see! You are trying to get a confession out of him, in advance of the trial, as a big feature for your terrible paper!”
She moved a pace nearer him. All the suppressed anger, all the hidden anguish, of the last three months burst up volcanically.
“Oh! oh!” she cried breathlessly. “I never dreamt till I met you that a man could be so low, so heartless, as to hound an old man as you have hounded my father – and all for the sake of a yellow newspaper sensation. But he’s a safe man for you to attack. Yes, he’s safe – old, unpopular, helpless!”
Bruce’s heavy brows lowered. He did not give back a step before her ireful figure.
“And because he’s old and unpopular I should not attack him, eh?” he demanded. “Because he’s down, I should not hit him? That’s your woman’s reasoning, is it? Well, let me tell you,” and his gray eyes flashed, and his voice had a crunching tone – “that I believe when you’ve got an enemy of society down, don’t, because you pity him, let him up to go and do the same thing again. While you’ve got him down, keep on hitting him till you’ve got him finished!”
“Like the brute that you are!” she cried. “But, like the coward you are, you first very carefully choose your ‘enemy of society.’ You were careful to choose one who could not hit back!”
“I did not choose your father. He thrust himself upon the town’s attention. And I consider neither his weakness nor his strength. I consider only the fact that your father has done the city a greater injury than any man who ever lived in Westville.”
“It’s a lie! I tell you it’s a lie!”
“It’s the truth!” he declared harshly, dominantly. “His swindling Westville by giving us a worthless filtering-plant in return for a bribe – why, that is the smallest evil he has done the town. Before that time, Westville was on the verge of making great municipal advances – on the verge of becoming a model and a leader for the small cities of the Middle West. And now all that grand development is ruined – and ruined by that man, your father!” He excitedly jerked a paper from his pocket and held it out to her. “If you want to see what he has brought us to, read that editorial in the Clarion!”
She fixed him with glittering eyes.
“I have read one cowardly editorial to-day in a Westville paper. That is enough.”
“Read that, I say!” he commanded.
For answer she took the Clarion and tossed it into the waste-basket. She glared at him, quivering all over, in her hands a convulsive itch for physical vengeance.
“If I thought that in all your fine talk about the city there was one single word of sincerity, I might respect you,” she said with slow and scathing contempt. “But your words are the words of a mere poseur – of a man who twists the truth to fit his desires – of a man who deals in the ideas that seem to him most profitable – of a man who cares not how poor, how innocent, is the body he uses as a stepping stone for his clambering greed and ambition. Oh, I know you – I have watched you – I have read you. You are a mere self-seeker! You are a demagogue! You are a liar! And, on top of that, you are a coward!”
Whatever Arnold Bruce was, he was a man with a temper. Fury was blazing behind his heavy spectacles.
“Go on! I care that for the words of a woman who has so little taste, so little sense, so little modesty, as to leave the sphere – ”
“You boor!” gasped Katharine.
“Perhaps I am. At least I am not afraid to speak the truth straight out even to a woman. You are all wrong. You are unwomanly. You are unsexed. Your pretensions as a lawyer are utterly preposterous, as the trial on Thursday will show you. And the condemnation of the town is not half as severe a rebuke – ”
“Stop!” gasped Katherine. A wild defiance surged up and overmastered her, her nerves broke, and her hot words tumbled out hysterically. “You think you are a God-anointed critic of humanity, but you are only a heartless, conceited cad! Just wait – I’ll show you what your judgment of me is worth! I am going to clear my father! I am going to make this Westville that condemns me kneel at my feet! and as for you – you can think what you please! But don’t you ever dare to speak to my father again – don’t you ever dare speak to me again – don’t you ever dare enter this house again! Now go! Go! I say. Go! Go! Go!”
His face had grown purple; he seemed to be choking. For a space he gazed at her. Then without answering he bowed slightly and was gone.
She glared a moment at the door. Then suddenly she collapsed upon the floor, her head and arms on the old haircloth sofa, and her whole body shook with silent sobs. Doctor West, first gazing at her a little helplessly, sat down upon the sofa, and softly stroked her hair. For a time there were no words – only her convulsive breathing, her choking sobs.
Presently he said gently:
“I’m sure you’ll do everything you said.”
“No – that’s the trouble,” she moaned. “What I said – was – was just a big bluff. I won’t do any – of those things. Your trial is two days off – and, father, I haven’t one bit of evidence – I don’t know what we’re going to do – and the jury will have to – oh, father, father, that man was right; I’m just – just a great big failure!”
Again she shook with sobs. The old man continued to sit beside her, softly stroking her thick brown hair.
CHAPTER VII
THE MASK FALLS
But presently the sobs subsided, as though shut off by main force, and Katherine rose to her feet. She wiped her eyes and looked at her father, a wan smile on her reddened, still tremulous face.
“What a hope-inspiring lawyer you have, father!”
“I would not want a truer,” said he loyally.
“We won’t have one of these cloud-bursts again, I promise you. But when you have been under a strain for months, and things are stretched tighter and tighter, and at last something makes things snap, why you just can’t help – well,” she ended, “a man would have done something else, I suppose, but it might have been just as bad.”
“Worse!” avowed her father.
“Anyhow, it’s all over. I’ll just repair some of the worst ravages of the storm, and then we’ll talk about our programme for the trial.”
As she was arranging her hair before her father’s mirror, she saw, in the glass, the old man stoop and take something from the waste-basket. Turning his back to her, he cautiously examined the object.
She left the mirror and came up behind him.
“What are you looking at, dear?”
He started, and glanced up.
“Oh – er – that editorial Mr. Bruce referred to.” He rubbed his head dazedly. “If that should happen, with me even indirectly the cause of it – why, Katherine, it really would be pretty bad!” He held out the Clarion. “Perhaps, after all, you had better read it.”
She took the paper. The Clarion had from the first opposed the city’s owning the water-works, and the editorial declared that the present situation gave the paper, and all those who had held a similar opinion, their long-awaited triumph and vindication. “This failure is only what invariably happens whenever a city tries municipal ownership,” declared the editorial. “The situation has grown so unbearably acute that the city’s only hope of good water lies in the sale of the system to some private concern, which will give us that superior service which is always afforded by private capital. Westville is upon the eve of a city election, and we most emphatically urge upon both parties that they make the chief plank of their platforms the immediate sale of our utterly discredited water-works to some private company.”
The editorial did not stir Katherine as it had appeared to stir Bruce, nor even in the milder degree it had stirred Doctor West. She was interested in the water-works only in so far as