeches were being made, there was a stir at the door. The throng of men, packing every inch of floor space, were pushed rudely aside. The crowd craned their necks, Senators turned and looked behind them to see what the disturbance meant, and the Chief Justice rapped for order.

  Suddenly through the dense mass appeared the forms of two gigantic negroes carrying an old man. His grim face, white and rigid, and his big club foot hanging pathetically from those black arms, could not be mistaken. A thrill of excitement swept the floor and galleries, and a faint cheer rippled the surface, quickly suppressed by the gavel.

  The negroes placed him in an armchair facing the semicircle of Senators, and crouched down on their haunches beside him. Their kinky heads, black skin, thick lips, white teeth, and flat noses made for the moment a curious symbolic frame for the chalk-white passion of the old Commoner’s face.

  No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a race of empire builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the “equal” of their master, grinning at his forms of justice, the evolution of forty centuries of Aryan genius. To their brute strength the white fanatic in the madness of his hate had appealed, and for their hire he had bartered the birthright of a mighty race of freemen.

  The speaker hurried to his conclusion that the half-fainting master might deliver his message. In the meanwhile his eyes, cold and thrilling, sought the secrets of the souls of the judges before him.