Counsel for the Defense Part 12

"And your work was interesting?"

"Very. You see, I think I am on the verge of discovering that the typhoid bacillus----"

"You'll tell me all about that later. Now the first order of your attorney is, just as soon as you have finished your coffee and folded your napkin, back you go to your laboratory."

"But, Katherine, with this affair----"

"This affair, worry and all, has been shifted off upon your eminent counsel. Work will keep you from worry, so back you go to your darling germs."

"You're mighty good, dear, but----"

"No argument! You've got to do just what your lawyer tells you. And now," she added "as I may have to be seeing a lot of people, and as having people about the house may interrupt your work, I'm going to take an office."

He stared at her.

"Take an office?"

"Yes. Who knows--I may pick up a few other cases. If I do, I know who can use the money."

"But open an office in Westville! Why, the people----Won't it be a little more unpleasant----" He paused doubtfully. "Did you see what the _Express_ had to say about you?"

She flushed, but smiled sweetly.

"What the _Express_ said is one reason why I'm going to open an office."

"Yes?"

"I'm not going to let fear of that Mr. Bruce dictate my life. And since I'm going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be the whole thing. And what's more, I'm going to act as though I were doing the most ordinary thing in the world. And if Mr. Bruce and the town want to talk, why, we'll just let 'em talk!"

"But--but--aren't you afraid?"

"Of course I'm afraid," she answered promptly. "But when I realize that I'm afraid to do a thing, I'm certain that that is just exactly the thing for me to do. Oh, don't look so worried, dear"--she leaned across and kissed him--"for I'm going to be the perfectest, properest, politest lady that ever scuttled a convention. And nothing is going to happen to me--nothing at all."

Breakfast finished, Katherine despotically led her father up to his laboratory. A little later she set out for downtown, looking very fresh in a blue summer dress that had the rare qualities of simplicity and grace. Her colour was perhaps a little warmer than was usual, but she walked along beneath the maples with tranquil mien, seemingly unconscious of some people she pa.s.sed, giving others a clear, direct glance, smiling and speaking to friends and acquaintances in her most easy manner.

As she turned into Main Street the intelligence that she was coming seemed in some mysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front doors. Bare-armed and ap.r.o.ned proprietors of grocery stores and their hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that dozed beside the curb hurried out of cavernous doors, the fear of run-away writ large upon their countenances, to see if a buckle was not loose or a tug perchance unfastened. Behind her, as she pa.s.sed, Main Street stood statued in mid-action, strap in motionless hand, sprinkling-can tilting its entire contents of restorative over a box of clothes-pins, and gaped and stared. This was epochal for Westville.

Never before had a real, live, practising woman lawyer trod the cement walk of Main Street.

When Katherine came to Court House Square, she crossed to the south side, pa.s.sed the _Express_ Building, and made for the Hollingsworth Block, whose first floor was occupied by the New York Store's "glittering array of vast and profuse fashion." Above this alluring pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked "Hosea Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms." In the room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on the top of the desk a "plug" hat, so venerable that it looked a very great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic evidence that they were not present for ornament alone.

From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall, smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled "Prince Albert" coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth, half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar.

"I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?" said Katherine. The question was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest memories.

"Yes. Come right in," he returned in a high, nasal voice.

She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down.

He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the fine wrinkles of his leathery face.

"And I believe this is Katherine West--our lady lawyer," he remarked.

"I read in the _Express_ how you----"

Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of temper. "The editor of that paper is a cad!"

"Well, he ain't exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman,"

the old lawyer admitted. "At least, I never heard of his exerting himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons."

"You know him, then?"

"A little. He's my nephew."

"Oh! I remember."

"And we live together," the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or satirical. "Batch it--with a n.i.g.g.e.r who saves us work by stealing things we'd otherwise have to take care of. We sc.r.a.p most of the time.

I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of the _Express_ is, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb once. He's suffering from the spared rod."

Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had inherited una.n.a.lyzed from her childhood, when old Hosie Hollingsworth had been the chief scandal of the town--an infidel, who had dared challenge the creation of the earth in seven days, and yet was not stricken down by a fiery bolt from heaven! She did not pursue the subject of Bruce, but went directly to her business.

"I understand that you have an office to rent."

"So I have. Like to see it?"

"That is what I called for."

"Just come along with me."

He rose, and Katherine followed him to the floor above and into a room furnished much as the one she had just left.

"This office was last used," commented old Hosie, "by a young fellow who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study law with. He tried law for a while." The old man's thin prehensile lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "He's down in Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to pay his back office rent."

"How about the furniture?" asked Katherine.

"That was his. He left it in part payment. You can use it if you want to."

"But I don't want those things about"--pointing gingerly to a pair of cuspidors.

"All right. Though I don't see how you expect to run a law office in Westville without 'em." He bent over and took them in his hands. "I'll take 'em along. I need a few more, for my business is picking up."

"I suppose I can have possession at once."

"Whenever you please."

Standing with the cuspidors in his two hands the old lawyer looked her over. He slowly grinned, and a dry cackle came out of his lean throat.

"I was born out there in Buck Creek Township myself," he said. "Folks all Quakers, same as your ma's and your Aunt Rachel's. I was brought up on plowing, husking corn and going to meeting. Never smiled till after I was twenty; wore a halo, size too large, that slipped down and made my ears stick out. My grandfather's name was Elijah, my father's Elisha. My father had twelve sons, and beginning with me, Hosea, he named 'em all in order after the minor prophets. Being brought up in a houseful of prophets, naturally a lot of the gift of prophecy sort of got rubbed off on me."

"Well?" said Katherine impatiently, not seeing the pertinence of this autobiography.