The 13th District: A Story of a CandidateWhitlock, Brand
General
The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate
Whitlock, Brand
Didactic fiction; Elections -- Fiction; Political campaigns -- Fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
But he took the paper. It was the _News_, and his eye lighted at once
on the article that Pusey had written about Garwood. As he read it a
great rage gathered in his breast, a rage compounded of many emotions,
which gradually took form, first as a hatred of Garwood for his
misdeeds, then of Pusey for laying them bare. Ethan Harkness was not a
man of broad sympathies. What love he had was bestowed on Emily; he had
lavished it there ever since his wife had died. He gave so much to her
that he had none left for others, and he stood in the community as a
hard, just man who had built up his fortune by long years of labor and
self-denial that made him impatient of the frailties which his fellows
in the little community, in common with their brothers in the wider
world, found it so hard to govern and restrain.
He sat there mute and implacable, with his fist, still big from the
farm work it had done in early life, clenched upon the _News_, while
Morton clanked the bars of the vault in fastening the place of treasure
for the night, and slipped here and there behind his wire cage,
pretending little duties to keep him from facing his employer when in
such a mood.
It was after five o'clock when the surrey lurched into the filthy
gutter, and when Harkness saw that Emily was not in it, he felt his
rage with Garwood increase for depriving him thus of the pleasant hour
to which he looked forward all the afternoon. He rode home in silence
behind old Jasper who tried in his companionable way, by making his
characteristic observations on men and things, to draw his master out
of his moody preoccupation.
Harkness found his daughter at the supper table, and when he saw her,
he at once yearned toward her with a great wish to give her such
comfort as a mother would have supplied; but with something of his
own stern nature, she held herself spiritually aloof; and he ate his
cold meat, his fried potatoes, his peaches and cream and drank his
tea without a word from her, beyond some allusions to the heat of the
sultry day, the prospect of rain, and the need of it at his farm lying
at the edge of town. Her face was white, but her eyes were not red or
swollen, and she gave him no sign whether or not she knew of the blow
that had been struck at the man she loved. He thought several times of
telling her, or asking her about it, but he was always half afraid of
her, and had submitted to her rule all the years when no one else was
strong enough to rule him.
When supper was done, she disappeared, and as he strained his ears from
his library where he was reading all alone, he heard her close a door
upstairs and lock it. Later, when he went up in his stocking-feet,
having left his boots downstairs in the habit he had brought out of the
poverty of his boyhood into the comfort of his age, he paused a moment
by her door, and raised his hand as if to knock; but he could not
figure it out, he said to himself, and so changed his mind and went to
bed, leaving it all to time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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