The Reaping

"WILLIAM FOX? He's the most brilliant man they've got, but a two-edged sword; they're all afraid of him!" The speaker had just left the swinging doors at the foot of the staircase from the Rotunda, under the old Library rooms in the west front of the Capitol, and his companion, who was also a member, was working himself slowly into his greatcoat. "No wonder; he's got a tongue like a whiplash and his smooth ways only make its sting worse," he retorted, between his struggles with a recalcitrant sleeve lining and a stiff shoulder. "That's it, his tongue and his infernal sarcastic humor," Fox's admirer admitted with reluctance, "but his logicit's magnificent,his mind cuts as clean as a diamond; look at his speech on the Nicaraguan affair. Lord, I'd like to see the opposition beat it! They can't do it; they've done nothing but snarl since. He'll be President some dayif he doesn't cut his own throat." "Pshaw, man!" retorted the other irritably, "he's brilliant, but as unstable as water, and a damned egoist!" They had reached the top of the wide steps which descend from the west terrace, and Allestree lost the reply to his outburst in the increasing distance as they went down into the park below. He stood looking after their indistinctly outlined figures as they disappeared slowly into the soft mist which enveloped the scene at his feet. It was about six o'clock, an early December evening, and already night overhead where the sky was heavily clouded. The streets, streaming with water, showed broad circles of shimmering light under the electric lamps, and the naked trees and the ilexes clustered below the terrace made a darkness through which, and beyond, he saw the long, converging vista of the Avenue, lined on either side with what seemed to be wavering and brilliant rainbows, suspended above the wet pavements and apparently melting into one in the extreme distance, as though he looked into the sharp apex of a triangle. The whole was veiled and mystically obscured by a palely luminous vapor which transformed and softened every object, while the vehicles and pedestrians, constantly hurrying across the foreground, loomed exaggerated and fantastic in the fog. Now and then a keen point of light, the eye of some motor-car, approached, flashed past the Peace Monument and was lost at the elbow of the Hill. The terrace, except for Allestree, was deserted, and the continuous murmur and roar of city life came up to him slightly softened and subdued, both by the atmospheric depression and the intervening space of the park. Behind him both wings of the Capitol were vividly lighted, for the House had just risen after a heated debate, prolonged, as he amusedly surmised, by the eloquence of William Fox. At the thought, that much discussed figure arose before his mind's eye in a new aspect created by the fragment of conversation which had just reached him. He was in the habit of viewing Fox from that intimate standpoint which, discovering all the details, loses the larger effect of the whole; as the man in the wings of the theatre, disillusioned by the tinsel on the costume of an actor and the rouge on his face, loses the grand climax of his dramatic genius and sees instead only the charlatan. Yet Allestree's affection for his cousin was strong enough to embrace even those defects, of which he was keenly aware, and personal enough to feel a thrill of elation at the constant evidences of an increasing recognition of Fox's really great abilities. Yet there was something amusing in the fear which he was beginning to inspire in his opponents; amusing, at least, to one who knew him, as Allestree did, to be a man of careless good humor and large indifference.

Dettagli