“I do not know him very well. During the four years he has been here, I have met him only a few times.”
“But you know what your dearest friend thinks of him.”
“Yes, I know Elsie considers her husband to be an ecclesiastical Sir Galahad. And I must admit that he has seemed to me the highest type of the modern young minister.”
“Then you agree with me, that Mr. Sherman is thoroughly honest in this affair? That his only motive is a sense of public duty?”
“Yes. I cannot conceive of him knowingly doing a wrong.”
“That’s what has forced me to think it’s only just a mistake,” said her father.
“You may be right.” She considered the idea. “But what does your lawyer say?”
His pale cheeks flushed.
“I have no lawyer,” he said slowly.
“I see. You were waiting to consult me about whom to retain.”
He shook his head.
“Then you have approached some one?”
“I have spoken to Hopkins, and Williams, and Freeman. They all——” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“They all said they could not take my case.”
“Could not take your case!” she cried. “Why not?”
“They made different excuses. But their excuses were not their real reason.”
“And what was that?”
The old man flushed yet more painfully.
“I guess you do not fully realize the situation, Katherine. I don’t need to tell you that a wave of popular feeling against political corruption is sweeping across the country. This is the first big case that has come out in Westville, and the city is stirred up over this as it hasn’t been stirred in years. The way theExpress——You saw theExpress?”
Her hands instinctively clenched.
“It was awful! Awful!”
“The way theExpresshas handled it has especially—well, you see——”
“You mean those lawyers are afraid to take the case?”
Doctor West nodded.
Katherine’s dark eyes glowed with wrath.
“Did you try any one else?”
“Mr. Green came to see me. But——”
“Of course not! It would kill your case to have a shyster represent you.” She gripped his hand, and her voice rang out: “Father, I’m glad those men refused you. We’re going to get for you the biggest man, the biggest lawyer, in Westville.”
“You mean Mr. Blake?”
“Yes, Mr. Blake.”
“I thought of him at first, of course. But I—well, I hesitated to approach him.”
“Hesitated? Why?”
“Well, you see,” he stammered, “I remembered about your refusing him, and I felt——”
“That would never make any difference to him,” she cried. “He’s too much of a gentleman. Besides, that was five years ago, and he has forgotten it.”
“Then you think he’ll take the case?”
“Of course, he’ll take it! He’ll take it because he’s a big man, and because you need him, and because he’s no coward. And with the biggest man in Westville on your side, you’ll see how public opinion will right-about face!”
She sprang up, aglow with energy. “I’m going to see him this minute! With his help, we’ll have this matter cleared up before you know it, and”—smiling lightly—“just you see, daddy, all Westville will be out there in the front yard, tramping over Aunt Rachel’s sweet williams, begging to be allowed to come and kiss your hand!”
He kissed her own. He rose, and a smile broke through the clouds of his face.
“You’ve been home only an hour, and I feel that a thousand years have been lifted off me.”
“That’s right—and just keep on feeling athousand years younger.” She smiled caressingly, and began to twist a finger in a buttonhole of his coat. “U’m—don’t you think, daddy, that such a very young gentleman as you are, such a regular roaring young blade, might—u’m—might——”
“Might what, my dear?”
“Might——” She leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
A hand went to his throat.
“Eh, why, is this one——”
“I’m afraid it is, daddy—very!”
“We’ve been so upset I guess your aunt must have forgotten to put out a clean one for me.”
“And I suppose it never occurred to the profound scientific intellect that it was possible for one to pull out a drawer and take out a collar for one’s self.” She crossed to the bureau and came back with a clean collar. “Now, sir—up with your chin!” With quick hands she replaced the offending collar with the fresh one, tied the tie and gave it a perfecting little pat. “There—that’s better! And now I must be off. I’ll send around a few policemen to keep the crowds off Aunt Rachel’s flower-beds.”
And pressing on his pale cheek another kiss, and smiling at him from the door, she hurried out.
Katherine’srefusal of Harrison Blake’s unforeseen proposal, during the summer she had graduated from Vassar, had, until the present hour, been the most painful experience of her life.
Ever since that far-away autumn of her fourteenth year when Blake had led an at-first forlorn crusade against “Blind Charlie” Peck and swept that apparently unconquerable autocrat and his corrupt machine from power, she had admired Blake as the ideal public man. He had seemed so fine, so big already, and loomed so large in promise—it was the fall following his proposal that he was elected lieutenant-governor—that it had been a humiliation to her that she, so insignificant, so unworthy, could not give him that intractable passion, love. But though he had gone very pale at her stammered answer, he had borne his disappointment like a gallant gentleman; and in the years since then he had acquitted himself to perfection in that most difficult of rôles,the lover who must be content to be mere friend.
Katherine still retained her girlish admiration of Mr. Blake. Despite his having been so conspicuous at the forefront of public affairs, no scandal had ever soiled his name. His rectitude, so said people whose memories ran back a generation, was due mainly to fine qualities inherited from his mother, for his father had been a good-natured, hearty, popular politician with no discoverable bias toward over-scrupulosity. In fact, twenty years ago there had been a great to-do touching the voting, through a plan of the elder Blake’s devising, of a gang of negroes half a dozen times down in a river-front ward. But his party had rushed loyally to his rescue, and had vindicated him by sending him to Congress; and his sudden death on the day after taking his seat had at the time abashed all accusation, and had suffused his memory with a romantic afterglow of sentiment.
Blake lived alone with his mother in a house adjoining the Wests’, and a few moments after Katherine had left her father she turned into the Blakes’ yard. The house stood far back in a spacious lawn, shady with broad maples and aspiring pines, and set here and there with shrubs and flower-beds and a fountain whose misty spray hung a golden aureole upon the sunlight. It was quite worthy of Westville’smost distinguished citizen—a big, roomy house of brick, its sterner lines all softened with cool ivy, and with a wide piazza crossing its entire front and embracing its two sides.
The hour was that at which Westville arose from its accustomed mid-day dinner—which was the reason Katherine was calling at Blake’s home instead of going downtown to his office. She was informed that he was in. Telling the maid she would await him in his library, where she knew he received all clients who called on business at his home, she ascended the well-remembered stairway and entered a large, light room with walls booked to the ceiling.
Despite her declaration to her father that that old love episode had been long forgotten by Mr. Blake, at this moment it was not forgotten by her. She could not subdue a fluttering agitation over the circumstance that she was about to appeal for succour to a man she had once refused.
She had but a moment to wait. Blake’s tall, straight figure entered and strode rapidly across the room, his right hand outstretched.
“What—you, Katherine! I’m so glad to see you!”
She had risen. “And I to see you, Mr. Blake.” For all he had once vowed himself her lover, she had never overcome her girlhood awe of him sufficiently to use the more familiar “Harrison.”
“I knew you were coming home, but I had not expected to see you so soon. Please sit down again.”
She resumed her soft leather-covered chair, and he took the swivel chair at his great flat-topped library desk. His manner was most cordial, but lurking beneath it Katherine sensed a certain constraint—due perhaps, to their old relationship—perhaps due to meeting a friend involved in a family disgrace.
Blake was close upon forty, with a dark, strong, handsome face, penetrating but pleasant eyes, and black hair slightly marked with gray. He was well dressed but not too well dressed, as became a public man whose following was largely of the country. His person gave an immediate impression of a polished but not over-polished gentleman—of a man who in acquiring a large grace of manner, has lost nothing of virility and bigness and purpose.
“It seems quite natural,” Katherine began, smiling, and trying to speak lightly, “that each time I come home it is to congratulate you upon some new honour.”
“New honour?” queried he.
“Oh, your name reaches even to New York! We hear that you are spoken of to succeed Senator Grayson when he retires next year.”
“Oh, that!” He smiled—still with some constraint. “I won’t try to make you believethat I’m indifferent about the matter. But I don’t need to tell you that there’s many a slip betwixt being ‘spoken of’ and actually being chosen.”
There was an instant of awkward silence. Then Katherine went straight to the business of her visit.
“Of course you know about father.”
He nodded. “And I do not need to say, Katherine, how very, very sorry I am.”
“I was certain of your sympathy. Things look black on the surface for him, but I want you to know that he is innocent.”
“I am relieved to be assured of that,” he said, hesitatingly. “For, frankly, as you say, things do look black.”
She leaned forward and spoke rapidly, her hands tightly clasped.
“I have come to see you, Mr. Blake, because you have always been our friend—my friend, and a kinder friend than a young girl had any right to expect—because I know you have the ability to bring out the truth no matter how dark the circumstantial evidence may seem. I have come, Mr. Blake, to ask you, to beg you, to be my father’s lawyer.”
He stared at her, and his face grew pale.
“To be your father’s lawyer?” he repeated.
“Yes, yes—to be my father’s lawyer.”
He turned in his chair and looked out to wherethe fountain was flinging its iridescent drapery to the wind. She gazed at his strong, clean-cut profile in breathless expectation.
“I again assure you he is innocent,” she urged pleadingly. “I know you can clear him.”
“You have evidence to prove his innocence?” asked Blake.
“That you can easily uncover.”
He slowly swung about. Though with all his powerful will he strove to control himself, he was profoundly agitated, and he spoke with a very great effort.
“You have put me in a most embarrassing situation, Katherine.”
She caught her breath.
“You mean?”
“I mean that I should like to help you, but—but——”
“Yes? Yes?”
“But I cannot.”
“Cannot! You mean—you refuse his case?”
“It pains me, but I must.”
She grew as white as death.
“Oh!” she breathed. “Oh!” She gazed at him, lips wide, in utter dismay.
Suddenly she seized his arm. “But you have not yet thought it over—you have not considered,” she cried rapidly. “I cannot take no for your answer. I beg you, I implore you, to take the case.”
He seemed to be struggling between two desires. A slender, well-knit hand stretched out and clutched a ruler; his brow was moist; but he kept silent.
“Mr. Blake, I beg you, I implore you, to reconsider,” she feverishly pursued. “Do you not see what it will mean to my father? If you take the case, he is as good as cleared!”
His voice came forth low and husky. “It is because it is beyond my power to clear him that I refuse.”
“Beyond your power?”
“Listen, Katherine,” he answered. “I am glad you believe your father innocent. The faith you have is the faith a daughter ought to have. I do not want to hurt you, but I must tell you the truth—I do not share your faith.”
“You refuse, then, because you think him guilty?”
He inclined his head. “The evidence is conclusive. It is beyond my power, beyond the power of any lawyer, to clear him.”
This sudden failure of the aid she had so confidently counted as already hers, was a blow that for the moment completely stunned her. She sank back in her chair and her head dropped down into her hands.
Blake wiped his face with his handkerchief. After a moment, he went on in an agitated, persuasive voice:
“I do not want you to think, because I refuse, that I am any less your friend. If I took the case, and did my best, your father would be convicted just the same. I am going to open my heart to you, Katherine. I should like very much to be chosen for that senatorship. Naturally, I do not wish to do any useless thing that will impair my chances. Now for me, an aspirant for public favour, to champion against the aroused public the case of a man who has—forgive me the word—who has betrayed that public, and in the end to lose that case, as I most certainly should—it would be nothing less than political suicide. Your father would gain nothing. I would lose—perhaps everything. Don’t you see?”
“I follow your reasons,” she said brokenly into her hands, “I do not blame you—I accept your answer—but I still believe my father innocent.”
“And for that faith, as I told you, I admire and honour you.”
She slowly rose. He likewise stood up.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I do not know,” she answered dully. “I was so confident of your aid, that I had thought of no alternative.”
“Your father has tried other lawyers?”
“Yes. They have all refused. You can guess their reason.”
He was silent for an instant.
“Why not take the case yourself?”
“I take the case!” cried Katherine, amazed.
“Yes. You are a lawyer.”
“But I have never handled a case in court! I am not even admitted to the bar of the state. And, besides, a woman lawyer in Westville—— No, it’s quite out of the question.”
“I was only suggesting it, you know,” he said apologetically.
“Oh, I realized you did not mean it seriously.”
Her face grew ashen as her failure came to her afresh. She gazed at him with a final desperation.
“Then your answer—it is final?”
“I am sorry, but it is final,” said he.
Her head dropped.
“Thank you,” she said dully. “Good-by.” And she started away.
“Wait, Katherine.”
She paused, and he came to her side. His features were gray-hued and were twitching strangely; for an instant she had the wild impression that his old love for her still lived.
“I am sorry that—that the first time you asked aid of me—I should fail you. But but——”
“I understand.”
“One word more.” But he let several momentspass before he spoke it, and he wet his lips continually. “Remember, I am still your friend. Though I cannot take the case, I shall be glad, in a private way, to advise you upon any matters you may care to lay before me.”
“You are very good.”
“Then you accept?”
“How can I refuse? Thank you.”
He accompanied her down the stairway and to the door. Heavy-hearted, she returned home. This was sad news to bring her father, whom but half an hour before she had so confidently cheered; and she knew not in what fresh direction to turn for aid.
She went straight up to her father’s room. With him she found a stranger, who had a vague, far-distant familiarity.
The two men rose.
“This is my daughter,” said Doctor West.
The stranger bowed slightly.
“I have heard of Miss West,” he said, and in his manner Katherine’s quick instinct read strong preconceived disapprobation.
“And, Katherine,” continued her father, “this is Mr. Bruce.”
She stopped short.
“Mr. Bruce of theExpress?”
“Of theExpress,” Bruce calmly repeated.
Her dejected figure grew suddenly tense, and her cheeks glowed with hot colour. Shemoved up before the editor and gazed with flashing eyes into his square-jawed face.
“So you are the man who wrote those brutal things about father?”
He bristled at her hostile tone and manner, and there was a quick snapping behind the heavy glasses.
“I am the man who wrote those true things about your father,” he said with cold emphasis.
“And after that you dare come into this house!”
“Pardon me, Miss West, but a newspaper man dares go wherever his business takes him.”
She was trembling all over.
“Then let me inform you that you have no business here. Neither my father nor myself has anything whatever to say to yellow journalists!”
“Katherine! Katherine!” interjected her father.
Bruce bowed, his face a dull red.
“I shall leave, Miss West, just as soon as Doctor West answers my last question. I called to see if he wished to make any statement, and I was asking him about his lawyer. He told me he had as yet secured none, but that you were applying to Mr. Blake.”
Doctor West stepped toward her eagerly.
“Yes, Katherine, what did he say? Will he take the case?”
She turned from Bruce, and as she looked into the white, worn face of her father, the fire of her anger went out.
“He said—he said——”
“Yes—yes?”
She put her arms about him.
“Don’t you mind, father dear, what he said.”
Doctor West grew yet more pale.
“Then—he said—the same as the others?”
She held him tight.
“Dear daddy!”
“Then—he refused?”
“Yes—but don’t you mind it,” she tried to say bravely.
Without a sound, the old man’s head dropped upon his chest. He held to Katherine a moment; then he moved waveringly to an old haircloth sofa, sank down upon it and bowed his face into his hands.
Bruce broke the silence.
“I am to understand, then, that your father has no lawyer?”
Katherine wheeled from the bowed figure, and her anger leaped instantly to a white heat.
“And why has he no lawyer?” she cried. “Because of the inhuman things you wrote about him!”
“You forget, Miss West, that I am running a newspaper, and it is my business to print the news.”
“The news, yes; but not a malignant, ferocious distortion of the news! Look at my father there. Does it not fill your soul with shame to think of the black injustice you have done him?”
“Mere sentiment! Understand, I do not let conventional sentiment stand between me and my duty.”
“Your duty!” There was a world of scorn in her voice. “And, pray, what is your duty?”
“Part of it is to establish, and maintain, decent standards of public service in this town.”
“Don’t hide behind that hypocritical pretence! I’ve heard about you. I know the sort of man you are. You saw a safe chance for a yellow story for your yellow newspaper, a safe chance to gain prominence by yelping at the head of the pack. If he had been a rich man, if he had had a strong political party behind him, would you have dared assail him as you have? Never! Oh, it was brutal—infamous—cowardly!”
There was an angry fire behind the editor’s thick glasses, and his square chin thrust itself out. He took a step nearer.
“Listen to me!” he commanded in a slow, defiant voice. “Your opinion is to me a matter of complete indifference. I tell you that a man who betrays his city is a traitor, and that I would treat an old traitor exactly as I would treat a young traitor, I tell you that I take itas a sign of an awakening public conscience when reputable lawyers refuse to defend a man who has done what your father has done. And, finally, I predict that, try as you may, you will not be able to find a decent lawyer who will dare to take his case. And I glory in it, and consider it the result of my work!” He bowed to her. “And now, Miss West, I wish you good afternoon.”
She stood quivering, gasping, while he crossed to the door. As his hand fell upon the knob she sprang forward.
“Wait!” she cried. “Wait! He has a lawyer!”
He paused.
“Indeed! And whom?”
“One who is going to make you take back every cowardly word you have printed!”
“Who is it, Katherine?” It was her father who spoke.
She turned. Doctor West had raised his head, and in his eyes was an eager, hopeful light. She bent over him and slipped an arm about his shoulders.
“Father dear,” she quavered, “since we can get no one else, will you take me?”
“Take you?” he exclaimed.
“Because,” she quavered on, “whether you will or not, I’m going to stay in Westville and be your lawyer.”
Fora long space after Bruce had gone Katherine sat quiveringly upon the old haircloth sofa beside her father, holding his hands tightly, caressingly. Her words tumbled hotly from her lips—words of love of him—of resentment of the injustice which he suffered—and, fiercest of all, of wrath against Editor Bruce, who had so ruthlessly, and for such selfish ends, incited the popular feeling against him. She would make such a fight as Westville had never seen! She would show those lawyers who had been reduced to cowards by Bruce’s demagogy! She would bring the town humiliated to her father’s feet!
But emotion has not only peaks, but plains, and dark valleys. As she cooled and her passion descended to a less exalted level, she began to see the difficulties of, and her unfitness for, the rôle she had so impulsively accepted. An uneasiness for the future crept upon her. As she had told Mr. Blake, she had never handled a case in court. True, she had been amember of the bar for two years, but her duties with the Municipal League had consisted almost entirely in working up evidence in cases of municipal corruption for the use of her legal superiors. An untried lawyer, and a woman lawyer at that—surely a weak reed for her father to lean upon!
But she had thrown down the gage of battle; she had to fight, since there was no other champion; and even in this hour of emotion, when tears were so plenteous and every word was accompanied by a caress, she began to plan the preliminaries of her struggle.
“I shall write to-night to the league for a leave of absence,” she said. “One of the things I must see to at once is to get admitted to the state bar. Do you know when your case is to come up?”
“It has been put over to the September term of court.”
“That gives me four months.”
She was silently thoughtful for a space. “I’ve got to work hard, hard! upon your case. As I see it now, I am inclined to agree with you that the situation has arisen from a misunderstanding—that the agent thought you expected a bribe, and that you thought the bribe a small donation to the hospital.”
“I’m certain that’s how it is,” said her father.
“Then the thing to do is to see Doctor Sherman,and if possible the agent, have them repeat their testimony and try to search out in it the clue to the mistake. And that I shall see to at once.”
Five minutes later Katherine left the house. After walking ten minutes through the quiet, maple-shaded back streets she reached the Wabash Avenue Church, whose rather ponderous pile of Bedford stone was the most ambitious and most frequented place of worship in Westville, and whose bulk was being added to by a lecture room now rising against its side.
Katherine went up a gravelled walk toward a cottage that stood beneath the church’s shadow. The house’s front was covered with a wide-spreading rose vine, a tapestry of rich green which June would gorgeously embroider with sprays of heart-red roses. The cottage looked what Katherine knew it was, a bower of lovers.
Her ring was answered by a fair, fragile young woman whose eyes were the colour of faith and loyalty. A faint colour crept into the young woman’s pale cheeks.
“Why—Katherine—why—why—I don’t know what you think of us, but—but——” She could stammer out no more, but stood in the doorway in distressed uncertainty.
Katherine’s answer was to stretch out her arms. “Elsie!”Instantly the two old friends were in a close embrace.
“I haven’t slept, Katherine,” sobbed Mrs. Sherman, “for thinking of what you would think——”
“I think that, whatever has happened, I love you just the same.”
“Thank you for saying it, Katherine.” Mrs. Sherman gazed at her in tearful gratitude. “I can’t tell you how we have suffered over this—this affair. Oh, if you only knew!”
It was instinctive with Katherine to soothe the pain of others, though suffering herself. “I am certain Doctor Sherman acted from the highest motives,” she assured the young wife. “So say no more about it.”
They had entered the little sitting-room, hung with soft white muslin curtains. “But at the same time, Elsie, I cannot believe my father guilty,” Katherine went on. “And though I honour your husband, why, even the noblest man can be mistaken. My hope of proving my father’s innocence is based on the belief that Doctor Sherman may somehow have made a mistake. At any rate, I’d like to talk over his evidence with him.”
“He’s trying to work on his sermon, though he’s too worn to think. I’ll bring him right in.”
She passed through a door into the study, and a moment later reëntered with DoctorSherman. The present meeting would have been painful to an ordinary person; doubly so was it to such a hyper-sensitive nature. The young clergyman stood hesitant just within the doorway, his usual pallor greatly deepened, his thin fingers intertwisted—in doubt how to greet Katherine till she stretched out her hand to him.
“I want you to understand, Katherine dear,” little Mrs. Sherman put in quickly, with a look of adoration at her husband, “that Edgar reached the decision to take the action he did only after days of agony. You know, Katherine, Doctor West was always as kind to me as another father, and I loved him almost like one. At first I begged Edgar not to do anything. Edgar walked the floor for nights—suffering!—oh, how you suffered, Edgar!”
“Isn’t it a little incongruous,” said Doctor Sherman, smiling wanly at her, “for the instrument that struck the blow to complain, in the presence of the victim, ofhissuffering?”
“But I want her to know it!” persisted the wife. “She must know it to do you justice, dear! It seemed at first disloyal—but finally Edgar decided that his duty to the city——”
“Please say no more, Elsie.” Katherine turned to the pale young minister. “Doctor Sherman, I have not come to utter one single word of recrimination. I have come merelyto ask you to tell me all you know about the case.”
“I shall be glad to do so.”
“And could I also talk with Mr. Marcy, the agent?”
“He has left the city, and will not return till the trial.”
Katherine was disappointed by this news. Doctor Sherman, though obviously pained by the task, rehearsed in minutest detail the charges he had made against Doctor West, which charges he would later have to repeat upon the witness stand. Also he recounted Mr. Marcy’s story. Katherine scrutinized every point in these two stories for the loose end, the loop-hole, the flaw, she had thought to find. But flaw there was none. The stories were perfectly straightforward.
Katherine walked slowly away, still going over and over Doctor Sherman’s testimony. Doctor Sherman was telling the indubitable truth—yet her father was indubitably innocent. It was a puzzling case, this her first case—a puzzling, most puzzling case.
When she reached home she was told by her aunt that a gentleman was waiting to see her. She entered the big, old-fashioned parlour, fresh and tasteful despite the stiff black walnut that, in the days of her mother’s marriage, had been spread throughout the land as beauty by thegentlemen who dealt conjointly in furniture and coffins.
From a chair there rose a youthful and somewhat corpulent presence, with a chubby and very serious pink face that sat in a glossy high collar as in a cup. He smiled with a blushful but ingratiating dignity.
“Don’t you remember me? I’m Charlie Horn.”
“Oh!” And instinctively, as if to identify him by Charlie Horn’s well-remembered strawberry-marks, Katherine glanced at his hands. But they were clean, and the warts were gone. She looked at him in doubt. “You can’t be Nellie Horn’s little brother?”
“I’m not so little,” he said, with some resentment. “Since you knew me,” he added a little grandiloquently, “I’ve graduated from Bloomington.”
“Please pardon me! It was kind of you to call, and so soon.”
“Well, you see I came on business. I suppose you have seen this afternoon’sExpress?”
She instinctively stiffened.
“I have not.”
He drew out a copy of theExpress, opened it, and pointed a plump, pinkish forefinger at the beginning of an article on the first page.
“You see theExpresssays you are going to be your father’s lawyer.”
Katharine read the indicated paragraphs. Her colour heightened. The statement was blunt and bare, but between the lines she read the contemptuous disapproval of the “new woman” that a few hours since Bruce had displayed before her. Again her anger toward Bruce flared up.
“I am a reporter for theClarion,” young Charlie Horn announced, striving not to appear too proud. “And I’ve come to interview you.”
“Interview me?” she cried in dismay. “What about?”
“Well, you see,” said he, with his benign smile, “you’re the first woman lawyer that’s ever been in Westville. It’s almost a bigger sensation than your fath—you see, it’s a big story.”
He drew from his pocket a bunch of copy paper. “I want you to tell me about how you are going to handle the case. And about what you think a woman lawyer’s prospects are in Westville. And about what you think will be woman’s status in future society. And you might tell me,” concluded young Charlie Horn, “who your favourite author is, and what you think of golf. That last will interest our readers, for our country club is very popular.”
It had been the experience of Nellie Horn’s brother that the good people of Westville were quite willing—nay, even had a subdued eagerness—todiscourse about themselves, and whom they had visited over Sunday, and who was “Sundaying” with them, and what beauties had impressed them most at Niagara Falls; and so that confident young ambassador from theClarionwas somewhat dazed when, a moment later, he found himself standing alone on the West doorstep with a dim sense of having been politely and decisively wished good afternoon.
But behind him amid the stiff, dark, solemn-visaged furniture (Calvinists, every chair of them!) he left a person far more dazed than himself. Charlie Horn’s call had brought sharply home to Katherine a question that, in the press of affairs, she hardly had as yet considered—how was Westville going to take to a woman lawyer being in its midst? She realized, with a chill of apprehension, how profoundly this question concerned her next few months. Dear, bustling, respectable Westville, she well knew, clung to its own idea of woman’s sphere as to a thing divinely ordered, and to seek to leave which was scarcely less than rebellion against high God. In patriarchal days, when heaven’s justice had been prompter, such a disobedient one would suddenly have found herself rebuked into a bit of saline statuary.
Katherine vividly recalled, when she had announced her intention to study law, what a raising of hands there was, what a loud regrettingthat she had not a mother. But since she had not settled in Westville, and since she had not been actively practising in New York, the town had become partially reconciled. But this step of hers was new, without a precedent. How would Westville take it?
Her brain burned with this and other matters all afternoon, all evening, and till the dawn began to edge in and crowd the shadows from her room. But when she met her father at the breakfast table her face was fresh and smiling.
“Well, how is my client this morning?” she asked gaily. “Do you realize, daddy, that you are my first really, truly client?”
“And I suppose you’ll be charging me something outrageous as a fee!”
“Something like this”—kissing him on the ear. “But how do you feel?”
“Certain that my lawyer will win my case.” He smiled. “And how are you?”
“Brimful of ideas.”
“Yes? About the——”
“Yes. And about you. First, answer a few of your counsel’s questions. Have you been doing much at your scientific work of late?”
“The last two months, since the water-works has been practically completed, I have spent almost my whole time at it.”
“And your work was interesting?”
“Very. You see, I think I am on the verge of discovering that the typhoid bacillus——”
“You’ll tell me all about that later. Now the first order of your attorney is, just as soon as you have finished your coffee and folded your napkin, back you go to your laboratory.”
“But, Katherine, with this affair——”
“This affair, worry and all, has been shifted off upon your eminent counsel. Work will keep you from worry, so back you go to your darling germs.”
“You’re mighty good, dear, but——”
“No argument! You’ve got to do just what your lawyer tells you. And now,” she added “as I may have to be seeing a lot of people, and as having people about the house may interrupt your work, I’m going to take an office.”
He stared at her.
“Take an office?”
“Yes. Who knows—I may pick up a few other cases. If I do, I know who can use the money.”
“But open an office in Westville! Why, the people——Won’t it be a little more unpleasant——” He paused doubtfully. “Did you see what theExpresshad to say about you?”
She flushed, but smiled sweetly.
“What theExpresssaid is one reason why I’m going to open an office.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going to let fear of that Mr. Bruce dictate my life. And since I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be the whole thing. And what’s more, I’m going to act as though I were doing the most ordinary thing in the world. And if Mr. Bruce and the town want to talk, why, we’ll just let ’em talk!”
“But—but—aren’t you afraid?”
“Of course I’m afraid,” she answered promptly. “But when I realize that I’m afraid to do a thing, I’m certain that that is just exactly the thing for me to do. Oh, don’t look so worried, dear”—she leaned across and kissed him—“for I’m going to be the perfectest, properest, politest lady that ever scuttled a convention. And nothing is going to happen to me—nothing at all.”
Breakfast finished, Katherine despotically led her father up to his laboratory. A little later she set out for downtown, looking very fresh in a blue summer dress that had the rare qualities of simplicity and grace. Her colour was perhaps a little warmer than was usual, but she walked along beneath the maples with tranquil mien, seemingly unconscious of some people she passed, giving others a clear, direct glance, smiling and speaking to friends and acquaintances in her most easy manner.
As she turned into Main Street the intelligence that she was coming seemed in somemysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front doors. Bare-armed and aproned proprietors of grocery stores and their hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that dozed beside the curb hurried out of cavernous doors, the fear of run-away writ large upon their countenances, to see if a buckle was not loose or a tug perchance unfastened. Behind her, as she passed, Main Street stood statued in mid-action, strap in motionless hand, sprinkling-can tilting its entire contents of restorative over a box of clothes-pins, and gaped and stared. This was epochal for Westville. Never before had a real, live, practising woman lawyer trod the cement walk of Main Street.
When Katherine came to Court House Square, she crossed to the south side, passed theExpressBuilding, and made for the Hollingsworth Block, whose first floor was occupied by the New York Store’s “glittering array of vast and profuse fashion.” Above this alluring pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked “Hosea Hollingsworth.Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms.” In the room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on the top of the desk a “plug” hat, so venerable that it looked a very great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic evidence that they were not present for ornament alone.
From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall, smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled “Prince Albert” coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth, half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar.
“I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?” said Katherine. The question was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest memories.
“Yes. Come right in,” he returned in a high, nasal voice.
She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down. He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the fine wrinkles of his leathery face.
“And I believe this is Katherine West—our lady lawyer,” he remarked. “I read in theExpresshow you——”
Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of temper.“The editor of that paper is a cad!”
“Well, he ain’t exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman,” the old lawyer admitted. “At least, I never heard of his exerting himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons.”
“You know him, then?”
“A little. He’s my nephew.”
“Oh! I remember.”
“And we live together,” the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or satirical. “Batch it—with a nigger who saves us work by stealing things we’d otherwise have to take care of. We scrap most of the time. I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of theExpressis, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb once. He’s suffering from the spared rod.”
Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had inherited unanalyzed from her childhood, when old Hosie Hollingsworth had been the chief scandal of the town—an infidel, who had dared challenge the creation of the earth in seven days, and yet was not stricken down by a fiery bolt from heaven!She did not pursue the subject of Bruce, but went directly to her business.
“I understand that you have an office to rent.”
“So I have. Like to see it?”
“That is what I called for.”
“Just come along with me.”
He rose, and Katherine followed him to the floor above and into a room furnished much as the one she had just left.
“This office was last used,” commented old Hosie, “by a young fellow who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study law with. He tried law for a while.” The old man’s thin prehensile lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. “He’s down in Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to pay his back office rent.”
“How about the furniture?” asked Katherine.
“That was his. He left it in part payment. You can use it if you want to.”
“But I don’t want those things about”—pointing gingerly to a pair of cuspidors.
“All right. Though I don’t see how you expect to run a law office in Westville without ’em.” He bent over and took them in his hands. “I’ll take ’em along. I need a few more, for my business is picking up.”
“I suppose I can have possession at once.”
“Whenever you please.”
Standing with the cuspidors in his two hands the old lawyer looked her over. He slowly grinned, and a dry cackle came out of his lean throat.
“I was born out there in Buck Creek Township myself,” he said. “Folks all Quakers, same as your ma’s and your Aunt Rachel’s. I was brought up on plowing, husking corn and going to meeting. Never smiled till after I was twenty; wore a halo, size too large, that slipped down and made my ears stick out. My grandfather’s name was Elijah, my father’s Elisha. My father had twelve sons, and beginning with me, Hosea, he named ’em all in order after the minor prophets. Being brought up in a houseful of prophets, naturally a lot of the gift of prophecy sort of got rubbed off on me.”
“Well?” said Katherine impatiently, not seeing the pertinence of this autobiography.
Again he shifted his cigar. “Well, when I prophesy, it’s inspired,” he went on. “And you can take it as the word that came unto Hosea, that a woman lawyer settling in Westville is going to raise the very dickens in this old town!”
Whenold Hosie had withdrawn with his expectorative plunder, Katherine sat down at the desk and gazed thoughtfully out of her window, taking in the tarnished dome of the Court House that rose lustreless above the elm tops and the heavy-boned farmhorses that stood about the iron hitch-racks of the Square, stamping and switching their tails in dozing warfare against the flies.
Once more, she began to go over the case. Having decided to test all possible theories, she for the moment pigeon-holed the idea of a mistake, and began to seek for other explanations. For a space she vacantly watched the workmen tearing down the speakers’ stand. But presently her eyes began to glow, and she sprang up and excitedly paced the little office.
Perhaps her father had unwittingly and innocently become involved in some large system of corruption! Perhaps this case was the first symptom of the existence of some deep-hidden municipal disease!
It seemed possible—very possible. Her two years with the Municipal League had taught her how common were astute dishonest practices. The idea filled her. She began to burn with a feverish hope. But from the first moment she was sufficiently cool-headed to realize that to follow up the idea she required intimate knowledge of Westville political conditions.
Here she felt herself greatly handicapped. Owing to her long residence away from Westville she was practically in ignorance of public affairs—and she faced the further difficulty of having no one to whom she could turn for information. Her father she knew could be of little service; expert though he was in his specialty, he was blind to evil in men. As for Blake, she did not care to ask aid from him so soon after his refusal of assistance. And as for others, she felt that all who could give her information were either hostile to her father or critical of herself.
For days the idea possessed her mind. She kept it to herself, and, her suspicious eyes sweeping in all directions, she studied as best she could to find some evidence or clue to evidence, that would corroborate her conjecture. In her excited hope, she strove, while she thought and worked, to be indifferent to what the town might think about her. But she was well aware that Old Hosie’s prophecy was swiftin coming true—that a storm was raging, a storm of her own sex. It should be explained, however, in justice to them, that they forgot the fact, or never really knew it, that she had been forced to take her father’s case. To be sure, there was no open insult, no direct attack, no face-to-face denunciation; but piazzas buzzed indignantly with her name, and at the meeting of the Ladies’ Aid the poor were forgotten, as at the Missionary Society were the unbibled heathen upon the foreign shore.
Fragments of her sisters’ pronouncements were wafted to Katherine’s ears. “No self-respecting, womanly woman would ever think of wanting to be a lawyer”—“A forward, brazen, unwomanly young person”—“A disgrace to the town, a disgrace to our sex”—“Think of the example she sets to impressionable young girls; they’ll want to break away and do all sorts of unwomanly things”—“Everybody knows her reason for being a lawyer is only that it gives her a greater chance to be with the men.”
Katherine heard, her mouth hardened, a certain defiance came into her manner. But she went straight ahead seeking evidence to support her suspicion.
Every day made her feel more keenly her need of intimate knowledge about the city’s political affairs; then, unexpectedly, and from an unexpected quarter, an informant steppedout upon her stage. Several times Old Hosie Hollingsworth had spoken casually when they had chanced to pass in the building or on the street. One day his lean, stooped figure appeared in her office and helped itself to a chair.
“I see you haven’t exactly made what Charlie Horn, in his dramatic criticisms, calls an uproarious and unprecedented success,” he remarked, after a few preliminaries.
“I have not been sufficiently interested to notice,” was her crisp response.
“That’s right; keep your back up,” said he. “I’ve been agin about everything that’s popular, and for everything that’s unpopular, that ever happened in this town. I’ve been an ‘agin-er’ for fifty years. They’d have tarred and feathered me long ago if there’d been any leading citizen unstingy enough to have donated the tar. Then, too, I’ve had a little money, and going through the needle’s eye is easy business compared to losing the respect of Westville so long as you’ve got money—unless, of course,” he added, “you’re a female lawyer. I tell you, there’s no more fun than stirring up the animals in this old town. Any one unpopular in Westville is worth being friends with, and so if you’re willing——”
He held out his thin, bony hand. Katherine, with no very marked enthusiasm, took it. Thenher eyes gleamed with a new light; and obeying an impulse she asked:
“Are you acquainted with political conditions in Westville?”
“Me acquainted with——” He cackled. “Why, I’ve been setting at my office window looking down on the political circus of this town ever since Noah run aground on Mount Ararat.”
She leaned forward eagerly.
“Then you know how things stand?”
“To a T.”
“Tell me, is there any rotten politics, any graft or corruption going on?” She flushed. “Of course, I mean except what’s charged against my father.”
“When Blind Charlie Peck was in power, there was more graft and dirty——”
“Not then, but now?” she interrupted.
“Now? Well, of course you know that since Blake run Blind Charlie out of business ten years ago, Blake has been the big gun in this town.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Then you must know that in the last ten years Westville has been text, sermon, and doxology for all the reformers in the state.”
“But could not corruption be going on without Mr. Blake knowing it? Could not Mr. Peck be secretly carrying out some scheme?”
“Blind Charlie? Blind Charlie ain’t dead yet, not by a long sight—and as long as there’s a breath in his carcass, that good-natured old blackguard is likely to be a dangerous customer. But though Charlie’s still the boss of his party, he controls no offices, and has got no real power. He’s as helpless as Satan was after he’d been kicked out of heaven and before he’d landed that big job he holds on the floor below. Nowadays, Charlie just sits in his side office over at the Tippecanoe House playing seven-up from breakfast till bedtime.”
“Then you think there’s no corrupt politics in Westville?” she asked in a sinking voice.
“Not an ounce of ’em!” said Old Hosie with decision.
This agreed with the conviction that had been growing upon Katherine during the last few days. While she had entertained suspicion of there being corruption, she had several times considered the advisability of putting a detective on the case. But this idea she now abandoned.
After this talk with the old lawyer, Katherine was forced back again upon misunderstanding. She went carefully over the records of her father’s department, on file in the Court House, seeking some item that would cast light upon the puzzle. She went over and over the indictment, seeking some loose end, some overlookedinconsistency, that would yield her at least a clue.
For days she kept doggedly at this work, steeling herself against the disapprobation of the town. But she found nothing. Then, in a flash, an overlooked point recurred to her. The trouble, so went her theory, was all due to a confusion of the bribe with the donation to the hospital. Where was that donation?
Here was a matter that might at last lead to a solution of the difficulty. Again on fire with hope, she interviewed her father. He was certain that a donation had been promised, he had thought the envelope handed him by Mr. Marcy contained the gift—but of the donation itself he knew no more. She interviewed Doctor Sherman; he had heard Mr. Marcy refer to a donation but knew nothing about the matter. She tried to get in communication with Mr. Marcy, only to learn that he was in England studying some new filtering plants recently installed in that country. Undiscouraged, she one day stepped off the train in St. Louis, the home of the Acme Filter, and appeared in the office of the company.
The general manager, a gentleman who ran to portliness in his figure, his jewellery and his courtesy, seemed perfectly acquainted with the case. In exculpation of himself and his company, he said that they were constantly beingheld up by every variety of official from a county commissioner to a mayor, and they were simply forced to give “presents” in order to do business.
“But my father’s defense,” put in Katherine, “was that he thought this ‘present’ was in reality a donation to the hospital. Was anything said to my father about a donation?”
“I believe there was.”
“That corroborates my father!” Katherine exclaimed eagerly. “Would you make that statement at the trial—or at least give me an affidavit to that effect?”
“I’ll be glad to give you an affidavit. But I should explain that the ‘present’ and the donation were two distinctly separate affairs.”
“Then what became of the donation?” Katherine cried triumphantly.
“It was sent,” said the manager.
“Sent?”
“I sent it myself,” was the reply.
Katherine left St. Louis more puzzled than before. What had become of the check, if it had really been sent? Home again, she ransacked her father’s desk with his aid, and in a bottom drawer they found a heap of long-neglected mail.
Doctor West at first scratched his head in perplexity. “I remember now,” he said. “I never was much of a hand to keep up with my letters, and for the few days before that celebrationI was so excited that I just threw everything——”
But Katherine had torn open an envelope and was holding in her hands a fifty dollar check from the Acme Filter Company.
“What was the date of your arrest?” she asked sharply. “The date Mr. Marcy gave you that money?”
“The fifteenth of May.”
“This check is dated the twelfth of May. The envelope shows it was received in Westville on the thirteenth.”
“Well, what of that?”
“Only this,” said Katherine slowly, and with a chill at her heart, “that the prosecution can charge, and we cannot disprove the charge, that the real donation was already in your possession at the time you accepted what you say you believed was the donation.”
Then, with a rush, a great temptation assailed Katherine—to destroy this piece of evidence unfavourable to her father which she held in her hands. For several moments the struggle continued fiercely. But she had made a vow with herself when she had entered law that she was going to keep free from the trickery and dishonourable practices so common in her profession. She was going to be an honest lawyer, or be no lawyer at all. And so, at length, she laid the check before her father.
“Just indorse it, and we’ll send it in to the hospital,” she said.
Afterward it occurred to her that to have destroyed the check would at the best have helped but little, for the prosecution, if it so desired, could introduce witnesses to prove that the donation had been sent. Suspicion of having destroyed or suppressed the check would then inevitably have rested upon her father.
This discovery of the check was a heavy blow, but Katherine went doggedly back to the first beginnings; and as the weeks crept slowly by she continued without remission her desperate search for a clue which, followed up, would make clear to every one that the whole affair was merely a mistake. But the only development of the summer which bore at all upon the case—and that bearing seemed to Katherine indirect—was that, since early June, the service of the water-works had steadily been deteriorating. There was frequently a shortage in the supply, and the filtering plant, the direct cause of Doctor West’s disgrace, had proved so complete a failure that its use had been discontinued. The water was often murky and unpleasant to the taste. Moreover, all kinds of other faults began to develop in the plant. The city complained loudly of the quality of the water and the failure of the system. It was like one of these new-fangled toys, averredthe street corners, that runs like a miracle while the paint is on it and then with a whiz and a whir goes all to thunder.
But to this mere by-product of the case Katherine gave little thought. She had to keep desperately upon the case itself. At times, feeling herself so alone, making no inch of headway, her spirits sank very low indeed. What made the case so wearing on the soul was that she was groping in the dark. She was fighting an invisible enemy, even though it was no more than a misunderstanding—an enemy whom, strive as she would, she could not clutch, with whom she could not grapple. Again and again she prayed for a foe in the open. Had there been a fight, no matter how bitter, her part would have been far, far easier—for in fight there is action and excitement and the lifting hope of victory.
It took courage to work as she did, weary week upon weary week, and discover nothing. It took courage not to slink away at the town’s disapprobation. At times, in the bitterness of her heart, she wished she were out of it all, and could just rest, and be friends with every one. In such moods it would creep coldly in upon her that there could be but one solution to the case—that after all her father must be guilty. But when she would go home and look into his thoughtful, unworldy old face, thatsolution would instantly become impossible; and she would cast out doubt and despair and renew her determination.
The weeks dragged heavily on—hot and dusty after the first of July, and so dry that out in the country the caked earth was a fine network of zigzagging fissures, and the farmers, gazing despondently upon their shrivelling corn, watched with vain hope for a rescuing cloud to darken the clear, hard, brilliant heavens. At length the summer burned to its close; the opening day of the September term of court was close at hand. But still the case stood just as on the day Katherine had stepped so joyously from the Limited. The evidence of Sherman was unshaken. The charges of Bruce had no answer.
One afternoon—her father’s case was set for two days later—as Katherine left her office, desperate, not knowing which way to turn, her nerves worn fine and thin by the long strain, she saw her father’s name on the front page of theExpress. She bought a copy. In the centre of the first page, in a “box” and set in heavy-faced type, was an editorial in Bruce’s most rousing style, trying her father in advance, declaring him flagrantly guilty, and demanding for him the law’s extremest penalty.
That editorial unloosed her long-collected wrath—wrath that had many a reason. In Bruce’s person Katherine had from the firstseen the summing up, the leader, of the bitterness against her father. All summer he had continued his sharp attacks, and the virulence of these had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover, Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite. And to her hostility against him in her father’s behalf and to her contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town’s attitude toward her she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her soul that she might humble.
She crushed theExpress, flung it from her into the gutter, and walked home all a-tremble. Her aunt met her in the hall as she was laying off her hat. A spot burned faintly in either withered cheek of the old woman.
“Who does thee think is here?” she asked.
“Who?” Katherine repeated mechanically, her wrath too high for interest in anything else.
“Mr. Bruce. Upstairs with thy father.”
“What!” cried Katherine.
Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father’s door, and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom heaving, eyes on fire.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
His powerful figure rose, and his square-hewn face looked directly into her own.
“Interviewing your father,” he returned with his aggressive calm.
“He was asking me to confess,” explained Doctor West.
“Confess?” cried Katherine.