The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [182]
“It was a terrific thing—there is no denying that. If he had been proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling graves, I believe they would have suspended him for two days.”
“You can depend on it, Washington. Congress is vindictive, Congress is savage, sir, when it gets waked up once. It will go to any length to vindicate its honor at such a time.”
“Ah well, we have talked the morning through, just as usual in these tiresome days of waiting, and we have reached the same old result; that is to say, we are no better off than when we began. The land bill is just as far away as ever, and the trial is closer at hand. Let’s give up everything and die.”
“Die and leave the Duchess to fight it out all alone? Oh, no, that won’t do. Come, now, don’t talk so. It is all going to come out right. Now you’ll see.”
“It never will, Colonel, never in the world. Something tells me that. I get more tired and more despondent every day. I don’t see any hope; life is only just a trouble. I am so miserable these days!”
The Colonel made Washington get up and walk the floor with him, arm in arm. The good old speculator wanted to comfort him, but he hardly knew how to go about it. He made many attempts, but they were lame; they lacked spirit; the words were encouraging, but they were only words—he could not get any heart into them. He could not always warm up, now, with the old Hawkeye fervor. By and by his lips trembled and his voice got unsteady. He said:
“Don’t give up the ship, my boy—don’t do it. The wind’s bound to fetch around and set in our favor. I know it.”
And the prospect was so cheerful that he wept. Then he blew a trumpet-blast that started the meshes of his handkerchief, and said in almost his breezy old-time way:
“Lord bless us, this is all nonsense! Night doesn’t last always; day has got to break some time or other. Every silver lining has a cloud behind it, as the poet says; and that remark has always cheered me, though I never could see any meaning to it. Everybody uses it, though, and everybody gets comfort out of it. I wish they would start something fresh. Come, now, let’s cheer up; there’s been as good fish in the sea as there are now. It shall never be said that Eschol Sellers—. Come in?”
It was the telegraph boy. The Colonel reached for the message and devoured its contents.
“I said it! Never give up the ship! The trial’s postponed till February, and we’ll save the child yet. Bless my life, what lawyers they have in New York! Give them money to fight with, and the ghost of an excuse, and they would manage to postpone anything in this world, unless it might be the millennium or something like that. Now for work again, my boy. The trial will last to the middle of March, sure; Congress ends the fourth of March. Within three days of the end of the session they will be done putting through the preliminaries, and then they will be ready for national business. Our bill will go through in forty-eight hours, then, and we’ll telegraph a million dollars to the jury—to the lawyers, I mean—and the verdict of the jury will be ‘Accidental murder resulting from justifiable insanity’—or something to that effect, something to that effect. Everything is dead sure, now. Come, what is the matter? What are you wilting down like that, for? You mustn’t be a girl, you know.”
“Oh, Colonel, I am become so used to troubles, so used to failures, disappointments, hard luck of all kinds, that a little good news breaks me right down. Everything has been so hopeless that now I can’t stand good news at all. It is too good to be true, anyway. Don’t you see how our bad luck has worked on me? My hair is getting gray, and many nights I don’t sleep at all. I wish it was all over and we could rest. I wish we could lie down and just forget everything, and let it all be just a dream that is done and can’t come back to trouble us any more. I am so tired.”
“Ah, poor child, don’t talk like that—cheer up—there’s daylight ahead. Don’t give up. You’ll have Laura again, and Louise, and your mother, and oceans and oceans of money—and