Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

A DUEL AFTER LUNCH

In the respectable morning newspaper the Fosdicks took in, the facts of Josiah's latest public appearance were presented with those judicious omissions and modifications which the respectable editor feels it his duty to make, that the lower classes may not be led to distrust and deride the upper classes. Thus, Amy, glancing at headlines in search of the only important news—the doings of "our set"—got the impression that her father had had an annoying lapse of memory in testifying about something or other before somebody or other. But the servants took in a newspaper that had no mission to safeguard the name and fame and influence of the upper classes; probably not by chance, this newspaper was left where its vulgar but vivid headlines caught her eye.

She read, punctuating each paragraph with explosions of indignation. But when she had finished, she reread—and began to think. As most of us have learned by experience in great matters or small, truth is rubberlike—it offers small resistance to the blows of prejudice, and, as soon as the blow passes, it straightway springs back to its original form and place. Amy downfaced a thousand little facts of her own knowledge as to where the money came from—facts which tried to tell her that the "low, lying sheet" had revealed only a trifling part of the truth. But, when she saw her father, saw how he had suddenly broken, his very voice emasculate and thin, she gave up the struggle to deceive herself. There is a notion that a man's family is the last to believe the disagreeable truth about his relations with the outside world. This is part of the theory that a man has two characters, that he can be a saint at six o'clock in the morning and a scoundrel at six o'clock in the evening, that he is honest at a certain street and number and a liar and a thief at another street and number. But the fact is that character is the most closely woven and homogeneous of fabrics, and, though a man's family do not admit it publicly when the truth about him is exposed, they know him all the time for what he really is. Amy knew; her father's appearance, indicating not that he was guilty but that he was found out and was in an agony of dread of the consequences, threw her into a hysteria of shame and terror. She avoided the servants; she startled each time the door bell rang; it might mean the bursting of the real disgrace, for, in her ignorance of political conditions, she assumed that arrest and imprisonment would follow the detection of her father and probably Hugo in grave crimes. She dared not face any of the few that called; she would not even see Hugo.

On Sunday morning came a note from Alois—a love letter, begging to see her. She read it with tears flowing and with a heart swelling with gratitude. "He does love me!" she said. "He must know we are about to be disgraced, yet he has only been strengthened in his love." Though the actual state of the family's affairs was vastly different from what she imagined, though she would have been little disturbed had she known that publicity was the only punishment likely to overtake persons so respectable as Fosdick and his son, still the crisis was none the less real to Amy. In such crises the best qualities of human nature rise in all their grandeur and exert all their power. She sent off an immediate answer—"Thank you, Alois—I need you— Come at three o'clock. Yours, Amy."

When he came, she let him see what she wanted; how, with all she had valued and had thought valuable transforming into trash and slipping away from her, she had turned to him, to the only reality—to the love that welcomes the storm which gives it the opportunity to show how strong it is, how firmly rooted. With his first stammering, ardent protestations, she flung herself into his arms. "I have loved you from the beginning," she sobbed. "But I didn't realize it until I looked round for some one to turn to. You do love me?"

"I am here," he said simply, and there is nothing finer than was the look in his eyes, the feeling in his heart. "And we must be married soon. We must be together, now."

"Yes, yes—soon—at once," she agreed. "And you will take me away, won't you? Ah, I love you—I love you, Alois. I will show you how a woman can love." And never had she been so beautiful, both without and within.

"As soon as you please," said he. He was not inclined to interrogate his happiness; but he was surprised at her sudden and unconditional surrender. He guessed that some quarrel about him with her father or with Hugo had roused her to assert what he was quite ready to believe had been in her heart all the time; or, it might be that she wished to make amends for her father's having planned to send him away when honor commanded him to stay and guard his reputation. Had the cause of her hysteria been real, or had he known why she was so clinging and so eager, he would not have changed—for he loved her and was never half-hearted in any emotion. Though her money and her position were originally her greatest attractions for him, his ideal of his own self-respect was too high and too real for him to rest content until he had forced love to put him under its spell.

When he left her she sent for Hugo and told him. Hugo went off like a charge at the snap of the spark. "You must be mad!" he shouted. "Why, such a marriage is beneath you—is almost as bad as your sister's. It's your duty to bring a gentleman into the family."

She would not argue that; she would at any cost be forbearing with Hugo, who must be in torture, if he was not altogether a fool—and sometimes she thought he was. She restrained herself to saying gently, "You don't seem to appreciate our changed position."