The Clansman Part 25

Pa.s.sing 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, s.h.i.+mmering and flas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 Const.i.tution----" 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 G.o.d of a fearful responsibility."

They left him in disgust and dismay.

CHAPTER X

TOSSED BY THE STORM

As the storm of pa.s.sion 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 waste 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."