Chapter XII

Cornelia McNabb's campaign against the tenants of the Clifton proceeded apace. Such as pleased her fancy or promised advantage to her future she attacked one by one; she made quite a succession of engagements, dropping here and picking up there, until she reached the point where, for as many hours of the day as she chose, her time was occupied, and occupied to her taste. We have already seen her in the office of the Underground National, and we may now see her in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Company. She did good work within the limits she had set for herself; she was accurate and fairly rapid, and therefore was in considerable request.

"I'd a good deal rather work around like this," she expounded to Ogden, one day, "than put in all my time in one place. Lots more variety, to begin with, and lots more pay. 'Most every one gives me half as much as I could get in any single office; and then I can skip around and have more of a show. You can talk about your rolling stone; that's all bosh."

Cornelia was now doing a daily stint of an hour or so in the office of the Brass Company. This hour came in the middle of the forenoon, and the work was oftener performed under the severe eye of Mrs. Floyd than our young amanuensis could have wished. Mrs. Floyd's presence in the office had always been rather frequent, and her prejudice against female stenographers did not operate to make it any the less so. She bestowed considerable scrutiny on Cornelia, and Cornelia returned the interest in kind. She recognized in Mrs. Floyd one of the minor lights of "Society," and she became more deeply indebted to her for points in costume, speech, and behavior than either perhaps realized.

Mrs. Floyd was generally accompanied by Miss Wilde. This provided Cornelia with a double course of instruction: she learned what to do and what to avoid.

Miss Wilde was generally accompanied by her hand-bag, and that receptacle was capable of an endless yield of documents calculated to irritate and perplex her brother-in-law. Mrs. Floyd encouraged this. Who, indeed, should take an interest in the affairs of her own sister if not her own husband?

One morning Ann produced a memorandum that stunned him. As he studied it she stood above him like the spirit of Bankruptcy.

"For Heaven's sake, Walworth, tell me what it means. Am I a ruined woman, or what?"

Floyd glanced at the sum total; the figures mounted high. "They _have_ struck you pretty hard, that's a fact."

It was a bill for special assessments levied on the possessions of Ann E. Wilde, in one of McDowell's subdivisions. Paving, so much; sewers and water-mains, so much; stone sidewalk, so much.

"And eighteen dollars and a half for a quarter of a lamp-post," wailed Ann. "Why, Walworth, I haven't got the money on hand for all this; I never anticipated such a thing."

"What's a quarter of a lamp-post good for?" asked her sister.

"I suppose the cost is levied on four property-owners," said her husband.

"And who's going to see by it when it's up?" asked the disconsolate investor. "Nobody ever goes past."

"Not this year, perhaps; but there'll be plenty next year. You've no idea how the town is spreading about. Why don't you step upstairs and see McDowell?"

"Who starts these things going?" asked Ann. "Who fixes the amounts?"

"I guess it's done sometimes on the petition of other owners about--according to the frontage."

"And who's the principal owner all about there?" demanded Ann. "Ain't it McDowell himself?"

"Well, I don't suppose he's sold off very much yet."

"And so he's taxing me to make his own property more valuable. I like that. I'm glad I went to him. And your young Ogden--I suppose I can thank him for this."

"Good gracious, Ann; McDowell is taxed, too. The town's growing, and all outlying property is subject to such things. And don't blame poor Ogden."

"What more can you expect, Ann, in such a half-baked place as this?" queried her sister.

"Go up and see McDowell," repeated Walworth. "He can tell you all about it--when it's payable, and how, and whether there's a rebate or anything." He passed the papers back to Ann with the definitive air that closes a matter. "Jessie didn't come with you, then?" he inquired, turning towards his wife.

"No, poor thing; she is away down this morning. Why, what do you think, Walworth? They've been asking her if she can't testify."

"Testify fiddlesticks! What could she say? They don't need her; they've got a clear enough case as it is."

"But think of her in court."

"Don't think of her in court. She may be a thousand miles away by the time the thing comes up. Has anything more been seen or heard of that interesting vocalist?"

"Nothing. He left the poor child all alone in that big place, with not three days' supplies and the--"

She looked sharply over towards Cornelia. The girl's hour was ended, but she had engaged in a pretence of tidying up the desk.

Ann creased her papers thoughtfully between her fingers. "I had no idea that curb-stones cost so much," she sighed. "If I had only sold out on that offer last month!"

Cornelia was now engaged in complicating her apron-strings. Her interest in the Underground people, while becoming no less professional, had become a good deal more personal. She would have given anything for a decent pretext to remain. It was hard indeed to tear herself away from this discussion of the affairs of Burton Brainard's sister.

"--and the gas turned off," Mrs. Floyd finished, as the door closed on the reluctant girl. "And that's the state Jessie found her in--everything just about as bad as it could be."

"Well, no," Floyd dissented, thoughtfully. "There's one important consolation--this suit could be brought."

"Oh, yes," answered his wife, quickly. "This Canadian woman doesn't claim to be his wife--only that she ought to be, and that he promised to make her so."

"Interesting family," murmured Walworth. "Should like to be related to 'em."

"She knew him in Toronto. She found him here before she had been in town a week."

"Small world," remarked Walworth, negligently. He played with his penholders.

Mrs. Floyd became silent. Gossip seemed out of the question with an indifferent husband and a preoccupied sister.

Vibert's detection by the girl he had betrayed and discarded, and his desertion of his young wife, were immediately followed by the proper steps on the part of Brainard's attorneys. The old man had received the intelligence of Vibert's double misdeed with a tremendous outburst of wrath and vituperation. His indignation revived in him all the crude violence of his youth; he drew out from the disused corners of his memory such a vocabulary and such turns of phrase as are possible only to one whose boyhood has been spent on the crass and barbaric frontier. He towered and swayed like a rank plant that has sprung rapidly from the earth and has brought up the slime and mould on its sheath and stalk. His prodigal and picturesque indecencies were heard but half understandingly by his son, and were lost, as to everything save their animus, on his advisers.

The equilibrium of the scales (whose mathematical poise he had once proven to his own satisfaction) was now destroyed; this outrage on his daughter and himself and all his belongings put another and a different face on the matter. The girl was received back into her father's house. It was the understanding that she was to remain there until the legal undoing of all this mischief had been accomplished, and that, afterwards, she must prepare herself for an indefinite exile among certain of her father's relatives still resident in Centralia.

During this interval Brainard allowed himself only the minimum of communication with his daughter; her mother's fluttering sympathies were too tenuous and too faded to furnish anything very definite or vivid in the way of consolation; her brother did not readily abandon himself to the softer feelings--particularly when work of so much sterner character was before them; and but for her sister this crushed and unfortunate child would have received but slender support and comfort. Abbie was not only sister, but mother and family circle too; she found a use for all the pent-up tenderness and domesticity of her nature.

The bill in the case of Vibert _vs_. Vibert was filed without receiving any undue attention from the press. Some exertions were taken, some influence was used, and the matter merely made a cold, official, numerical appearance in the legal columns of such of the dailies as affect complete court reports. The relations between Vibert and Jane Doane, however, made too good a "story" to be ignored in every quarter; some brief mention of it appeared in a new and struggling one-cent evening paper. The friends and well-wishers of the Brainards were surprised by the extent of that paper's circulation--a good many people appeared to have seen it.

The case of Vibert _vs_. Vibert had its place near the head of a short docket and was reached with much less than the usual delay. It was tried quietly and privately rather late one afternoon at a sitting which might have been termed either a prolongation of the regular session or a supplement to it. Perhaps only a legal mind could have distinguished; probably the legal mind that dominated the occasion did not attempt the distinction.

The matter was adjusted in a small and compact court-room high up in a certain vast and pillared pile--a room which differed little in size and not greatly in furnishings from an ordinary office. The court reporters and the crowd of court loungers had withdrawn; nobody remained behind save the clerk and a bailiff or two. Yet the spectre of publicity seemed hovering there; it hurled a flood of glaring light in through the high and curtainless windows, it shimmered on the staring yellow oak furnishings of bench and bar, and it searched out the darkest corner of the yawning jury-box. Abbie Brainard, standing beside her sister, peopled all this void with jargoning lawyers and callous constables and malicious witnesses and indifferent jurymen and sharp-witted reporters and trivial, time-killing spectators; and then she set her unveiled sister in that revolving witness-chair and brought to bear upon her the searching glare from the lofty windows and the more pitiless glare of the thousand-eyed crowd. She shuddered, and thanked Heaven--without going too deeply beneath the surface of things--that present conditions were so favorable.

For they involved none of the ordinary phenomena of a "trial." There was no wrangling, no eloquence, no auditory; there was no humiliation--beyond that which was inevitable. It was hardly more than a conference. The judge, with a quiet gravity, took a simple conversational tone--a keynote to which the indignation of Burt, the mortification of his sister, the sorrow of Jane Doane, and the juvenility of Freddy Pratt all came to be attuned. There was a simple recital of uncombated facts, the separation was decreed, and Mary Vibert was presently at liberty to resume her maiden name. It was considered best that she be known henceforth as Mrs. Mary Brainard. There was no report in the next day's papers, nor the next; on the third day things took a different turn.

One or two of the newspapers had sacrificed the Vibert-Doane story with considerable reluctance. They felt a certain degree of martyrdom, too, in withholding their hand from Brainard, who had been a standard subject of attack throughout the careers of all the younger writers. Nor were they at all sure that their position as guardians of the public morals justified any such suppression of the truth. They learned of the clandestine trial of the Vibert case, and that decided them. Their virtue was strengthened; the whole affair was reopened and thoroughly ventilated. The encroachments of wealth and privilege were held up before the alarmed eyes of the public; the entire episode, with everything leading up to it, was minutely rehearsed. A good many people were interviewed--a few who knew something of the circumstances, a good many who did not. Reportorial requisitions were also made on the bank and the house. Some persons contributed facts relating to the matter in hand; others, facts relating to matters whose connection was not so close; still others volunteered opinions on the method of procedure that made the trial noteworthy. "Vox Populi" and "Ruat Cœlum" wrote letters "to the editor." Rough cuts from sketches and photographs made their appearance. The whole career of Brainard was reviewed with merciless detail, and the issue of one edition of a particular publication was attended with the shouting of his name through the streets. Certain sheets whose existence is unknown to the majority of reputable people and whose circulation is in accordance therewith, gave their clients a scare-head full of exclamation-points; and one pink publication, whose single connection with respectability is through the barber-shops, devoted its whole front page to the illustration of the case: the wronged girl claimed her surpliced betrayer at the altar-rail, while the equally wronged wife swooned in a front pew. There was an appropriate Gothic background, while one corner of the foreground--piquant touch of innocence--was filled in by an open-eyed choir-boy.

All these manifestations of public interest caused Ogden a keen personal distress that surprised him. He heard the names of Brainard and Vibert bawled in the streets. He became familiar, for the first time, with the salient points in Brainard's career. He heard himself referred to once or twice as a clerk in Brainard's bank. As he handled that pink sheet in the Clifton barber-shop while awaiting his turn, he half expected some acquaintance to brand him as a caller at Brainard's house. As he lay, lathered and defenceless, in his chair, he almost dreaded lest some pitiless friend might happen in and stamp him as a suitor for the hand of Brainard's daughter.... He paused and blushed under the barber's eye; he saw now the reason for his personal distress over these odious domestic entanglements. His surprise passed away, but it left behind it a distress greater still.