Counsel for the Defense Part 11

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 grat.i.tude. "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 a.s.sured 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 n.o.blest 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 pa.s.sed through a door into the study, and a moment later reentered with Doctor Sherman. 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, of _his_ suffering?"

"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 merely to 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, rehea.r.s.ed 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 the gentlemen 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's _Express_?"

She instinctively stiffened.

"I have not."

He drew out a copy of the _Express_, opened it, and pointed a plump, pinkish forefinger at the beginning of an article on the first page.

"You see the _Express_ says 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 the _Clarion_," 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--to discourse 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 amba.s.sador from the _Clarion_ was 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 G.o.d. 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 regretting that 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."