Chapter 10

Into Armstrong's sitting room, toward ten that night, Fosdick came limping and shuffling. Even had Armstrong been a "good hater" he could hardly have withstood the pathos of that abject figure. Being too broadly intelligent for more than a spasm of that ugliest and most ignorant of passions, he felt as if the broken man before him were the wronged and he himself the wronger. "But this man made a shameful, treacherous, unprovoked attempt to disgrace me," he reminded himself, in the effort to keep a just point of view for prudence's sake. It was useless. That ghastly, sunken face, those frightened, dim old eyes, the trembling step— If a long life of soul-prostitution had left Josiah Fosdick enough of natural human generosity to appreciate the meaning of Armstrong's expression, he might have been able to change his crushing defeat into what in the circumstances would have been the triumph of a drawn battle. But, except possibly the creative geniuses, men must measure their fellows throughout by themselves. Fosdick knew what he would do, were he in Armstrong's place. He clutched at Armstrong's hand with a cringing hypocrisy of deference that made Armstrong ashamed for him—and that warned him he dared not yet drop his guard."I've been trying to get you since three o'clock this afternoon," said Fosdick. "I had to see you before I went to bed." He sank into a chair and sat breathing heavily. He looked horribly old. "You don't believe I deliberately lied about that money, do you, Horace?""Is it necessary to discuss that, Mr. Fosdick? Hadn't we better get right at what you've come to see me about?""I've wired the governor. He don't answer. Morris refuses to see me. Westervelt—it's useless to see him—he has betrayed me—sold me out—he on whom I have showered a thousand benefits. I made that man, Horace, and he has rewarded me. That's human nature!"Armstrong recalled that, when he was winning over Westervelt by convincing him of Fosdick's perfidy to him, Westervelt had made the same remark, had cried out that he loaned Fosdick the first five hundred dollars he ever possessed and had got him into the O.A.D. "It seems to me, Mr. Fosdick, that recriminations are idle," said he. "I assume you have something to ask or to propose. Am I right?""Horace, you and I are naturally friends. Why should we fight each other?""You have come to propose a peace?""I want us to continue to work together.""That can be arranged," said Armstrong."I hoped so!" Fosdick exclaimed. "I hoped so!""But," proceeded Armstrong, seeing the drift of the thought behind that quick elation, "let us have no misunderstanding. You were permitted to leave the witness stand when you did to-day because I wished you to have one more chance to save yourself. That chance will be withdrawn if you begin to act on the notion that my forbearance is proof of my weakness.""All I want is peace—peace and quiet," said Fosdick, with his new revived hope and craft better hid. But Armstrong saw that it was temperamentally impossible for Fosdick to believe any man would of his own accord drop the sword from the throat of a beaten foe."You can have peace," continued Armstrong, "peace with honor, provided you give a guarantee. You cannot expect me to trust you.""What guarantee do you want?""Control of the O.A.D."Fosdick's feebleness fell from him. He sprang erect, eyes flashing, fists shaking. "Never!" he shouted. "So help me God, never! It's mine. It's part of my children's patrimony. I'll keep it, in spite of hell!""You will lose it in any event," said Armstrong, as calm as Fosdick was tempestuous. "You have choice of turning it over to me or having it snatched from you by Atwater and Trafford and Langdon.""Atwater!" exclaimed Fosdick."When I found you had arranged to destroy me," explained Armstrong, "I formed a counter-arrangement, as I wasn't strong enough to fight you alone.""You sold me out!"Armstrong winced. Fosdick's phrase was unjust, but since his talk with Neva he was critical and sensitive in the matter of self-respect; and, while his campaign of self-defense, of "fighting the devil with fire," still seemed necessary and legitimate, it also seemed lacking in courage. If Fosdick had crept and crawled up on him, had he not also crawled and crept up on Fosdick? "I defended myself in the only way you left me," replied Armstrong. "I formed an alliance with the one man who could successfully attack you.""So, it is Atwater who has bought the governor—and Morris—yes, and that ingrate, Westervelt!""However that may be," replied Armstrong, "you will be destroyed and Atwater will take the O.A.D. unless you meet my terms." He was flushing deep red before Fosdick's look of recognition of a brother in chicane.He knew Atwater was simply using him, would destroy him or reduce him to dependence, as soon as Fosdick was stripped and ruined. He felt he was as fully justified in eluding the tiger by strategy as he had been in procuring the tiger to defeat and destroy the lion that had been about to devour him. Still, the business was not one a man would preen himself upon in a company of honest men and women. And Fosdick's look, which said, "This man, having sold me out, is now about to sell out his allies," hit home and hit hard.But he must carry his project through, or fall victim to Atwater; he must not let this melting mood which Neva had brought about enfeeble his judgment and disarm his courage. "If you refuse my offer," he said to Fosdick, "the investigation will go on, and Atwater will get the O.A.D. and take from you every shred of your character and much of your fortune—perhaps all. If you accept my offer, the investigation will stop and you will retire from the O.A.D. peaceably and without having to face proceedings to compel you to make restitution.""How do I know you can keep your bargain?""I have the governor and Morris with me," replied Armstrong, frankly exposing his whole hand. "They, no more than myself, wish to become the puppets of the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd."Fosdick reflected. Now that he knew the precise situation, he felt less feeble. Before Armstrong explained, he had been like a man fighting in a pitch dark room against foes he could not even number. Now, the light was on; he knew just how many, just who they were; and, appalling though the discovery was, it was not so appalling as that struggle in the pitch dark. "You evidently think I'm powerless," he said at last. "But if you press me too far, you will see that I am not. For instance, youneedme. You must have me or fall into Atwater's clutches. You see, I am far from powerless.""But you forget," replied Armstrong, "you are heavily handicapped by your reputation. A man who has to fight for his good name is like a soldier in battle with a baby on his arm and a woman clinging to his neck. How can you fight without losing your reputation? The committee is against you. At Monday's session, if you let matters take their course, all that Westervelt's books show of your profits from the O.A.D. will be exposed—even the way you made it pay for the carpets on your floors, for the sheets on your beds, for towels and soap and matches."Armstrong would not have believed there was in Fosdick's whole body so much red blood as showed in his face. "It's a custom that's grown up," he muttered shufflingly. "They all do it—in every big company, more or less, directly or indirectly.""True enough," said Armstrong. "But you'll be the only one on trial. If you accept my offer, you'll be let alone. Cancel the worst of those leases, settle the ugliest accounts, all at comparatively trifling cost, and the public will soon forget.""And what guarantee do you give that the agreement would be carried out?""My pledge—that's all," replied Armstrong—and again he flushed. He had avoided specifically giving his word to the Atwater crowd when he formed alliance with them; still, his "my pledge" had a hollow, jeering echo. "It's the only possible guarantee in the circumstances—and, as you are solely responsible for the circumstances, Mr. Fosdick, I do not see how you can complain."Fosdick again reflected; the awful, deathly pallor, the deep scams, the palsylike trembling came back. After a long wait, with Armstrong avoiding the sight of him, he quavered, "Horace, I'll agree to anything except giving up the O.A.D." There he broke down and wept. "You don't know what that institution means to me. It's my child. It's my heart. It's my reason for being alive.""Yes, it has been a source of enormous profit to you, Mr. Fosdick," said Armstrong calmly, for his own strengthening more than to get Fosdick back to facts. "I appreciate how hard it must be to give up such a source of easy wealth. But it must be done.""You don't understand," mourned the old man. "You have no sentiment. You do notfeelthose hundreds of thousands, those millions of helpless people—how they look up to me, how they pray for me and are full of gratitude to me. Do you think I could coldly turn over their interests to strangers? Why, who knows what might not be done with those sacred trust funds?""If you persist in letting Atwater get control," said Armstrong, "I fear those sacred trust funds will soon be larger by about two thirds of what you regard as your private fortune. I do not like to say these things; you compel me, Mr. Fosdick. It is waste of time and breath to cant to me."If Fosdick had had anything less at stake than his fortune, he would have broken then and there with Armstrong. As it was, his prudence could not smother down the geyser of fury that boiled and spouted up from his vanity. "I must be mad," he cried, "to imagine that such matters of conscience would make an impression on you."Armstrong laughed slightly. "When a man is in the jungle, is fighting with wild beasts, he has to put forward the beast in him. You tried to ruin me—a more infamous, causeless attack never was made on a man. You have failed; you are in the pit you dug for me. I am letting you off lightly." And now Armstrong's blue eyes had the green gray of steel and flashed with that furious temper which he had been compelled to learn to rule because, once beyond control, it would have been a free force of sheer destruction. "If you had not been interceded for, you would now be a pariah, with no wealth to buy you the semblance of respect. Don't try me too far! I do not love you. I have the normal instinct about reptiles."At that very moment Fosdick was looking the reptile. "Yes, I did try to tear you down," he hissed. "And I'll tell you why. Because I saw your ambition—saw you would never rest until you had robbed me and mine of that which you coveted. Was I not right?"Armstrong could not deny it. He had never definitely formed such an ambition; but he realized, as Fosdick was accusing him, that had he been permitted to go peacefully on as president, the day would have come when he would have reached out for real power.Fosdick went on, with more repression and dignity, but no less energy of feeling, "I cannot but believe that God in His justice will yet hurl you to ruin. You are robbing me, but as sure as there is a God, Horace Armstrong, He will bring you low!"Well as Armstrong knew him, he was for the moment impressed. The only born monsters are the insane criminals; the monstrous among our powerful and eminent and most respectable are by long and deliberate indulgence in self-deception manufactured into monsters, protected from public exposure by their position, wealth, and respectability. We do not realize any more than they do themselves, that they have become insane criminals like the monsters-born. There is a majesty in the trappings of virtue that does not altogether leave them even when a hypocrite wears them; also, Armstrong was more than half disarmed by his new-sprung doubts whether he was wholly justified in meeting treachery with treachery. He surprised Fosdick by breaking the silence with an almost deprecating, "I said more than I intended. What you have done, what I have done, is all part of the game. Let us continue to leave God and morals—honesty and honor—out of it. Let us be practical, businesslike. You wish to save your reputation and your fortune. I can save them for you. I have given you my condition—it is the least I will ask, or can ask. What do you say?""I must have time to think it over," replied Fosdick. "I cannot decide so important a matter in haste.""Quite right," Armstrong readily assented. "It will not be necessary to have your decision before noon to-morrow. The committee has adjourned until Monday. That will give us half of Saturday and Sunday to settle the plans that hang on your decision.""To-morrow noon," said Fosdick, sunk into a stupor. "To-morrow noon." And he moved vaguely to the door, one trembling hand out before him as if he were blind and feeling his way. And, so all-powerful are appearances with us, Armstrong hung his head and did not dare look at the pitiful spectacle of age and feebleness and misery. "He's a villain," said the young man to himself, "as nearly a through-and-through villain as walks the earth. But he's still a man, with a heart and pride and the power to suffer. And what am I that I should judge him? In his place, with his chances, would I have been any different? Was I not hell-bent by the same route? Am I not, still?"He walked beside Fosdick to the elevator, waited with him for the car. "Good night," he said in a tone of gentlest courtesy. And it hurt him that the old man did not seem to hear, did not respond. He wished that Fosdick had offered to shake hands with him.He went to Morris, expecting him at a club across the way, and related the substance of the interview. Morris, who had both imagination and sensibility, guessed the cause of his obvious yet apparently unprovoked depression, guessed why he had been so tender with Fosdick. Nevertheless he twitted him on his soft-heartedness: "The old bunco-steerer hasn't disgorged yet, has he?—and hasn't the remotest intention of disgorging. So, my tears are altogether for the policy holders he has been milking these forty years." Then he added, "Though, why careless damn fools should get any sympathy in their misfortunes does not clearly appear. As between knaves and fools, I incline toward knaves. At least, they are teachers of wisdom in the school of experience, while fools avail nothing, are simply provokers and purveyors to knavery."XXIIA DUEL AFTER LUNCHIn the respectable morning newspaper the Fosdicks took in, the facts of Josiah's latest public appearance were presented with those judicious omissions and modifications which the respectable editor feels it his duty to make, that the lower classes may not be led to distrust and deride the upper classes. Thus, Amy, glancing at headlines in search of the only important news—the doings of "our set"—got the impression that her father had had an annoying lapse of memory in testifying about something or other before somebody or other. But the servants took in a newspaper that had no mission to safeguard the name and fame and influence of the upper classes; probably not by chance, this newspaper was left where its vulgar but vivid headlines caught her eye.She read, punctuating each paragraph with explosions of indignation. But when she had finished, she reread—and began to think. As most of us have learned by experience in great matters or small, truth is rubberlike—it offers small resistance to the blows of prejudice, and, as soon as the blow passes, it straightway springs back to its original form and place. Amy downfaced a thousand little facts of her own knowledge as to where the money came from—facts which tried to tell her that the "low, lying sheet" had revealed only a trifling part of the truth. But, when she saw her father, saw how he had suddenly broken, his very voice emasculate and thin, she gave up the struggle to deceive herself. There is a notion that a man's family is the last to believe the disagreeable truth about his relations with the outside world. This is part of the theory that a man has two characters, that he can be a saint at six o'clock in the morning and a scoundrel at six o'clock in the evening, that he is honest at a certain street and number and a liar and a thief at another street and number. But the fact is that character is the most closely woven and homogeneous of fabrics, and, though a man's family do not admit it publicly when the truth about him is exposed, they know him all the time for what he really is. Amy knew; her father's appearance, indicating not that he was guilty but that he was found out and was in an agony of dread of the consequences, threw her into a hysteria of shame and terror. She avoided the servants; she startled each time the door bell rang; it might mean the bursting of the real disgrace, for, in her ignorance of political conditions, she assumed that arrest and imprisonment would follow the detection of her father and probably Hugo in grave crimes. She dared not face any of the few that called; she would not even see Hugo.On Sunday morning came a note from Alois—a love letter, begging to see her. She read it with tears flowing and with a heart swelling with gratitude. "He does love me!" she said. "He must know we are about to be disgraced, yet he has only been strengthened in his love." Though the actual state of the family's affairs was vastly different from what she imagined, though she would have been little disturbed had she known that publicity was the only punishment likely to overtake persons so respectable as Fosdick and his son, still the crisis was none the less real to Amy. In such crises the best qualities of human nature rise in all their grandeur and exert all their power. She sent off an immediate answer—"Thank you, Alois—I need you— Come at three o'clock. Yours, Amy."When he came, she let him see what she wanted; how, with all she had valued and had thought valuable transforming into trash and slipping away from her, she had turned to him, to the only reality—to the love that welcomes the storm which gives it the opportunity to show how strong it is, how firmly rooted. With his first stammering, ardent protestations, she flung herself into his arms. "I have loved you from the beginning," she sobbed. "But I didn't realize it until I looked round for some one to turn to. You do love me?""I am here," he said simply, and there is nothing finer than was the look in his eyes, the feeling in his heart. "And we must be married soon. We must be together, now.""Yes, yes—soon—at once," she agreed. "And you will take me away, won't you? Ah, I love you—I love you, Alois. I will show you how a woman can love." And never had she been so beautiful, both without and within."As soon as you please," said he. He was not inclined to interrogate his happiness; but he was surprised at her sudden and unconditional surrender. He guessed that some quarrel about him with her father or with Hugo had roused her to assert what he was quite ready to believe had been in her heart all the time; or, it might be that she wished to make amends for her father's having planned to send him away when honor commanded him to stay and guard his reputation. Had the cause of her hysteria been real, or had he known why she was so clinging and so eager, he would not have changed—for he loved her and was never half-hearted in any emotion. Though her money and her position were originally her greatest attractions for him, his ideal of his own self-respect was too high and too real for him to rest content until he had forced love to put him under its spell.When he left her she sent for Hugo and told him. Hugo went off like a charge at the snap of the spark. "You must be mad!" he shouted. "Why, such a marriage is beneath you—is almost as bad as your sister's. It's your duty to bring a gentleman into the family."She would not argue that; she would at any cost be forbearing with Hugo, who must be in torture, if he was not altogether a fool—and sometimes she thought he was. She restrained herself to saying gently, "You don't seem to appreciate our changed position.""What 'changed position'? What are you talking about?" demanded Hugo, rearing and beginning to stride the length of the room.She did not answer; answer seemed unnecessary, when Hugo was so obviously blustering to hide his real state of mind."You mean father's testimony?" he said. "What rot! Why, nobody that is anybody pays the slightest attention to that. Everyone understands how things are in finance and how vital it is to guard the secrets from lying demagogues and the mob. There isn't a man of consequence, of high respectability, on Manhattan Island, or in big affairs anywhere in the country, who wouldn't be in as difficult or more difficult a position, if he happened to be cornered. Everyone whose opinion we care anything about is in the game, and this attack on us is simply a move of our enemies.""Deceive yourself, if you want to," replied Amy. "But I know I can't get married any too soon.""And marrying a nobody, a mere architect, whose sister works for a living. You haven't even the excuse of caring for him.""Don't be too sure about that! In the last twenty-four hours I've learned a great deal about life, about people. Everybody talks of love, and of wanting love. But nobody knows what it really means, until he has suffered. Oh, Hugo, don't be so hard! I need Alois!" And there were tears in her eyes.Hugo tossed his head; but he was not unimpressed. "I'm sorry to see you so weak," said he in a tone that was merely surly and therefore, by contrast, kindly. "Of course, it's none ofmybusiness. But I don't approve it, I want you distinctly to understand.""You won't be disagreeable to Alois?""I don't blamehim," said Hugo. "It's natural he should be crazy to marry you. And, in his way, he isn't a bad sort. He's been about in our set long enough to get something of an air." Hugo was thinking that Amy had now lost young Roebuck, the only eligible in her train; that, after all, since he himself was to be the principal heir to his father's estate, she was not exactly a first-class matrimonial offering and might have to take something even less satisfactory than Alois, if she continued to wait for the husband he could warm to. "Go ahead, if you must," was his final remark. "I'll not interfere."This was equivalent to approval, and Amy, strengthened, moved upon her father. To her astonishment, he listened without interest. She had to say pointedly, "And I've come to find out whether you approve," before he roused himself to respond."Do as you like," he said wearily, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper on which he had been making aimless markings, when she interrupted him."You wouldn't object if I married—soon?""Don't bother me," he flamed out. "Do as you please. Only, don't fret me. And, no splurge! I'm sick. I want quiet."Thus it came about that on the Thursday following the engagement, a week almost to the hour from Fosdick's tumble into his own carefully and deeply dug pit, Amy married Alois Siersdorf, "with only the two families present, because of Mr. Fosdick's age and illness"; and at noon they sailed away on the almost emptyDeutschland.Alois did not let his perplexity before Amy's astounding docility interfere with his happiness. He saw that, whatever the cause, she was in love with him, so deeply in love that she had descended from the pedestal, had lifted him from his knees, had set him upon it, and had fallen down meekly to worship. There were a few of "our people" on the steamer—half a dozen families or parts of families, of "the push," who were on their way to freeze and sneeze in the "warm" Riviera for the sake of fashion. Alois was delighted that Amy was so absorbed in him that she would have nothing to do with them—this for the first three days. He had not believed her capable of the passion and the tenderness she was lavishing upon him. She made him hold her in his arms hours at a time; she developed amazing skill at those coquetries of intimacy so much more difficult than the enticements that serve to make the period of the engagement attractive. And he found her more beautiful, too, than he had thought. She was one of those women who are not at their best when on public or semipublic view, but reserve for intimacy a charm which explains the otherwise inexplicable hold they get upon the man to whom they fully reveal and abandon themselves.And Alois, in love with the woman herself now rather than with what she represented to his rather material imagination, surprised her in turn. She had thought him somewhat stilted, a distinctly professional man, with too little lightness of mind—interesting, satisfactory beyond the prosy and commonplace and patterned run of men she knew; but still with a tendency to be wearisome if taken in too large doses. She had to confess that she had misjudged him. He was no longer under the nervous strain of trying to win her, was no longer handicapped by a vague but potent notion that he would get more than he gave in a marriage with her. He revealed his real self—light-hearted, varied, most adaptable; thoroughgoing masculine, yet with a femininity, a knowledge of and interest in matters purely feminine, that made companionship as easy as it was delightful.They were in the full rapture of these agreeable surprises each about the other when the representatives of "our set" began to insist upon associating with them. Amy shrank from the first advances; this only made the bored fashionables the more determined. Even in her morbidness about the lost reputation and the menace of prison, she could not deceive herself as to the meaning of their persistent friendliness. And soon she was delighted by a third surprise. She found that Hugo had been right, and she absurdly wrong, about public opinion. There might be, probably was, a public opinion that misunderstood her father and judged him by provincial, old-fashioned standards. But it was notherpublic opinion. All the people of her set were more or less involved, directly or through their relations by blood and marriage, in enterprises that necessitated what in the masses—the "lower classes" and the "criminal classes"—would be called lying, swindling, and stealing; they, therefore, had no fault to find with Fosdick. Had he not his fortune still? And was he not impregnable against the mob howling that he be treated as a common malefactor? Where, then, was the occasion for Phariseeism? Was it not the plain duty of respectable people to stand firmly by the Fosdicks and show the mob that respectability was solidly against demagogism, against attempts to judge the upper class by lower class standards? Yes; that was the wise course, and the safe course. Why, even the public prosecutor, a suspiciously demagogical shouter for "equal justice"—respectability appreciated that he had to get the suffrages of the mob, but thought he went a little too far in demagogic speech—why, even he had shown that the gentleman was stronger in him than the politician. Had he not, after a few days of silence, come out boldly rebuking "the attempt to defame and persecute one of the country's most public-spirited and useful citizens, in advance of judicial inquiry"?Amy was amazed that she had been so preposterously unnerved by what she now saw was literally nothing at all, a mere morbid phantasy. But at the same time, she was devoutly thankful that she had been deluded. "But for that," said she to herself, "I might not have married 'Lois, might have stifled the best, the most beautiful emotion of my life, might have missed happiness entirely." This thought so moved her that she rose—it was in the dead of night—and went into his room and bent over him, asleep, and kissed him softly. And she stood, admiring in the dim light the manliness and the beauty of his head, his waving hair, his small, becoming blond beard."I love you," she murmured passionately. "No price would have been too dear to pay for you."Meanwhile Fosdick was settling to the new conditions with a facility that admirably illustrated the infinite adaptability of the human animal. The inevitable, however cruel, is usually easy to accept. It is always mitigated by such reflections as that it could not have been avoided and that it might have been worse. The more intelligent the victim, the shorter his idle bewailings and the quicker his readjustment—and Fosdick was certainly intelligent. Also, among "practical" men, as youth with its ardent courage and its enthusiasms retreats and old age advances, there is a steady decay of self-respect, a rapid decline of belief that in life, so brief, so unsatisfactory at best, so fundamentally sordid, anything which interferes with comfort, personal comfort, is worth fighting for; where a young man will challenge an almost fanciful infringement of his self-respect, an old man will accept with a resigned and cynical shrug the most degrading conditions, if only they leave him material comfort and peace.To aid old Fosdick in making the best of it, the sensational but influential part of the press each morning and each afternoon girded at him, at Morris and at the authorities, asking the most impertinent questions, making the most disgusting demands. Thus, the old man was not permitted to lose sight or sound of the foaming-jowled bloodhounds Armstrong was protecting him from. And when he gave full weight to the fact that Armstrong was also saving him from the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd, he ceased to hate him, began to look on him as a friend and ally.Now that Fosdick and Armstrong were on a basis on which he was compelled to respect the young man, each began to take a more favorable view of the other than he had ever taken before. Rarely indeed is any human being—any living being—altogether or even chiefly bad. If the evil is the predominant force in a man's life, it is usually because of some system of which he is the victim, some system whose appeal to appetite or vanity, or, often, to sheer necessities, is too strong for the natural instincts of the peaceful, patient human animal. And even the man who lives wholly by outrages upon his fellow men lives so that all but a very few of his daily acts are either not bad, or positively good. The mad beasts of creation, high and low, are few—and they are mad. All Fosdick's strongest instincts—except those for power and wealth—were decent, and some of them were fine. It was not surprising that, with so much of the genuinely good in him, he was able to delude himself into believing there was reality behind his reputation as a philanthropic business man.The hard part of his readjustment was requesting those through whom he had controlled the O.A.D. to transfer their allegiance to Armstrong. It is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomacy—and where was there ever successful diplomat who was not at bottom a good fellow, a sympathetic appreciator of human nature?—it is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomatic skill that Fosdick came to look on this transfer—and to hasten it and to make it complete—as the best, the only means of checking that "infamous Atwater-Trafford gang." He felt he was simply retreating one step further into that shadow behind the throne of power in which he had always been careful to keep himself pretty well concealed. He felt—so considerate and delicate was Armstrong—that he would still be a power in the councils of the O.A.D. He himself suggested that Hugo should retire from the fourth vice-presidency "as soon as this thing blows over."The public knew nothing of the transfer. Even when one gang bursts open the doors to fling another gang out, the public gets no more than a hasty and shallow glimpse behind the façade of the great institutions that exploit it and administer its affairs. It was not let into the secret that for the first time in the history of the O.A.D. its president did preside, and that he not only presided but ruled as autocratically as Fosdick had ruled, as some one man always does rule sooner or later in any human institution. But the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford "gang" soon heard what was occurring, and, as Armstrong had known that they must hear, he awaited results with not a little anxiety. Of Trafford he was not at all afraid—Trafford's tricks were the familiar common-places by which most men who get on in the world of chicane achieve their success. About Langdon, he was somewhat more unquiet; but Atwater was the one he dreaded. What was Atwater doing, now that he realized—as he must realize—that he had been duped, that Armstrong had used him to conquer Fosdick and was now facing him, armed with Fosdick's weapons and with youth and energy and astuteness; that Morris and the governor were not his tools, as he had been imagining, but Armstrong's allies; that, instead of being about to absorb the O.A.D., he might, should Armstrong force the fighting, lose the great Universal, the greater Gibraltar Mutual, and the Hearth and Home, which gathered in, and kept, the pennies of poverty?A few days before the committee was to reassemble, Atwater telephoned Armstrong, asking him to come to lunch with him. Armstrong accepted and drew a long breath of relief. He knew that Atwater's agents had been sounding both the governor and Morris, had "persuaded" little Kenworthy to pretend to be ill, and to put off the reassembling of the committee. So, this invitation, this request for a face-to-face talk, must mean that neither the governor nor Morris had yielded.When Armstrong and Atwater met, each looked the other over genially but thoroughly. "I congratulate you, my young friend," said Atwater heartily. "I can admire a stroke of genius, even though it cuts my own plans."No reference from Armstrong to the fact that Atwater had planned to destroy him as soon as he had used him to get the O.A.D.; no reference from Atwater, beyond this smiling and friendly hint, to the fact that Armstrong had allied himself with Atwater ostensibly to destroy Fosdick, and had shifted just in time to outgeneral his ally. Atwater was a fine, strong-looking man of sixty and odd years, with the kindest eyes in the world, and the wickedest jaw—in repose. When he smiled, his whole face was like his eyes. He had a peculiarly agreeable voice, and so much magnetism that his enemies liked him when with him. He was a man of audacious financial dreams, which he carried out with dazzling boldness—at least, carried out to the point where he himself could "get from under" with a huge profit and could shift the responsibility of collapse to others. He was a born pirate, the best-natured of pirates, the most chivalrous and generous. He was of a type that has recurred in the world each time the diffusion of intelligence and of liberty has released the energy of man and given it a chance to play freely. Such men were the distinction of Athens in the heyday of its democracy; of Rome in the period between the austere and cruel republic of the patricians and the ferocious tyranny of Cæsardom; of Bagdad and Cordova after the Moslems became liberalized and before they became degenerate; of Italy in the period of the renaissance; of France after the Revolution and before Friedland infatuated Napoleon into megalomania.During the lunch the two men talked racing and automobile and pictures—Atwater had a good eye for line and color. They would have gone on to talk music, had there been time—for Atwater loved music and sang well and played the violin amazingly, though he practiced only about two hours a day, and that not every day. But they did not get round to music; the coffee and cigars were brought, and the waiters withdrew."What is your committee going to do, when it gets together, day after to-morrow?" said Atwater, the instant the door closed on the head waiter."You'll have to see Morris, to find out that," replied Armstrong.Atwater smiled and waved his hand. "Bother!" he retorted. "What's your programme?""Morris is the man to see," repeated Armstrong. "I wouldn't give up his secrets, if I knew them.""Our man up at Buffalo wires," continued Atwater, "that you have got Kenworthy out of bed and completely cured. So, you are going on. And I know you are not the man to wait in the trenches. Now, it happens that Langdon and I have several matters on at this time—as much as we can conveniently look after. Besides, what's to be gained by tearing up the public again, just when it was settling down to confidence? I like a fight as well as any man; but I don't believe in fighting for mere fighting's sake, when there are so many chances for a scrimmage with something to be gained. It ain't good business. The first thing we know, the public is going to have some things impressed on it so deeply that even its rotten bad memory will hold the stamp.""I agree with you," said Armstrong. "I love peace, myself. But I don't believe in laying down arms while the other fellow is armed to the teeth, and hiding in the bushes before my very door.""That means me, eh?" inquired Atwater cheerfully."That means you," said Armstrong. "And it isn't of any use for you to call out from the bushes that you've gone away and are back at your plowing.""But I haven't gone away," replied Atwater; "I'm still in the bushes. However, I'm willing to go."On what condition?""Give us the two first vice-presidents of the O.A.D. and the chairmanship of the Finance Committee."That meant practical control. Armstrong knew that his worst anticipations were none too gloomy. "And if we don't?" said he."Our people have been collecting inside facts about the O.A.D., about its management ever since you came on to take old Shotwell's place—poor old Shotwell! If we are not put in a position where we can bring about reforms in your management and a better state of affairs, we'll have to take the only other alternative. We have the arrangements made to fire a broadside from four newspapers to-morrow morning. And we've got it so fixed that any return fire you might make would get into the columns of only two newspapers—and one of them would discredit you editorially. Also, we will at the same time expose your committee." Atwater set out this programme with the frankness of a large man of large affairs to one of his own class, one with whom evasions, concealments, and circumlocutions would be waste of time.Armstrong smiled slightly. "Then it's war?" he said."If you insist.""You know we've got the governor and the attorney-general?""But we've got the press, practically all respectability, and a better chance with the Grand Jury and the judges."Armstrong gazed reflectively into space. "A good fight!" he said judicially. "If I were a very rich man I should hesitate to precipitate it. But, having nothing but my salary—and agood, clean, personalrecord—I think I'll enjoy myself. I'll not try to steal the credit of making the fight, Mr. Atwater. I'll see that you get all the glory that comes from kicking the cover off hell.""Speaking of your personal record," said Atwater absently. "Let me see, you were in the A. & P. bond syndicate, in the little steel syndicate last spring, in two stock syndicates a couple of months ago. Your profits were altogether $72,356—I forget the odd cents. And they tell me you've sworn to three reports that won't stand examination."Armstrong lifted his eyebrows, drew at his cigar awhile. "I see you've been looking me up," he said, unruffled apparently. "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to escape an occasional shot. But they'd hardly be noted in the general fusillade. The Universal has been a mere shell ever since you used it, in that traction reorganization which failed—I've got a safe full of facts about it. And Morris tells me he can have mobs trying to hang Trafford and his board of directors for their doings in the Home Defender."Atwater smiled grimly. "I'm sorry to say, Armstrong, we'd concentrate on you. Several of the strong men look on you as a dangerous person. They don't like new faces down in this part of the town, unless they wear a more deferential expression than yours does. Personally, I'd miss you. You're the kind of man I like as friend or as foe. But I couldn't let my personal feelings influence me or oppose the advice of the leading men of finance.""Naturally not," assented Armstrong."I've got to be off now," continued Atwater, rising."So have I," said Armstrong.They went to the street door of the building, Atwater holding Armstrong by the arm. There, Armstrong put out his hand. "Good-by, Mr. Atwater," he said; "I'll meet you at Philippi.""Think it over, young man, think it over," said Atwater, a friendly, sad expression in his handsome, kind eyes. "I don't want to see you come a nasty cropper—one that'll make you crawl about with a broken back the rest of your life. Put off your ambitions—or, better still, come in with us. We'll do more for you than you can do for yourself.""Thank you," replied Armstrong ironically."Consult with your people. The governor has almost weakened, and I'm sure Morris will fall in line with whatever you do.""You've got my answer," said Armstrong, unruffled in his easy good nature. "And I'll tell you, Mr. Atwater, that if you do take the cover off hell, I'll see that it isn't put on again until you've had a look-in, at least.""You know the situation too well to imagine you can win," urged Atwater. "You must be thinking I'm bluffing.""Frankly, I don't know," replied Armstrong. "As you will lose so much and I so little, I rather believe you are.""Put that idea out of your mind," said Atwater; and now his face, especially his eyes, gave Armstrong a look full into the true man, the reckless and relentless tyrant, with whom tyranny was an instinct stronger than reason."I have," was Armstrong's quiet answer."Then—you agree?"Armstrong shook his head, without taking his eyes off Atwater's.Atwater shrugged his shoulders."Fallen women have been known to reform," said Armstrong. "But there's no recorded case of a fallen man's reforming. I find nothing to attract me, Atwater, in the lot of the most splendid of these male Messalinas you and your kind maintain in such luxury as officials, public and private. I belong to myself—and I shall continue to belong to myself."Atwater's smile was cynical; but there was the cordiality of respect in the hand clasp he abruptly forced on Armstrong, as he parted from him.

Into Armstrong's sitting room, toward ten that night, Fosdick came limping and shuffling. Even had Armstrong been a "good hater" he could hardly have withstood the pathos of that abject figure. Being too broadly intelligent for more than a spasm of that ugliest and most ignorant of passions, he felt as if the broken man before him were the wronged and he himself the wronger. "But this man made a shameful, treacherous, unprovoked attempt to disgrace me," he reminded himself, in the effort to keep a just point of view for prudence's sake. It was useless. That ghastly, sunken face, those frightened, dim old eyes, the trembling step— If a long life of soul-prostitution had left Josiah Fosdick enough of natural human generosity to appreciate the meaning of Armstrong's expression, he might have been able to change his crushing defeat into what in the circumstances would have been the triumph of a drawn battle. But, except possibly the creative geniuses, men must measure their fellows throughout by themselves. Fosdick knew what he would do, were he in Armstrong's place. He clutched at Armstrong's hand with a cringing hypocrisy of deference that made Armstrong ashamed for him—and that warned him he dared not yet drop his guard.

"I've been trying to get you since three o'clock this afternoon," said Fosdick. "I had to see you before I went to bed." He sank into a chair and sat breathing heavily. He looked horribly old. "You don't believe I deliberately lied about that money, do you, Horace?"

"Is it necessary to discuss that, Mr. Fosdick? Hadn't we better get right at what you've come to see me about?"

"I've wired the governor. He don't answer. Morris refuses to see me. Westervelt—it's useless to see him—he has betrayed me—sold me out—he on whom I have showered a thousand benefits. I made that man, Horace, and he has rewarded me. That's human nature!"

Armstrong recalled that, when he was winning over Westervelt by convincing him of Fosdick's perfidy to him, Westervelt had made the same remark, had cried out that he loaned Fosdick the first five hundred dollars he ever possessed and had got him into the O.A.D. "It seems to me, Mr. Fosdick, that recriminations are idle," said he. "I assume you have something to ask or to propose. Am I right?"

"Horace, you and I are naturally friends. Why should we fight each other?"

"You have come to propose a peace?"

"I want us to continue to work together."

"That can be arranged," said Armstrong.

"I hoped so!" Fosdick exclaimed. "I hoped so!"

"But," proceeded Armstrong, seeing the drift of the thought behind that quick elation, "let us have no misunderstanding. You were permitted to leave the witness stand when you did to-day because I wished you to have one more chance to save yourself. That chance will be withdrawn if you begin to act on the notion that my forbearance is proof of my weakness."

"All I want is peace—peace and quiet," said Fosdick, with his new revived hope and craft better hid. But Armstrong saw that it was temperamentally impossible for Fosdick to believe any man would of his own accord drop the sword from the throat of a beaten foe.

"You can have peace," continued Armstrong, "peace with honor, provided you give a guarantee. You cannot expect me to trust you."

"What guarantee do you want?"

"Control of the O.A.D."

Fosdick's feebleness fell from him. He sprang erect, eyes flashing, fists shaking. "Never!" he shouted. "So help me God, never! It's mine. It's part of my children's patrimony. I'll keep it, in spite of hell!"

"You will lose it in any event," said Armstrong, as calm as Fosdick was tempestuous. "You have choice of turning it over to me or having it snatched from you by Atwater and Trafford and Langdon."

"Atwater!" exclaimed Fosdick.

"When I found you had arranged to destroy me," explained Armstrong, "I formed a counter-arrangement, as I wasn't strong enough to fight you alone."

"You sold me out!"

Armstrong winced. Fosdick's phrase was unjust, but since his talk with Neva he was critical and sensitive in the matter of self-respect; and, while his campaign of self-defense, of "fighting the devil with fire," still seemed necessary and legitimate, it also seemed lacking in courage. If Fosdick had crept and crawled up on him, had he not also crawled and crept up on Fosdick? "I defended myself in the only way you left me," replied Armstrong. "I formed an alliance with the one man who could successfully attack you."

"So, it is Atwater who has bought the governor—and Morris—yes, and that ingrate, Westervelt!"

"However that may be," replied Armstrong, "you will be destroyed and Atwater will take the O.A.D. unless you meet my terms." He was flushing deep red before Fosdick's look of recognition of a brother in chicane.

He knew Atwater was simply using him, would destroy him or reduce him to dependence, as soon as Fosdick was stripped and ruined. He felt he was as fully justified in eluding the tiger by strategy as he had been in procuring the tiger to defeat and destroy the lion that had been about to devour him. Still, the business was not one a man would preen himself upon in a company of honest men and women. And Fosdick's look, which said, "This man, having sold me out, is now about to sell out his allies," hit home and hit hard.

But he must carry his project through, or fall victim to Atwater; he must not let this melting mood which Neva had brought about enfeeble his judgment and disarm his courage. "If you refuse my offer," he said to Fosdick, "the investigation will go on, and Atwater will get the O.A.D. and take from you every shred of your character and much of your fortune—perhaps all. If you accept my offer, the investigation will stop and you will retire from the O.A.D. peaceably and without having to face proceedings to compel you to make restitution."

"How do I know you can keep your bargain?"

"I have the governor and Morris with me," replied Armstrong, frankly exposing his whole hand. "They, no more than myself, wish to become the puppets of the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd."

Fosdick reflected. Now that he knew the precise situation, he felt less feeble. Before Armstrong explained, he had been like a man fighting in a pitch dark room against foes he could not even number. Now, the light was on; he knew just how many, just who they were; and, appalling though the discovery was, it was not so appalling as that struggle in the pitch dark. "You evidently think I'm powerless," he said at last. "But if you press me too far, you will see that I am not. For instance, youneedme. You must have me or fall into Atwater's clutches. You see, I am far from powerless."

"But you forget," replied Armstrong, "you are heavily handicapped by your reputation. A man who has to fight for his good name is like a soldier in battle with a baby on his arm and a woman clinging to his neck. How can you fight without losing your reputation? The committee is against you. At Monday's session, if you let matters take their course, all that Westervelt's books show of your profits from the O.A.D. will be exposed—even the way you made it pay for the carpets on your floors, for the sheets on your beds, for towels and soap and matches."

Armstrong would not have believed there was in Fosdick's whole body so much red blood as showed in his face. "It's a custom that's grown up," he muttered shufflingly. "They all do it—in every big company, more or less, directly or indirectly."

"True enough," said Armstrong. "But you'll be the only one on trial. If you accept my offer, you'll be let alone. Cancel the worst of those leases, settle the ugliest accounts, all at comparatively trifling cost, and the public will soon forget."

"And what guarantee do you give that the agreement would be carried out?"

"My pledge—that's all," replied Armstrong—and again he flushed. He had avoided specifically giving his word to the Atwater crowd when he formed alliance with them; still, his "my pledge" had a hollow, jeering echo. "It's the only possible guarantee in the circumstances—and, as you are solely responsible for the circumstances, Mr. Fosdick, I do not see how you can complain."

Fosdick again reflected; the awful, deathly pallor, the deep scams, the palsylike trembling came back. After a long wait, with Armstrong avoiding the sight of him, he quavered, "Horace, I'll agree to anything except giving up the O.A.D." There he broke down and wept. "You don't know what that institution means to me. It's my child. It's my heart. It's my reason for being alive."

"Yes, it has been a source of enormous profit to you, Mr. Fosdick," said Armstrong calmly, for his own strengthening more than to get Fosdick back to facts. "I appreciate how hard it must be to give up such a source of easy wealth. But it must be done."

"You don't understand," mourned the old man. "You have no sentiment. You do notfeelthose hundreds of thousands, those millions of helpless people—how they look up to me, how they pray for me and are full of gratitude to me. Do you think I could coldly turn over their interests to strangers? Why, who knows what might not be done with those sacred trust funds?"

"If you persist in letting Atwater get control," said Armstrong, "I fear those sacred trust funds will soon be larger by about two thirds of what you regard as your private fortune. I do not like to say these things; you compel me, Mr. Fosdick. It is waste of time and breath to cant to me."

If Fosdick had had anything less at stake than his fortune, he would have broken then and there with Armstrong. As it was, his prudence could not smother down the geyser of fury that boiled and spouted up from his vanity. "I must be mad," he cried, "to imagine that such matters of conscience would make an impression on you."

Armstrong laughed slightly. "When a man is in the jungle, is fighting with wild beasts, he has to put forward the beast in him. You tried to ruin me—a more infamous, causeless attack never was made on a man. You have failed; you are in the pit you dug for me. I am letting you off lightly." And now Armstrong's blue eyes had the green gray of steel and flashed with that furious temper which he had been compelled to learn to rule because, once beyond control, it would have been a free force of sheer destruction. "If you had not been interceded for, you would now be a pariah, with no wealth to buy you the semblance of respect. Don't try me too far! I do not love you. I have the normal instinct about reptiles."

At that very moment Fosdick was looking the reptile. "Yes, I did try to tear you down," he hissed. "And I'll tell you why. Because I saw your ambition—saw you would never rest until you had robbed me and mine of that which you coveted. Was I not right?"

Armstrong could not deny it. He had never definitely formed such an ambition; but he realized, as Fosdick was accusing him, that had he been permitted to go peacefully on as president, the day would have come when he would have reached out for real power.

Fosdick went on, with more repression and dignity, but no less energy of feeling, "I cannot but believe that God in His justice will yet hurl you to ruin. You are robbing me, but as sure as there is a God, Horace Armstrong, He will bring you low!"

Well as Armstrong knew him, he was for the moment impressed. The only born monsters are the insane criminals; the monstrous among our powerful and eminent and most respectable are by long and deliberate indulgence in self-deception manufactured into monsters, protected from public exposure by their position, wealth, and respectability. We do not realize any more than they do themselves, that they have become insane criminals like the monsters-born. There is a majesty in the trappings of virtue that does not altogether leave them even when a hypocrite wears them; also, Armstrong was more than half disarmed by his new-sprung doubts whether he was wholly justified in meeting treachery with treachery. He surprised Fosdick by breaking the silence with an almost deprecating, "I said more than I intended. What you have done, what I have done, is all part of the game. Let us continue to leave God and morals—honesty and honor—out of it. Let us be practical, businesslike. You wish to save your reputation and your fortune. I can save them for you. I have given you my condition—it is the least I will ask, or can ask. What do you say?"

"I must have time to think it over," replied Fosdick. "I cannot decide so important a matter in haste."

"Quite right," Armstrong readily assented. "It will not be necessary to have your decision before noon to-morrow. The committee has adjourned until Monday. That will give us half of Saturday and Sunday to settle the plans that hang on your decision."

"To-morrow noon," said Fosdick, sunk into a stupor. "To-morrow noon." And he moved vaguely to the door, one trembling hand out before him as if he were blind and feeling his way. And, so all-powerful are appearances with us, Armstrong hung his head and did not dare look at the pitiful spectacle of age and feebleness and misery. "He's a villain," said the young man to himself, "as nearly a through-and-through villain as walks the earth. But he's still a man, with a heart and pride and the power to suffer. And what am I that I should judge him? In his place, with his chances, would I have been any different? Was I not hell-bent by the same route? Am I not, still?"

He walked beside Fosdick to the elevator, waited with him for the car. "Good night," he said in a tone of gentlest courtesy. And it hurt him that the old man did not seem to hear, did not respond. He wished that Fosdick had offered to shake hands with him.

He went to Morris, expecting him at a club across the way, and related the substance of the interview. Morris, who had both imagination and sensibility, guessed the cause of his obvious yet apparently unprovoked depression, guessed why he had been so tender with Fosdick. Nevertheless he twitted him on his soft-heartedness: "The old bunco-steerer hasn't disgorged yet, has he?—and hasn't the remotest intention of disgorging. So, my tears are altogether for the policy holders he has been milking these forty years." Then he added, "Though, why careless damn fools should get any sympathy in their misfortunes does not clearly appear. As between knaves and fools, I incline toward knaves. At least, they are teachers of wisdom in the school of experience, while fools avail nothing, are simply provokers and purveyors to knavery."

XXII

A DUEL AFTER LUNCH

In the respectable morning newspaper the Fosdicks took in, the facts of Josiah's latest public appearance were presented with those judicious omissions and modifications which the respectable editor feels it his duty to make, that the lower classes may not be led to distrust and deride the upper classes. Thus, Amy, glancing at headlines in search of the only important news—the doings of "our set"—got the impression that her father had had an annoying lapse of memory in testifying about something or other before somebody or other. But the servants took in a newspaper that had no mission to safeguard the name and fame and influence of the upper classes; probably not by chance, this newspaper was left where its vulgar but vivid headlines caught her eye.

She read, punctuating each paragraph with explosions of indignation. But when she had finished, she reread—and began to think. As most of us have learned by experience in great matters or small, truth is rubberlike—it offers small resistance to the blows of prejudice, and, as soon as the blow passes, it straightway springs back to its original form and place. Amy downfaced a thousand little facts of her own knowledge as to where the money came from—facts which tried to tell her that the "low, lying sheet" had revealed only a trifling part of the truth. But, when she saw her father, saw how he had suddenly broken, his very voice emasculate and thin, she gave up the struggle to deceive herself. There is a notion that a man's family is the last to believe the disagreeable truth about his relations with the outside world. This is part of the theory that a man has two characters, that he can be a saint at six o'clock in the morning and a scoundrel at six o'clock in the evening, that he is honest at a certain street and number and a liar and a thief at another street and number. But the fact is that character is the most closely woven and homogeneous of fabrics, and, though a man's family do not admit it publicly when the truth about him is exposed, they know him all the time for what he really is. Amy knew; her father's appearance, indicating not that he was guilty but that he was found out and was in an agony of dread of the consequences, threw her into a hysteria of shame and terror. She avoided the servants; she startled each time the door bell rang; it might mean the bursting of the real disgrace, for, in her ignorance of political conditions, she assumed that arrest and imprisonment would follow the detection of her father and probably Hugo in grave crimes. She dared not face any of the few that called; she would not even see Hugo.

On Sunday morning came a note from Alois—a love letter, begging to see her. She read it with tears flowing and with a heart swelling with gratitude. "He does love me!" she said. "He must know we are about to be disgraced, yet he has only been strengthened in his love." Though the actual state of the family's affairs was vastly different from what she imagined, though she would have been little disturbed had she known that publicity was the only punishment likely to overtake persons so respectable as Fosdick and his son, still the crisis was none the less real to Amy. In such crises the best qualities of human nature rise in all their grandeur and exert all their power. She sent off an immediate answer—"Thank you, Alois—I need you— Come at three o'clock. Yours, Amy."

When he came, she let him see what she wanted; how, with all she had valued and had thought valuable transforming into trash and slipping away from her, she had turned to him, to the only reality—to the love that welcomes the storm which gives it the opportunity to show how strong it is, how firmly rooted. With his first stammering, ardent protestations, she flung herself into his arms. "I have loved you from the beginning," she sobbed. "But I didn't realize it until I looked round for some one to turn to. You do love me?"

"I am here," he said simply, and there is nothing finer than was the look in his eyes, the feeling in his heart. "And we must be married soon. We must be together, now."

"Yes, yes—soon—at once," she agreed. "And you will take me away, won't you? Ah, I love you—I love you, Alois. I will show you how a woman can love." And never had she been so beautiful, both without and within.

"As soon as you please," said he. He was not inclined to interrogate his happiness; but he was surprised at her sudden and unconditional surrender. He guessed that some quarrel about him with her father or with Hugo had roused her to assert what he was quite ready to believe had been in her heart all the time; or, it might be that she wished to make amends for her father's having planned to send him away when honor commanded him to stay and guard his reputation. Had the cause of her hysteria been real, or had he known why she was so clinging and so eager, he would not have changed—for he loved her and was never half-hearted in any emotion. Though her money and her position were originally her greatest attractions for him, his ideal of his own self-respect was too high and too real for him to rest content until he had forced love to put him under its spell.

When he left her she sent for Hugo and told him. Hugo went off like a charge at the snap of the spark. "You must be mad!" he shouted. "Why, such a marriage is beneath you—is almost as bad as your sister's. It's your duty to bring a gentleman into the family."

She would not argue that; she would at any cost be forbearing with Hugo, who must be in torture, if he was not altogether a fool—and sometimes she thought he was. She restrained herself to saying gently, "You don't seem to appreciate our changed position."

"What 'changed position'? What are you talking about?" demanded Hugo, rearing and beginning to stride the length of the room.

She did not answer; answer seemed unnecessary, when Hugo was so obviously blustering to hide his real state of mind.

"You mean father's testimony?" he said. "What rot! Why, nobody that is anybody pays the slightest attention to that. Everyone understands how things are in finance and how vital it is to guard the secrets from lying demagogues and the mob. There isn't a man of consequence, of high respectability, on Manhattan Island, or in big affairs anywhere in the country, who wouldn't be in as difficult or more difficult a position, if he happened to be cornered. Everyone whose opinion we care anything about is in the game, and this attack on us is simply a move of our enemies."

"Deceive yourself, if you want to," replied Amy. "But I know I can't get married any too soon."

"And marrying a nobody, a mere architect, whose sister works for a living. You haven't even the excuse of caring for him."

"Don't be too sure about that! In the last twenty-four hours I've learned a great deal about life, about people. Everybody talks of love, and of wanting love. But nobody knows what it really means, until he has suffered. Oh, Hugo, don't be so hard! I need Alois!" And there were tears in her eyes.

Hugo tossed his head; but he was not unimpressed. "I'm sorry to see you so weak," said he in a tone that was merely surly and therefore, by contrast, kindly. "Of course, it's none ofmybusiness. But I don't approve it, I want you distinctly to understand."

"You won't be disagreeable to Alois?"

"I don't blamehim," said Hugo. "It's natural he should be crazy to marry you. And, in his way, he isn't a bad sort. He's been about in our set long enough to get something of an air." Hugo was thinking that Amy had now lost young Roebuck, the only eligible in her train; that, after all, since he himself was to be the principal heir to his father's estate, she was not exactly a first-class matrimonial offering and might have to take something even less satisfactory than Alois, if she continued to wait for the husband he could warm to. "Go ahead, if you must," was his final remark. "I'll not interfere."

This was equivalent to approval, and Amy, strengthened, moved upon her father. To her astonishment, he listened without interest. She had to say pointedly, "And I've come to find out whether you approve," before he roused himself to respond.

"Do as you like," he said wearily, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper on which he had been making aimless markings, when she interrupted him.

"You wouldn't object if I married—soon?"

"Don't bother me," he flamed out. "Do as you please. Only, don't fret me. And, no splurge! I'm sick. I want quiet."

Thus it came about that on the Thursday following the engagement, a week almost to the hour from Fosdick's tumble into his own carefully and deeply dug pit, Amy married Alois Siersdorf, "with only the two families present, because of Mr. Fosdick's age and illness"; and at noon they sailed away on the almost emptyDeutschland.

Alois did not let his perplexity before Amy's astounding docility interfere with his happiness. He saw that, whatever the cause, she was in love with him, so deeply in love that she had descended from the pedestal, had lifted him from his knees, had set him upon it, and had fallen down meekly to worship. There were a few of "our people" on the steamer—half a dozen families or parts of families, of "the push," who were on their way to freeze and sneeze in the "warm" Riviera for the sake of fashion. Alois was delighted that Amy was so absorbed in him that she would have nothing to do with them—this for the first three days. He had not believed her capable of the passion and the tenderness she was lavishing upon him. She made him hold her in his arms hours at a time; she developed amazing skill at those coquetries of intimacy so much more difficult than the enticements that serve to make the period of the engagement attractive. And he found her more beautiful, too, than he had thought. She was one of those women who are not at their best when on public or semipublic view, but reserve for intimacy a charm which explains the otherwise inexplicable hold they get upon the man to whom they fully reveal and abandon themselves.

And Alois, in love with the woman herself now rather than with what she represented to his rather material imagination, surprised her in turn. She had thought him somewhat stilted, a distinctly professional man, with too little lightness of mind—interesting, satisfactory beyond the prosy and commonplace and patterned run of men she knew; but still with a tendency to be wearisome if taken in too large doses. She had to confess that she had misjudged him. He was no longer under the nervous strain of trying to win her, was no longer handicapped by a vague but potent notion that he would get more than he gave in a marriage with her. He revealed his real self—light-hearted, varied, most adaptable; thoroughgoing masculine, yet with a femininity, a knowledge of and interest in matters purely feminine, that made companionship as easy as it was delightful.

They were in the full rapture of these agreeable surprises each about the other when the representatives of "our set" began to insist upon associating with them. Amy shrank from the first advances; this only made the bored fashionables the more determined. Even in her morbidness about the lost reputation and the menace of prison, she could not deceive herself as to the meaning of their persistent friendliness. And soon she was delighted by a third surprise. She found that Hugo had been right, and she absurdly wrong, about public opinion. There might be, probably was, a public opinion that misunderstood her father and judged him by provincial, old-fashioned standards. But it was notherpublic opinion. All the people of her set were more or less involved, directly or through their relations by blood and marriage, in enterprises that necessitated what in the masses—the "lower classes" and the "criminal classes"—would be called lying, swindling, and stealing; they, therefore, had no fault to find with Fosdick. Had he not his fortune still? And was he not impregnable against the mob howling that he be treated as a common malefactor? Where, then, was the occasion for Phariseeism? Was it not the plain duty of respectable people to stand firmly by the Fosdicks and show the mob that respectability was solidly against demagogism, against attempts to judge the upper class by lower class standards? Yes; that was the wise course, and the safe course. Why, even the public prosecutor, a suspiciously demagogical shouter for "equal justice"—respectability appreciated that he had to get the suffrages of the mob, but thought he went a little too far in demagogic speech—why, even he had shown that the gentleman was stronger in him than the politician. Had he not, after a few days of silence, come out boldly rebuking "the attempt to defame and persecute one of the country's most public-spirited and useful citizens, in advance of judicial inquiry"?

Amy was amazed that she had been so preposterously unnerved by what she now saw was literally nothing at all, a mere morbid phantasy. But at the same time, she was devoutly thankful that she had been deluded. "But for that," said she to herself, "I might not have married 'Lois, might have stifled the best, the most beautiful emotion of my life, might have missed happiness entirely." This thought so moved her that she rose—it was in the dead of night—and went into his room and bent over him, asleep, and kissed him softly. And she stood, admiring in the dim light the manliness and the beauty of his head, his waving hair, his small, becoming blond beard.

"I love you," she murmured passionately. "No price would have been too dear to pay for you."

Meanwhile Fosdick was settling to the new conditions with a facility that admirably illustrated the infinite adaptability of the human animal. The inevitable, however cruel, is usually easy to accept. It is always mitigated by such reflections as that it could not have been avoided and that it might have been worse. The more intelligent the victim, the shorter his idle bewailings and the quicker his readjustment—and Fosdick was certainly intelligent. Also, among "practical" men, as youth with its ardent courage and its enthusiasms retreats and old age advances, there is a steady decay of self-respect, a rapid decline of belief that in life, so brief, so unsatisfactory at best, so fundamentally sordid, anything which interferes with comfort, personal comfort, is worth fighting for; where a young man will challenge an almost fanciful infringement of his self-respect, an old man will accept with a resigned and cynical shrug the most degrading conditions, if only they leave him material comfort and peace.

To aid old Fosdick in making the best of it, the sensational but influential part of the press each morning and each afternoon girded at him, at Morris and at the authorities, asking the most impertinent questions, making the most disgusting demands. Thus, the old man was not permitted to lose sight or sound of the foaming-jowled bloodhounds Armstrong was protecting him from. And when he gave full weight to the fact that Armstrong was also saving him from the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford crowd, he ceased to hate him, began to look on him as a friend and ally.

Now that Fosdick and Armstrong were on a basis on which he was compelled to respect the young man, each began to take a more favorable view of the other than he had ever taken before. Rarely indeed is any human being—any living being—altogether or even chiefly bad. If the evil is the predominant force in a man's life, it is usually because of some system of which he is the victim, some system whose appeal to appetite or vanity, or, often, to sheer necessities, is too strong for the natural instincts of the peaceful, patient human animal. And even the man who lives wholly by outrages upon his fellow men lives so that all but a very few of his daily acts are either not bad, or positively good. The mad beasts of creation, high and low, are few—and they are mad. All Fosdick's strongest instincts—except those for power and wealth—were decent, and some of them were fine. It was not surprising that, with so much of the genuinely good in him, he was able to delude himself into believing there was reality behind his reputation as a philanthropic business man.

The hard part of his readjustment was requesting those through whom he had controlled the O.A.D. to transfer their allegiance to Armstrong. It is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomacy—and where was there ever successful diplomat who was not at bottom a good fellow, a sympathetic appreciator of human nature?—it is a tribute to Armstrong's diplomatic skill that Fosdick came to look on this transfer—and to hasten it and to make it complete—as the best, the only means of checking that "infamous Atwater-Trafford gang." He felt he was simply retreating one step further into that shadow behind the throne of power in which he had always been careful to keep himself pretty well concealed. He felt—so considerate and delicate was Armstrong—that he would still be a power in the councils of the O.A.D. He himself suggested that Hugo should retire from the fourth vice-presidency "as soon as this thing blows over."

The public knew nothing of the transfer. Even when one gang bursts open the doors to fling another gang out, the public gets no more than a hasty and shallow glimpse behind the façade of the great institutions that exploit it and administer its affairs. It was not let into the secret that for the first time in the history of the O.A.D. its president did preside, and that he not only presided but ruled as autocratically as Fosdick had ruled, as some one man always does rule sooner or later in any human institution. But the Atwater-Langdon-Trafford "gang" soon heard what was occurring, and, as Armstrong had known that they must hear, he awaited results with not a little anxiety. Of Trafford he was not at all afraid—Trafford's tricks were the familiar common-places by which most men who get on in the world of chicane achieve their success. About Langdon, he was somewhat more unquiet; but Atwater was the one he dreaded. What was Atwater doing, now that he realized—as he must realize—that he had been duped, that Armstrong had used him to conquer Fosdick and was now facing him, armed with Fosdick's weapons and with youth and energy and astuteness; that Morris and the governor were not his tools, as he had been imagining, but Armstrong's allies; that, instead of being about to absorb the O.A.D., he might, should Armstrong force the fighting, lose the great Universal, the greater Gibraltar Mutual, and the Hearth and Home, which gathered in, and kept, the pennies of poverty?

A few days before the committee was to reassemble, Atwater telephoned Armstrong, asking him to come to lunch with him. Armstrong accepted and drew a long breath of relief. He knew that Atwater's agents had been sounding both the governor and Morris, had "persuaded" little Kenworthy to pretend to be ill, and to put off the reassembling of the committee. So, this invitation, this request for a face-to-face talk, must mean that neither the governor nor Morris had yielded.

When Armstrong and Atwater met, each looked the other over genially but thoroughly. "I congratulate you, my young friend," said Atwater heartily. "I can admire a stroke of genius, even though it cuts my own plans."

No reference from Armstrong to the fact that Atwater had planned to destroy him as soon as he had used him to get the O.A.D.; no reference from Atwater, beyond this smiling and friendly hint, to the fact that Armstrong had allied himself with Atwater ostensibly to destroy Fosdick, and had shifted just in time to outgeneral his ally. Atwater was a fine, strong-looking man of sixty and odd years, with the kindest eyes in the world, and the wickedest jaw—in repose. When he smiled, his whole face was like his eyes. He had a peculiarly agreeable voice, and so much magnetism that his enemies liked him when with him. He was a man of audacious financial dreams, which he carried out with dazzling boldness—at least, carried out to the point where he himself could "get from under" with a huge profit and could shift the responsibility of collapse to others. He was a born pirate, the best-natured of pirates, the most chivalrous and generous. He was of a type that has recurred in the world each time the diffusion of intelligence and of liberty has released the energy of man and given it a chance to play freely. Such men were the distinction of Athens in the heyday of its democracy; of Rome in the period between the austere and cruel republic of the patricians and the ferocious tyranny of Cæsardom; of Bagdad and Cordova after the Moslems became liberalized and before they became degenerate; of Italy in the period of the renaissance; of France after the Revolution and before Friedland infatuated Napoleon into megalomania.

During the lunch the two men talked racing and automobile and pictures—Atwater had a good eye for line and color. They would have gone on to talk music, had there been time—for Atwater loved music and sang well and played the violin amazingly, though he practiced only about two hours a day, and that not every day. But they did not get round to music; the coffee and cigars were brought, and the waiters withdrew.

"What is your committee going to do, when it gets together, day after to-morrow?" said Atwater, the instant the door closed on the head waiter.

"You'll have to see Morris, to find out that," replied Armstrong.

Atwater smiled and waved his hand. "Bother!" he retorted. "What's your programme?"

"Morris is the man to see," repeated Armstrong. "I wouldn't give up his secrets, if I knew them."

"Our man up at Buffalo wires," continued Atwater, "that you have got Kenworthy out of bed and completely cured. So, you are going on. And I know you are not the man to wait in the trenches. Now, it happens that Langdon and I have several matters on at this time—as much as we can conveniently look after. Besides, what's to be gained by tearing up the public again, just when it was settling down to confidence? I like a fight as well as any man; but I don't believe in fighting for mere fighting's sake, when there are so many chances for a scrimmage with something to be gained. It ain't good business. The first thing we know, the public is going to have some things impressed on it so deeply that even its rotten bad memory will hold the stamp."

"I agree with you," said Armstrong. "I love peace, myself. But I don't believe in laying down arms while the other fellow is armed to the teeth, and hiding in the bushes before my very door."

"That means me, eh?" inquired Atwater cheerfully.

"That means you," said Armstrong. "And it isn't of any use for you to call out from the bushes that you've gone away and are back at your plowing."

"But I haven't gone away," replied Atwater; "I'm still in the bushes. However, I'm willing to go.

"On what condition?"

"Give us the two first vice-presidents of the O.A.D. and the chairmanship of the Finance Committee."

That meant practical control. Armstrong knew that his worst anticipations were none too gloomy. "And if we don't?" said he.

"Our people have been collecting inside facts about the O.A.D., about its management ever since you came on to take old Shotwell's place—poor old Shotwell! If we are not put in a position where we can bring about reforms in your management and a better state of affairs, we'll have to take the only other alternative. We have the arrangements made to fire a broadside from four newspapers to-morrow morning. And we've got it so fixed that any return fire you might make would get into the columns of only two newspapers—and one of them would discredit you editorially. Also, we will at the same time expose your committee." Atwater set out this programme with the frankness of a large man of large affairs to one of his own class, one with whom evasions, concealments, and circumlocutions would be waste of time.

Armstrong smiled slightly. "Then it's war?" he said.

"If you insist."

"You know we've got the governor and the attorney-general?"

"But we've got the press, practically all respectability, and a better chance with the Grand Jury and the judges."

Armstrong gazed reflectively into space. "A good fight!" he said judicially. "If I were a very rich man I should hesitate to precipitate it. But, having nothing but my salary—and agood, clean, personalrecord—I think I'll enjoy myself. I'll not try to steal the credit of making the fight, Mr. Atwater. I'll see that you get all the glory that comes from kicking the cover off hell."

"Speaking of your personal record," said Atwater absently. "Let me see, you were in the A. & P. bond syndicate, in the little steel syndicate last spring, in two stock syndicates a couple of months ago. Your profits were altogether $72,356—I forget the odd cents. And they tell me you've sworn to three reports that won't stand examination."

Armstrong lifted his eyebrows, drew at his cigar awhile. "I see you've been looking me up," he said, unruffled apparently. "Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to escape an occasional shot. But they'd hardly be noted in the general fusillade. The Universal has been a mere shell ever since you used it, in that traction reorganization which failed—I've got a safe full of facts about it. And Morris tells me he can have mobs trying to hang Trafford and his board of directors for their doings in the Home Defender."

Atwater smiled grimly. "I'm sorry to say, Armstrong, we'd concentrate on you. Several of the strong men look on you as a dangerous person. They don't like new faces down in this part of the town, unless they wear a more deferential expression than yours does. Personally, I'd miss you. You're the kind of man I like as friend or as foe. But I couldn't let my personal feelings influence me or oppose the advice of the leading men of finance."

"Naturally not," assented Armstrong.

"I've got to be off now," continued Atwater, rising.

"So have I," said Armstrong.

They went to the street door of the building, Atwater holding Armstrong by the arm. There, Armstrong put out his hand. "Good-by, Mr. Atwater," he said; "I'll meet you at Philippi."

"Think it over, young man, think it over," said Atwater, a friendly, sad expression in his handsome, kind eyes. "I don't want to see you come a nasty cropper—one that'll make you crawl about with a broken back the rest of your life. Put off your ambitions—or, better still, come in with us. We'll do more for you than you can do for yourself."

"Thank you," replied Armstrong ironically.

"Consult with your people. The governor has almost weakened, and I'm sure Morris will fall in line with whatever you do."

"You've got my answer," said Armstrong, unruffled in his easy good nature. "And I'll tell you, Mr. Atwater, that if you do take the cover off hell, I'll see that it isn't put on again until you've had a look-in, at least."

"You know the situation too well to imagine you can win," urged Atwater. "You must be thinking I'm bluffing."

"Frankly, I don't know," replied Armstrong. "As you will lose so much and I so little, I rather believe you are."

"Put that idea out of your mind," said Atwater; and now his face, especially his eyes, gave Armstrong a look full into the true man, the reckless and relentless tyrant, with whom tyranny was an instinct stronger than reason.

"I have," was Armstrong's quiet answer.

"Then—you agree?"

Armstrong shook his head, without taking his eyes off Atwater's.

Atwater shrugged his shoulders.

"Fallen women have been known to reform," said Armstrong. "But there's no recorded case of a fallen man's reforming. I find nothing to attract me, Atwater, in the lot of the most splendid of these male Messalinas you and your kind maintain in such luxury as officials, public and private. I belong to myself—and I shall continue to belong to myself."

Atwater's smile was cynical; but there was the cordiality of respect in the hand clasp he abruptly forced on Armstrong, as he parted from him.

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