The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [161]
Mr. Buckstone resolved that now that the nail was driven home, he would clinch it on the other side and make it stay forever. He moved a reconsideration of the vote by which the bill had passed. The motion was lost, of course, and the great Industrial University act was an accomplished fact as far as it was in the power of the House of Representatives to make it so.
There was no need to move an adjournment. The instant the last motion was decided, the enemies of the University rose and flocked out of the Hall, talking angrily, and its friends flocked after them jubilant and congratulatory. The galleries disgorged their burden, and presently the House was silent and deserted.
When Col. Sellers and Washington stepped out of the building they were surprised to find that the daylight was old and the sun well up. Said the Colonel:
“Give me your hand, my boy! You’re all right at last! You’re a millionaire! At least you’re going to be. The thing is dead sure. Don’t you bother about the Senate. Leave me and Dilworthy to take care of that. Run along home, now, and tell Laura. Lord, it’s magnificent news—perfectly magnificent! Run, now. I’ll telegraph my wife. She must come here and help me build a house. Everything’s all right now!”
A Hearty Shake.
Washington was so dazed by his good fortune and so bewildered by the gaudy pageant of dreams that was already trailing its long ranks through his brain, that he wandered he knew not where, and so loitered by the way that when at last he reached home he woke to a sudden annoyance in the fact that his news must be old to Laura, now, for of course Senator Dilworthy must have already been home and told her an hour before. He knocked at her door, but there was no answer.
“That is like the Duchess,” said he. “Always cool. A body can’t excite her—can’t keep her excited, anyway. Now she has gone off to sleep again, as comfortably as if she were used to picking up a million dollars every day or two.”
Then he went to bed. But he could not sleep; so he got up and wrote a long, rapturous letter to Louise, and another to his mother. And he closed both to much the same effect:
“Laura will be queen of America, now, and she will be applauded, and honored and petted by the whole nation. Her name will be in every one’s mouth more than ever, and how they will court her and quote her bright speeches. And mine, too, I suppose; though they do that more already, than they really seem to deserve. Oh, the world is so bright, now, and so cheery; the clouds are all gone, our long struggle is ended, our troubles are all over. Nothing can ever make us unhappy any more. You dear faithful ones will have the reward of your patient waiting now. How father’s wisdom is proven at last! And how I repent me, that there have been times when I lost faith and said the blessing he stored up for us a tedious generation ago was but a long-drawn curse, a blight upon us all. But everything is well, now— we are done with poverty and toil, weariness and heart-breakings; all the world is filled with sunshine.”
CHAPTER 46
Forte è l’aceto di vin dolce.
Ne bid swylc cwénlíc fieaw
idese to efnanne,
fieáh de hió ænlícu sy,
fiætte freodu-webbe
feores onsæce,
æfter lig-torne,
leófne mannan.
BEOWULF.
Philip left the capitol and walked up Pennsylvania Avenue in company with Senator Dilworthy. It was a bright spring morning, the air was soft and inspiring; in the deepening wayside green, the pink flush of the blossoming peach trees, the soft suffusion on the heights of Arlington, and the breath of the warm south wind was apparent the annual miracle of the resurrection of the earth.
The Senator took off his hat and seemed to open his soul to the sweet influences of the morning. After the heat and noise of the chamber, under its dull gas-illuminated glass canopy, and the all night struggle of passion and feverish excitement there, the open, tranquil world