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McNiven went after Beattie at once and proposed a quiet treaty and a settlement out of court. Beattie grinned so odiously that McNiven had to say: "Oh, I remember you. You used to be an ambulance-chaser. What are you after now a little dirty advertising?" "What are you after?" said Beattie. "A little collusive juggling with the Seventh Commandment?"
The damage is done. The whole world has read the lie. Now we'll make it read the truth. There must be some way for me to defend my name, and I want to know what it is." McNiven told her that the law allowed her to enter the case and seek vindication, but he advised her against it. She thanked him for the information and rejected the advice.
"Well, we haven't all the privilege of knowing you as well as the defendant does. You may step down, Mrs. Cheever, thank you." McNiven rose. "One moment, Mrs. Cheever. You testified on direct examination that the defendant left you immediately after the waiter did?" "Yes." "And that he did not return till the next morning, just before the waiter returned." "Yes." "That is all, Mrs. Cheever."
McNiven was startled and grieved when he learned that Jim was not making ready to marry Charity Coe, but some one else. Jim told him as much as he thought necessary, and McNiven guessed the rest. He groaned: "It seems impossible to surround marriage with such difficulties that people won't break in and out. I've got a friend of yours trying to bust a home as quietly as you're trying to build one."
It may be interesting to outline the procedure as a social document in chicanery, or social surgery, as one wills to call it. McNiven first laid under Charity's eyes a summons and complaint against Peter Cheever. She glanced over it and found it true except that Zada L'Etoile was not named; Cheever's alleged income was vastly larger than she imagined, and her claim for alimony was exorbitant.
"But a separation is only a guarantee of of infidelity, I should think." "Of course it is," said Lawyer McNiven. "Then everything seems all wrong." "Of course it is." "Then why doesn't somebody correct it?" "Who's going to bell the cat?
"All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm pretty tired of being a free woman." Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must persuade her over into New Jersey.
If it takes the last cent I've got and dad's got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned me against marrying her, and I wish to God I'd listened to you. I'm not blaming her for being suspicious, but I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect Charity if I have to build a wall of solid gold around her." McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for alarm.
The judge had fixed her alimony at $30,000 a year, and an allowance for costs. Beattie tried to make a huge cost settlement, but McNiven knew of Kedzie's interest in the Marquess and he refused the bait. So Kedzie got only $7,500. She found it a ruinously small capital to begin life as a Marchioness on she that had had only two dollars to begin life in New York on!
One cannot even go to the stake without some guile. The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.
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