CHAPTER IX

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Sec.1. "No, sir; she's gone out," said the servant that answered Luke's ring at the door of the Forbes house and his inquiry for Betty on the afternoon of his interview with Judge Stein.

"To town?" asked Luke.

"Yes, sir; I think so. I think she's gone over to Mr. Nicholson's Hester Street mission."

Luke had frequently met the Rev. Pinkney Nicholson; he liked him. The young clergyman was a friend of both Forbes and Forbes's daughter. The latter often helped in Nicholson's slum-missionary work; an attendance at Nicholson's church of St. Athanasius was the only occupation that brought Forbes and Betty even slightly into touch with the world of the Ruysdaels. With Betty, Luke often went to the Sunday morning services. Indeed, he had recently become a consistent member of the congregation,

## partly because Betty liked the church and partly because Luke himself

admired Nicholson's simple and forcible eloquence and believed enough in Nicholson's philanthropy to forgive a ritualism that in itself had only a superficial appeal for him.

"She didn't say when she would be back?" Luke inquired. Until this moment he had not known how badly he wanted to see her.

"No, sir. By dinner-time, I guess. Would you like to leave any message, Mr. Huber?"

"Only that if she isn't going out this evening, I'll call."

"Very well, sir."

Luke had hurried to the Forbes house in Brooklyn as soon as Stein left him, for he knew that Betty was usually at home from three o'clock in the afternoon until five; but the Judge had consumed some time; there was a block in the subway and another block on the surface-line at the subway's end: Luke had missed Betty. There was nothing to be done but to return to town, where he should have remained in order to be in touch with the new friends that were announcing him as their certain chance for the district-attorneyship.

He considered himself ready for the fight. He knew that Stein, although checked in the engagement at the Thirty-ninth Street apartments, would not be defeated and would resume the offensive from some other quarter at some later date; but Luke looked for no serious oppilation by these secret enemies before the end of the month that he had given them in which to come to terms. He underestimated, in short, both the power and the unencumbered license of his foes. He would not realize the handicap that his grant of a four weeks' armistice placed on his own movements, he would not believe that his antagonists might violate the truce, and he refused to credit them with the vast influence and free conscience which were at their command.

The open war, the war that the reformers and the public saw, was, however, waging. The Municipal Reform League had taken city headquarters in an office-building in Broadway below Madison Square weeks ago, before they began their search for a candidate. At that time divisional headquarters were opened in every ward in New York, and the remnants of an older reform organization, left from a defeat ten years old, were gathered and cemented for present use. Nelson, Venable, and Yeates were working day and night with their lieutenants, and when Luke returned to his apartments, the loneliness that he was beginning to feel because of the sudden end of his duties under Leighton, was banished by the news that the League headquarters had been telephoning madly for him.

He bought a newspaper on his way downtown and discovered what was one of the things that his associates wanted to see him about: Leighton had issued a statement saying that he had forced Luke's resignation from the District-Attorney's staff because of Luke's inefficiency.

"You must nail that lie immediately!" cried Venable as soon as Luke entered the offices of the League. The old man was standing at a desk with Yeates and Nelson beside him.

"Why did he fire you, anyway?" asked Yeates. "I always thought Leighton was a rather decent kind of fellow."

"Jealousy," suggested Nelson. "He was afraid of him."

Luke sat on a table and dangled his long legs. He did not like the necessity that Leighton had put upon him.

"Of course, he didn't discharge you at all," said Venable. "We all know that. But we have called the committee for the day after to-morrow, and you must make the public see the matter as we do."

"I'm not so sure that he didn't fire me," said Luke. He chose to be blind to his hearers' astonishment. "It was a race to see whether he'd chuck me or me him, and I think it ended in a dead-heat."

"Oh, come off!" said Yeates.

Venable stroked his white hair.

"But the reason?" he commanded. "You must give the full story to the public. We stand for absolute honesty in politics, and we can't begin with any suppression of facts in public office."

"Well," said Luke, "I think I gave Leighton, in a general way, to understand I believed he was willing to use the Money Power in politics, if he could get it to use." He smiled at them. "Does sound rather vague, doesn't it?"

Nelson puffed out his cheeks. "Men don't break up a partnership for such things," said he.

"Leighton and I did."

"Perhaps you did, but people won't think so."

Venable cut in:

"We don't want to pry into your private affairs, and, of course, we don't expect you to violate any personal confidences that you naturally had with Mr. Leighton; but a broad statement of the basic facts has to go to the papers at once. The charge wouldn't be so serious if it was specific and vulgar, because then you would have no trouble in disproving it; but Mr. Leighton is a thorough politician; he knows the value of vagueness, and he gives the impression that he could tell a great deal if he wasn't so much of a gentleman as to want to spare your feelings."

Luke slowly got down from the table.

"I will say this much," he replied; "I will answer Leighton in his own language: I will say he tried to get hold of some documents that would make trouble for a group of unscrupulous and influential men, and he wasn't going to use those documents in court or out of it to stop those men in a wrong they were doing, but only as a means to force them to give him their political support."

Venable reflected.

"I think it would suit if you published that," he said.

"Did he get the documents?" asked Nelson.

"No," said Luke, "he didn't. Now, send me in a stenographer, and I'll dictate a statement along those lines."

Sec.2. The headquarters of the Municipal Reform League occupied a half of the second floor. They were accessible by either the stairs, or any of the three elevators that all day long shot down and up narrow shafts from the roof to the hall opening on Broadway. Entering the offices, one came first to a reception-room; beyond that, one passed along the cleared side of a railing in the large apartment, behind which sat the company of stenographers and typewriters, and so came to a series of offices with ground-glass doors and windows giving upon the street. It was one of these offices which was permanently assigned to Luke.

Here, pacing the floor between the roll-top desk at one side and the small safe for private papers on the other, Luke dictated his public letter. He tried to word it in such a way that its facts would not sound incredible to the uninitiated reader, would not seem so vague as to excite suspicion, and would yet convey to both Leighton and Stein the threat of complete publicity to be fulfilled if the writer were pushed too far. It was a hard task, but Luke, after several revisions, was satisfied with it.

"Yes," said Venable, "I think that will do. The reporters are waiting outside; I sent for them. I have only one addition to suggest."

"What's that?" asked Luke.

"You deal exclusively with your resignation, and yet you are issuing this statement from the League's headquarters. Don't you think you had better say something about your candidacy?

"Hadn't I better wait till I get it?"

"You will have it as soon as the committee meets. Everybody knows that. I don't propose that you should anticipate all the good points of your letter of acceptance, but merely that you should state what you will stand for. You could say that your name has been mentioned for the nomination and that, if nominated, you will make your campaign on such and such issues."

"All right." Luke shrugged his lean shoulders. He turned to the waiting stenographer. "Take this," he said:

"In conclusion, I wish to say that my recent experience in the service of the city has convinced me of the crying need of a new movement for civic improvement: a non-partisan movement in which the one object shall be the purification of municipal government and the fearless administration of the law, all of its supporters working together not for any man or party, but for the good of New York. Such a movement is that now started by the conscientious men who compose the Municipal Reform League.

"My name has been mentioned as a candidate for office on the ticket of this league, and I shall feel honored, indeed, if I receive my nomination under such happy auspices. In that event, I shall go before the people with a frank appeal to them to drive the money-changers out of the Temple of Justice, the grafters out of the police-force, vice and crime from the streets; and, if elected, I should attempt to do these things, as the will of the people who placed me in power, with favor to no persons, or combination of persons, in Greater New York. But whether I am nominated or not, I shall take my coat off and roll up my sleeves and go to work for the Municipal Reform League as for the only present hope of this city's moral regeneration."

Luke turned to Venable.

"How's that?" he inquired.

Venable agreed that it ought to do.

"_I_ think it's stodgy enough," said Luke.

Venable visibly winced, but passed the comment by.

"I am not quite sure," he said, "about that expression concerning taking off your coat and so on. Our first appeal has to be made to the cultivated voters, you see, and we don't want to sound too--well, too agricultural."

Luke smiled his weary smile. No doubt Venable was right.

"Change that," said Luke to the stenographer--"change it to: 'I shall put on my armor and take up my broadsword to go into this battle.'"

Sec.3. "Miss Forbes got back?" Luke asked that evening when he again rang the bell at the Forbes house.

"Yes, sir," said the servant, "she's in the parlor. Mr. Forbes is in the library. Shall I----"

"I think I can make out with only Miss Forbes--for a while," Luke interrupted. He started to walk past the servant.

"Mr. Nicholson is there, too," the careful servant warned him. "He stayed to dinner."

"Oh, that's good," said Luke. "Well, I'll be glad to see him." But his tone was not so enthusiastic as it had been, and his step hesitated half-way to the parlor door.

The door was open. Through it Betty heard him, and through it she now hurried into the hall to meet him, her hands outstretched.

"How splendid of you!" she was saying. "We've just been reading your letter in the paper, The papers are full of you, and you don't know how proud we are to know you, and how proud that you come here to see us at such a busy time."

Her cheeks were flushed, her brown eyes shone. Luke noted a little curl that escaped from the mass of golden hair, so like a saint's glory to her head, and seemed to caress one coral ear.

"It's all nothing but my good luck," he said as he took both her hands in his and thought not half so much of her words as of the woman that uttered them. "But I didn't expect your father's approval."

"You have it, anyway," she assured him. "Of course, he's a Progressive, and he thinks you would have done better to come into his party; but he does admire your courage, and so does Mr. Nicholson."

"Does he?" said Luke dryly. "I hope not: it might go to my head." He remembered that Nicholson believed in celibacy for the clergy, and he was glad of it.

The young priest rose as his hostess and her new guest came into the Eighteen-Sixty parlor. He was a handsome man and his eyes were kindly, yet he had the face of an ascetic.

"Miss Forbes is right," he said. "New York needs men with high convictions and the courage of them."

"So does the Church," replied Luke heartily--"and she is getting them now."

They sat down.

"The Church," said Nicholson, "has always had them. What she lacked was the co-operation of such men in the practical world. If all of our millionaires were like some few of them, our work would be easy; but now we scarcely know which is more dangerous: the evil tyrant or the evil demagogue."

He talked for some time in this strain, not to weariness, but with the completeness of the zealot. Nicholson regarded wealth as a sacred trust, a gift from God given to the great intellects of the world only that it might be administered for the benefit of the lesser of God's creatures. He mentioned no specific instance, but he saw in many of the country's rich men souls that were proving worthy of their trust and others that were using their money selfishly and even cruelly. For the former he had the highest regard, for the latter the severest condemnation; the spiritual and physical welfare of the poor he considered as the especial care of the more fortunate, and charity was not only the right of penury: it was the salvation of the rich.

Betty listened to him with a rapt face; Luke honored him, but sincerely hoped that he would go. Fearing that this desire was becoming too patent, Luke said:

"The Manhattan and Niagara people don't seem to share your views."

"Ah," said Nicholson, "there you touch a vexed problem, because there you have to do with a corporation, and it is almost a fact that corporations have no souls."

"If that corporation ever had any, it is damned," said Luke; "but what I'm driving at is that the individuals composing a corporation have moral responsibilities."

The clergyman agreed, but in corporations, he thought, responsibility was so intricately subdivided and so sinuously delegated that no one man had much left to him or could incur much guilt for his individual errors. In connection with most such accidents as a railway wreck, there was really an ethical basis for the legal phrase "an act of God."

"Not in the North Bridge wreck," said Luke. "It's been shown that the company used cheap material, didn't have any proper system for checking its work-reports so as to tell whether ordered repairs were made, and didn't hire competent men. The company can't get out of this mess by saying its experts were forced on it by the unions: it hasn't any legal right to delegate its choice of experts to a union. It's a common carrier and, if it can't do its work properly, then it ought to stop work."

Nicholson saw this much as Luke did, and said so at a good deal of length. It was some time before his part of the conversation lagged and he rose to go.

Sec.4. Luke waited only until he heard the door close upon the departing clergyman. Then he turned to Betty with a relieved sigh.

"Phew!" he said. "I'm glad that's over."

She was sitting opposite him in the full glare of light from an old-fashioned, crystal-hung chandelier. Betty could bear strong lights.

"Why?" she asked. Her brow was puckered, but her lips smiled. "I like him. He's very good, and he's doing a really great work. I like him ever so much."

"Oh, yes," said Luke. "Nicholson's all right. He has what he admires in other men: high convictions and the courage of them. Most of us always admire in others what we don't have ourselves; but not Nicholson. He is doing a big work, too. But I'm glad he's gone, just the same."

"Why?" repeated Betty.

Luke rose. He came over to Betty and stood looking down at her, his arms folded across his chest.

"Because," he said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"It didn't look so. It looked as if you wanted to talk to Mr. Nicholson."

"I wanted to talk to you and about you."

She stopped fencing. She gave him her full, frank gaze.

"Well?" she asked.

"You know what I want to say, Betty," he answered. "You've seen for a long time what I was coming to. I held off. I held off because I hadn't anything to offer you. Even now I haven't much. I haven't half enough. If I win this fight I'm in, it won't give me anything that would make me deserve you. I've not been a bit better than I should be." His voice grew tense. "When I come down to brass tacks, when I--I beg your pardon; but what I mean is that when I get to the point of telling you I love you, I see how far I've been from being what I should be. I---- Oh, hang it all, Betty!" He put out his hands. "I love you. I've never really loved anybody else and never can. If I win this confounded--blessed fight, will you marry me?"

She got slowly to her feet: it seemed to Luke minutes before she had stood up and begun her answer. Then she took both his hands.

"You don't have to win the fight to win me, Luke," she said.

The realization swept over him. He took her in his arms. He looked in her upturned face--the eyes wide, the sweet, fresh cheeks hot, the lips parted, breathing quickly--and then he felt the blood rush to his head, felt it hammer at his temples. It got into his eyes and blinded him. He ground his lips upon hers.

The dull despair of his last months under Leighton commanded a reaction. The rushing changes of the last two days had set his nerves to a speed that would not now cease in whatever physical activities he engaged himself. These things flung him along a new road; they raced him down a way of which he had known but little. As he felt the warmth of her gracious young body next his, he was hurled with such violence down a course so unfamiliar to him that only the thought of losing his race by running it too swiftly could serve to lessen his straining speed. Like a quarter-mile runner stopping himself short in the last hundred yards before the tape, he almost fell as he forced himself to release her.

"Your father," he panted. He looked away from her: "I must see him now."

Betty did not understand. She was only exalted by this new thing; she was only happy.

"Now?" she whispered.

"Yes." He looked back at her and, with a white face, smiled. "He has a right to know." He caught her hand, pressed it only as tightly as he dared. "I'll go to him in the library. Wait for me."

Sec.5. Forbes was seated at a round table, engaged in his regular nightly task of reading the editorial-page of the _Evening Star_, nodding his head when he agreed with its generalities and muttering maledictions upon it when it specifically ridiculed the Progressive Party. As Luke came in, Forbes was in the midst of one of the paper's attacks on progressivism, and his frown seemed to drive his beaked nose into his mustache.

"Oh, Huber," he said, without at once relaxing his scowl; "I didn't know you were here. Come in. Been here long?"

Luke could not have guessed how long he had been in the house.

"Not very," he ventured.

"Sit down," said Forbes. He had not risen. He indicated an easy-chair near his own.

"Thanks," said Luke; but he did not sit down.

Forbes at last noticed his visitor's nervousness.

"I suppose you've had a hard day," he said. "Pardon me for not congratulating you sooner on your success. This sheet"--he brandished the _Evening Star_--"doesn't want anything but to be against everything. It upsets me every evening. But you've done a big thing. I think you should have come clear over to our side, but I dare say you will do that in time. Meanwhile, I'm sincerely glad for your good fortune. You deserve it."

"You're very good," said Luke. His eyes twinkled a little. "I wonder if you know about it--all."

"Only what this mealy-mouthed sheet says. It's absolutely inexplicable to me, Huber, how a paper written by such able men can be so narrow-minded on broad subjects. However, I think they're going to support _your_ party, if they may be said ever to support anything."

"I'm afraid they _are_ rather reticent about the real news," said Luke.

"They never tell anything that weighs against their theories."

"They haven't had a chance to tell this."

Forbes looked puzzled.

"What do you mean?"

"It's only just happened." Luke breathed deeply. "I'm engaged to be married," he said. He spoke with an unusual rapidity. "Engaged to be married, and I'd like it to come off--the wedding, I mean--right after the election."

Forbes scrambled up. He wrung Luke's hand.

"Well, well," he said, "you are to be congratulated!"

"I am glad you think so," said Luke, "for you know the girl better than I do."

"The girl? I know her better----" Forbes's voice rose. "You don't mean---- You don't mean to say----"

"Yes," Luke nodded. "It _is_ luck, isn't it? It's Betty."

"Bless my soul!" Forbes brought his left hand down on Luke's right shoulder. "Bless my soul! My little girl! Huber, you--you rather knock the wind out of me."

He said all the conventional things; his manner showed all the proper surprise; and both men understood that he had been expecting this news for a long time and wanting it.

"Huber," he said, "of course this is sudden, and of course I'm an old fool not to have got over considering Betty a child--a mere baby--but, now you're here with the announcement, I'm quite certain that, out of all the men who've been tagging after her, you're the one that I'd want for a son-in-law."

Luke again mumbled his thanks.

"You're not standing still," pursued Forbes: "you're going ahead. You have a great deal to you, and Betty's the very girl to make you make the best of yourself"--Forbes's voice abandoned the commonplace note and fell to the note of genuine feeling--"then there's your interest in the Business. Huber, I've always regretted that I didn't have a son to leave the Business to, as my father left it to me and his father to him. If you'd married somebody else, and Betty had married some chap that had no interest in it, the Business might have gone over to you eventually, and so on to children of another stock than mine; whereas, now"--he looked around Luke to the doorway--"Betty!" he said.

She had not obeyed Luke; she was standing at the door.

"I couldn't wait," she confessed; but she said it with an allegiance that was now all for Luke.

"Come here," her father ordered.

He released Luke's hand and shoulder. The girl ran to him and put her arms about his neck.

"Please be nice, daddy," she whispered. "Please be nice."

Forbes managed to draw a handkerchief and blow his nose.

"I _am_ a fool," he said. "I--Betty, you're looking so much to-night the way your mother--By George, I _am_ a fool! I think I must be getting old, Huber."

Sec.6. In the room at the end of the hall marked "Family Entrance" to a saloon in Fifty-second Street, near Eighth Avenue, a red-headed man dressed in cheap clothes of fashionable cut, was leaning across a table at which he was drinking raw whisky with a girl who, had she not been too heavily painted, would have had a face like that popularly ascribed to Joan of Arc.

[Illustration: HE FOUND IT NECESSARY TO BE EMPHATIC]

"I've got him showed to me," the man was saying. "He lives at the Arapahoe on Thirty-ninth Street. I'll play lighthouse. All you gotta do's put on them glad clothes an' get him into Pearl's Six' Av'nue place. He's in wrong, anyhow. Then I'll tip off Charley Guth, an' he'll put Donovan wise an' pinch the joint. See?"

The girl that looked like Joan of Arc nodded comprehendingly.

"But the clothes has got to be real swell," she said.

*