CHAPTER IV. KISSES AND KLEPTOMANIA.
“Hello, Dad!”
After the attorney's departure, Gilder had been rather fussily going over some of the papers on his desk. He was experiencing a vague feeling of injury on account of the lawyer's ill-veiled efforts to arouse his sympathy in behalf of the accused girl. In the instinct of strengthening himself against the possibility of yielding to what he deemed weakness, the magnate rehearsed the facts that justified his intolerance, and, indeed, soon came to gloating over the admirable manner in which righteousness thrives in the world. And it was then that an interruption came in the utterance of two words, words of affection, of love, cried out in the one voice he most longed to hear—for the voice was that of his son. Yet, he did not look up. The thing was altogether impossible! The boy was philandering, junketing, somewhere on the Riviera. His first intimation as to the exact place would come in the form of a cable asking for money. Somehow, his feelings had been unduly stirred that morning; he had grown sentimental, dreaming of pleasant things.... All this in a second. Then, he looked up. Why, it was true! It was Dick's face there, smiling in the doorway. Yes, it was Dick, it was Dick himself! Gilder sprang to his feet, his face suddenly grown younger, radiant.
“Dick!” The big voice was softened to exquisite tenderness.
As the eyes of the two met, the boy rushed forward, and in the next moment the hands of father and son clasped firmly. They were silent in the first emotion of their greeting. Presently, Gilder spoke, with an effort toward harshness in his voice to mask how much he was shaken. But the tones rang more kindly than any he had used for many a day, tremulous with affection.
“What brought you back?” he demanded.
Dick, too, had felt the tension of an emotion far beyond that of the usual things. He was forced to clear his throat before he answered with that assumption of nonchalance which he regarded as befitting the occasion.
“Why, I just wanted to come back home,” he said; lightly. A sudden recollection came to give him poise in this time of emotional disturbance, and he added hastily: “And, for the love of heaven, give Sadie five dollars. I borrowed it from her to pay the taxi'. You see, Dad, I'm broke.”
“Of course!” With the saying, Edward Gilder roared Gargantuan laughter. In the burst of merriment, his pent feelings found their vent. He was still chuckling when he spoke, sage from much experience of ocean travel. “Poker on the ship, I suppose.”
The young man, too, smiled reminiscently as he answered:
“No, not that, though I did have a little run in at Monte Carlo. But it was the ship that finished me, at that. You see, Dad, they hired Captain Kidd and a bunch of pirates as stewards, and what they did to little Richard was something fierce. And yet, that wasn't the real trouble, either. The fact is, I just naturally went broke. Not a hard thing to do on the other side.”
“Nor on this,” the father interjected, dryly.
“Anyhow, it doesn't matter much,” Dick replied, quite unabashed. “Tell me, Dad, how goes it?”
Gilder settled himself again in his chair, and gazed benignantly on his son.
“Pretty well,” he said contentedly; “pretty well, son. I'm glad to see you home again, my boy.” There was a great tenderness in the usually rather cold gray eyes.
The young man answered promptly, with delight in his manner of speech, and a sincerity that revealed the underlying merit of his nature.
“And I'm glad to be home, Dad, to be”—there was again that clearing of the throat, but he finished bravely—“with you.”
The father avoided a threatening display of emotion by an abrupt change of subject to the trite.
“Have a good time?” he inquired casually, while fumbling with the papers on the desk.
Dick's face broke in a smile of reminiscent happiness.
“The time of my young life!” He paused, and the smile broadened. There was a mighty enthusiasm in his voice as he continued: “I tell you, Dad, it's a fact that I did almost break the bank at Monte Carlo. I'd have done it sure, if only my money had held out.”
“It seems to me that I've heard something of the sort before,” was Gilder's caustic comment. But his smile was still wholly sympathetic. He took a curious vicarious delight in the escapades of his son, probably because he himself had committed no follies in his callow days. “Why didn't you cable me?” he asked, puzzled at such restraint on the part of his son.
Dick answered with simple sincerity.
“Because it gave me a capital excuse for coming home.”
It was Sarah who afforded a diversion. She had known Dick while he was yet a child, had bought him candy, had felt toward him a maternal liking that increased rather than diminished as he grew to manhood. Now, her face lighted at sight of him, and she smiled a welcome.
“I see you have found him,” she said, with a ripple of laughter.
Dick welcomed this interruption of the graver mood.
“Sadie,” he said, with a manner of the utmost seriousness, “you are looking finer than ever. And how thin you have grown!”
The girl, eager with fond fancies toward the slender ideal, accepted the compliment literally.
“Oh, Mr. Dick!” she exclaimed, rapturously. “How much do you think I have lost?”
The whimsical heir of the house of Gilder surveyed his victim critically, then spoke with judicial solemnity.
“About two ounces, Sadie.”
There came a look of deep hurt on Sadie's face at the flippant jest, which Dick himself was quick to note.
He had not guessed she was thus acutely sensitive concerning her plumpness. Instantly, he was all contrition over his unwitting offense inflicted on her womanly vanity.
“Oh, I'm sorry, Sadie,” he exclaimed penitently. “Please don't be really angry with me. Of course, I didn't mean——”
“To twit on facts!” the secretary interrupted, bitterly.
“Pooh!” Dick cried, craftily. “You aren't plump enough to be sensitive about it. Why, you're just right.” There was something very boyish about his manner, as he caught at the girl's arm. A memory of the days when she had cuddled him caused him to speak warmly, forgetting the presence of his father. “Now, don't be angry, Sadie. Just give me a little kiss, as you used to do.” He swept her into his arms, and his lips met hers in a hearty caress. “There!” he cried. “Just to show there's no ill feeling.”
The girl was completely mollified, though in much embarrassment.
“Why, Mr. Dick!” she stammered, in confusion. “Why, Mr. Dick!”
Gilder, who had watched the scene in great astonishment, now interposed to end it.
“Stop, Dick!” he commanded, crisply. “You are actually making Sarah blush. I think that's about enough, son.”
But a sudden unaccustomed gust of affection swirled in the breast of the lad. Plain Anglo-Saxon as he was, with all that implies as to the avoidance of displays of emotion, nevertheless he had been for a long time in lands far from home, where the habits of impulsive and affectionate peoples were radically unlike our own austerer forms. So now, under the spur of an impulse suggested by the dalliance with the buxom secretary, he grinned widely and went to his father.
“A little kiss never hurts any one,” he declared, blithely. Then he added vivaciously: “Here, I'll show you!”
With the words, he clasped his arms around his father's neck, and, before that amazed gentleman could understand his purpose, he had kissed soundly first the one cheek and then the other, each with a hearty, wholesome smack of filial piety. This done, he stood back, still beaming happily, while the astounded Sarah tittered bewilderedly. For his own part, Dick was quite unashamed. He loved his father. For once, he had expressed that fondness in a primitive fashion, and he was glad.
The older man withdrew a step, and there rested motionless, under the sway of an emotion akin to dismay. He stood staring intently at his son with a perplexity in his expression that was almost ludicrous. When, at last, he spoke, his voice was a rumble of strangely shy pleasure.
“God bless my soul!” he exclaimed, violently. Then he raised a hand, and rubbed first one cheek, and after it its fellow, with a gentleness that was significant. The feeling provoked by the embrace showed plainly in his next words. “Why, that's the first time you have kissed me, Dick, since you were a little boy. God bless my soul!” he repeated. And now there was a note of jubilation.
The son, somewhat disturbed by this emotion he had aroused, nevertheless answered frankly with the expression of his own feeling, as he advanced and laid a hand on his father's shoulder.
“The fact is, Dad,” he said quietly, with a smile that was good to see, “I am awfully glad to see you again.”
“Are you, son?” the father cried happily. Then, abruptly his manner changed, for he felt himself perilously close to the maudlin in this new yielding to sentimentality. Such kisses of tenderness, however agreeable in themselves, were hardly fitting to one of his dignity. “You clear out of here, boy,” he commanded, brusquely. “I'm a working man. But here, wait a minute,” he added. He brought forth from a pocket a neat sheaf of banknotes, which he held out. “There's carfare for you,” he said with a chuckle. “And now clear out. I'll see you at dinner.”
Dick bestowed the money in his pocket, and again turned toward the door.
“You can always get rid of me on the same terms,” he remarked slyly. And then the young man gave evidence that he, too, had some of his father's ability in things financial. For, in the doorway he turned with a final speech, which was uttered in splendid disregard for the packet of money he had just received—perhaps, rather, in a splendid regard for it. “Oh, Dad, please don't forget to give Sadie that five dollars I borrowed from her for the taxi'.” And with that impertinent reminder he was gone.
The owner of the store returned to his labors with a new zest, for the meeting with his son had put him in high spirits. Perhaps it might have been better for Mary Turner had she come to him just then, while he was yet in this softened mood. But fate had ordained that other events should restore him to his usual harder self before their interview. The effect was, indeed, presently accomplished by the advent of Smithson into the office. He entered with an expression of discomfiture on his rather vacuous countenance. He walked almost nimbly to the desk and spoke with evident distress, as his employer looked up interrogatively.
“McCracken has detained—er—a—lady, sir,” he said, feebly. “She has been searched, and we have found about a hundred dollars worth of laces on her.”
“Well?” Gilder demanded, impatiently. Such affairs were too common in the store to make necessary this intrusion of the matter on him. “Why did you come to me about it?” His staff knew just what to do with shoplifters.
At once, Smithson became apologetic, while refusing to retreat.
“I'm very sorry, sir,” he said haltingly, “but I thought it wiser, sir, to—er—to bring the matter to your personal attention.”
“Quite unnecessary, Smithson,” Gilder returned, with asperity. “You know my views on the subject of property. Tell McCracken to have the thief arrested.”
Smithson cleared his throat doubtfully, and in his stress of feeling he even relaxed a trifle that majestical erectness of carriage that had made him so valuable as a floor-walker.
“She's not exactly a—er—a thief,” he ventured.
“You are trifling, Smithson,” the owner of the store exclaimed, in high exasperation. “Not a thief! And you caught her with a hundred dollars worth of laces that she hadn't bought. Not a thief! What in heaven's name do you call her, then?”
“A kleptomaniac,” Smithson explained, retaining his manner of mild insistence. “You see, sir, it's this way. The lady happens to be the wife of J. W. Gaskell, the banker, you know.”
Yes, Gilder did know. The mention of the name was like a spell in the effect it wrought on the attitude of the irritated owner of the store. Instantly, his expression changed. While before his features had been set grimly, while his eyes had flashed wrathfully, there was now only annoyance over an event markedly unfortunate.
“How extremely awkward!” he cried; and there was a very real concern in his voice. He regarded Smithson kindly, whereat that rather puling gentleman once again assumed his martial bearing. “You were quite right in coming to me.” For a moment he was silent, plunged in thought. Finally he spoke with the decisiveness characteristic of him. “Of course, there's nothing we can do. Just put the stuff back on the counter, and let her go.”
But Smithson had not yet wholly unburdened himself. Instead of immediately leaving the room in pursuance of the succinct instructions given him, he again cleared his throat nervously, and made known a further aggravating factor in the situation.
“She's very angry, Mr. Gilder,” he announced, timidly. “She—er—she demands an—er—an apology.”
The owner of the store half-rose from his chair, then threw himself back with an exclamation of disgust. He again ejaculated the words with which he had greeted his son's unexpected kisses, but now there was a vast difference in the intonation.
“God bless my soul!” he cried. From his expression, it was clear that a pious aspiration was farthest from his thought. On the contrary! Again, he fell silent, considering the situation which Smithson had presented, and, as he reflected, his frown betrayed the emotion natural enough under the circumstances. At last, however, he mastered his irritation to some degree, and spoke his command briefly. “Well, Smithson, apologize to her. It can't be helped.” Then his face lighted with a sardonic amusement. “And, Smithson,” he went on with a sort of elephantine playfulness, “I shall take it as a personal favor if you will tactfully advise the lady that the goods at Altman and Stern's are really even finer than ours.”
When Smithson had left the office, Gilder turned to his secretary.
“Take this,” he directed, and he forthwith dictated the following letter to the husband of the lady who was not a thief, as Smithson had so painstakingly pointed out:
“J. W. GASKELL, ESQ.,
“Central National Bank, New York.
“MY DEAR Mr. GASKELL: I feel that I should be doing less than my duty as a man if I did not let you know at once that Mrs. Gaskell is in urgent need of medical attention. She came into our store to-day, and——”
He paused for a moment. “No, put it this way,” he said finally:
“We found her wandering about our store to-day in a very nervous condition. In her excitement, she carried away about one hundred dollars' worth of rare laces. Not recognizing her, our store detective detained her for a short time. Fortunately for us all, Mrs. Gaskell was able to explain who she was, and she has just gone to her home. Hoping for Mrs. Gaskell's speedy recovery, and with all good wishes, I am,
“Yours very truly.”
Yet, though he had completed the letter, Gilder did not at once take up another detail of his business. Instead, he remained plunged in thought, and now his frown was one of simple bewilderment. A number of minutes passed before he spoke, and then his words revealed distinctly what had been his train of meditation.
“Sadie,” he said in a voice of entire sincerity, “I can't understand theft. It's a thing absolutely beyond my comprehension.”
On the heels of this ingenuous declaration, Smithson entered the office, and that excellent gentleman appeared even more perturbed than before.
“What on earth is the matter now?” Gilder spluttered, suspiciously.
“It's Mrs. Gaskell still,” Smithson replied in great trepidation. “She wants you personally, Mr. Gilder, to apologize to her. She says that the action taken against her is an outrage, and she is not satisfied with the apologies of all the rest of us. She says you must make one, too, and that the store detective must be discharged for intolerable insolence.”
Gilder bounced up from his chair angrily.
“I'll be damned if I'll discharge McCracken,” he vociferated, glaring on Smithson, who shrank visibly.
But that mild and meek man had a certain strength of pertinacity. Besides, in this case, he had been having multitudinous troubles of his own, which could be ended only by his employer's placating of the offended kleptomaniac.
“But about the apology, Mr. Gilder,” he reminded, speaking very deferentially, yet with insistence.
Business instinct triumphed over the magnate's irritation, and his face cleared.
“Oh, I'll apologize,” he said with a wry smile of discomfiture. “I'll make things even up a bit when I get an apology from Gaskell. I shrewdly suspect that that estimable gentleman is going to eat humble pie, of my baking, from his wife's recipe. And his will be an honest apology—which mine won't, not by a damned sight!” With the words, he left the room, in his wake a hugely relieved Smithson.
Alone in the office, Sarah neglected her work for a few minutes to brood over the startling contrast of events that had just forced itself on her attention. She was not a girl given to the analysis of either persons or things, but in this instance the movement of affairs had come close to her, and she was compelled to some depth of feeling by the two aspects of life on which to-day she looked. In the one case, as she knew it, a girl under the urge of poverty had stolen. That thief had been promptly arrested, finally she had been tried, had been convicted, had been sentenced to three years in prison. In the other case, a woman of wealth had stolen. There had been no punishment. A euphemism of kleptomania had been offered and accepted as sufficient excuse for her crime. A polite lie had been written to her husband, a banker of power in the city. To her, the proprietor of the store was even now apologizing in courteous phrases of regret.... And Mary Turner had been sentenced to three years in prison. Sadie shook her head in dolorous doubt, as she again bent over the keys of her typewriter. Certainly, some happenings in this world of ours did not seem quite fair.
CHAPTER V. THE VICTIM OF THE LAW.
It was on this same day that Sarah, on one of her numerous trips through the store in behalf of Gilder, was accosted by a salesgirl, whose name, Helen Morris, she chanced to know. It was in a spot somewhere out of the crowd, so that for the moment the two were practically alone. The salesgirl showed signs of embarrassment as she ventured to lay a detaining hand on Sarah's arm, but she maintained her position, despite the secretary's manner of disapproval.
“What on earth do you want?” Sarah inquired, snappishly.
The salesgirl put her question at once.
“What did they do to Mary Turner?”
“Oh, that!” the secretary exclaimed, with increased impatience over the delay, for she was very busy, as always. “You will all know soon enough.”
“Tell me now.” The voice of the girl was singularly compelling; there was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white apron showed ordinarily only insignificant. “Tell me now,” she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to her own surprise.
“They sent her to prison for three years,” she answered, sharply.
“Three years?” The salesgirl had repeated the words in a tone that was indefinable, yet a tone vehement in its incredulous questioning. “Three years?” she said again, as one refusing to believe.
“Yes,” Sarah said, impressed by the girl's earnestness; “three years.”
“Good God!” There was no irreverence in the exclamation that broke from the girl's lips. Instead, only a tense horror that touched to the roots of emotion.
Sarah regarded this display of feeling on the part of the young woman before her with an increasing astonishment. It was not in her own nature to be demonstrative, and such strong expression of emotion as this she deemed rather suspicious. She recalled, in addition, the fact that his was not the first time that Helen Morris had shown a particular interest in the fate of Mary Turner. Sarah wondered why.
“Say,” she demanded, with the directness habitual to her, “why are you so anxious about it? This is the third time you have asked me about Mary Turner. What's it to you, I'd like to know?”
The salesgirl started violently, and a deep flush drove the accustomed pallor from her cheeks. She was obviously much disturbed by the question.
“What is it to me?” she repeated in an effort to gain time. “Why, nothing—nothing at all!” Her expression of distress lightened a little as she hit on an excuse that might serve to justify her interest. “Nothing at all, only—she's a friend of mine, a great friend of mine. Oh, yes!” Then, in an instant, the look of relief vanished, as once again the terrible reality hammered on her consciousness, and an overwhelming dejection showed in the dull eyes and in the drooping curves of the white lips. There was a monotone of desolation as she went on speaking in a whisper meant for the ears of no other. “It's awful—three years! Oh, I didn't understand! It's awful!—awful!” With the final word, she hurried off, her head bowed. She was still murmuring brokenly, incoherently. Her whole attitude was of wondering grief.
Sarah stared after the girl in complete mystification. She could not at first guess any possible cause for an emotion so poignant. Presently, however, her shrewd, though very prosaic, commonsense suggested a simple explanation of the girl's extraordinary distress.
“I'll bet that girl has been tempted to steal. But she didn't, because she was afraid.” With this satisfactory conclusion of her wonderment, the secretary hurried on her way, quite content. It never occurred to her that the girl might have been tempted to steal—and had not resisted the temptation.
It was on account of this brief conversation with the salesgirl that Sarah was thinking intently of Mary Turner, after her return to the office, from which Gilder himself happened to be absent for the moment. As the secretary glanced up at the opening of the door, she did not at first recognize the figure outlined there. She remembered Mary Turner as a tall, slender girl, who showed an underlying vitality in every movement, a girl with a face of regular features, in which was a complexion of blended milk and roses, with a radiant joy of life shining through all her arduous and vulgar conditions. Instead of this, now, she saw a frail form that stood swaying in the opening of the doorway, that bent in a sinister fashion which told of bodily impotence, while the face was quite bloodless. And, too, there was over all else a pall of helplessness—helplessness that had endured much, and must still endure infinitely more.
As a reinforcement of the dread import of that figure of wo, a man stood beside it, and one of his hands was clasped around the girl's wrist, a man who wore his derby hat somewhat far back on his bullet-shaped head, whose feet were conspicuous in shoes with very heavy soles and very square toes.
It was the man who now took charge of the situation. Cassidy, from Headquarters, spoke in a rough, indifferent voice, well suited to his appearance of stolid strength.
“The District Attorney told me to bring this girl here on my way to the Grand Central Station with her.”
Sarah got to her feet mechanically. Somehow, from the raucous notes of the policeman's voice, she understood in a flash of illumination that the pitiful figure there in the doorway was that of Mary Turner, whom she had remembered so different, so frightfully different. She spoke with a miserable effort toward her usual liveliness.
“Mr. Gilder will be right back. Come in and wait.” She wished to say something more, something of welcome or of mourning, to the girl there, but she found herself incapable of a single word for the moment, and could only stand dumb while the man stepped forward, with his charge following helplessly in his clutch.
The two went forward very slowly, the officer, carelessly conscious of his duty, walking with awkward steps to suit the feeble movements of the girl, the girl letting herself be dragged onward, aware of the futility of any resistance to the inexorable power that now had her in its grip, of which the man was the present agent. As the pair came thus falteringly into the center of the room, Sarah at last found her voice for an expression of sympathy.
“I'm sorry, Mary,” she said, hesitatingly. “I'm terribly sorry, terribly sorry!”
The girl, who had halted when the officer halted, as a matter of course, did not look up. She stood still, swaying a little as if from weakness. Her voice was lifeless.
“Are you?” she said. “I did not know. Nobody has been near me the whole time I have been in the Tombs.” There was infinite pathos in the tones as she repeated the words so fraught with dreadfulness. “Nobody has been near me!”
The secretary felt a sudden glow of shame. She realized the justice of that unconscious accusation, for, till to-day, she had had no thought of the suffering girl there in the prison. To assuage remorse, she sought to give evidence as to a prevalent sympathy.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “there was Helen Morris to-day! She has been asking about you again and again. She's all broken up over your trouble.”
But the effort on the secretary's part was wholly without success.
“Who is Helen Morris?” the lifeless voice demanded. There was no interest in the question.
Sarah experienced a momentary astonishment, for she was still remembering the feverish excitement displayed by the salesgirl, who had declared herself to be a most intimate friend of the convict. But the mystery was to remain unsolved, since Gilder now entered the office. He walked with the quick, bustling activity that was ordinarily expressed in his every movement. He paused for an instant, as he beheld the two visitors in the center of the room, then he spoke curtly to the secretary, while crossing to his chair at the desk.
“You may go, Sarah. I will ring when I wish you again.”
There followed an interval of silence, while the secretary was leaving the office and the girl with her warder stood waiting on his pleasure. Gilder cleared his throat twice in an embarrassment foreign to him, before finally he spoke to the girl. At last, the proprietor of the store expressed himself in a voice of genuine sympathy, for the spectacle of wo presented there before his very eyes moved him to a real distress, since it was indeed actual, something that did not depend on an appreciation to be developed out of imagination.
“My girl,” Gilder said gently—his hard voice was softened by an honest regret—“my girl, I am sorry about this.”
“You should be!” came the instant answer. Yet, the words were uttered with a total lack of emotion. It seemed from their intonation that the speaker voiced merely a statement concerning a recondite matter of truth, with which sentiment had nothing whatever to do. But the effect on the employer was unfortunate. It aroused at once his antagonism against the girl. His instinct of sympathy with which he had greeted her at the outset was repelled, and made of no avail. Worse, it was transformed into an emotion hostile to the one who thus offended him by rejection of the well-meant kindliness of his address
“Come, come!” he exclaimed, testily. “That's no tone to take with me.”
“Why? What sort of tone do you expect me to take?” was the retort in the listless voice. Yet, now, in the dullness ran a faint suggestion of something sinister.
“I expected a decent amount of humility from one in your position,” was the tart rejoinder of the magnate.
Life quickened swiftly in the drooping form of the girl. Her muscles tensed. She stood suddenly erect, in the vigor of her youth again. Her face lost in the same second its bleakness of pallor. The eyes opened widely, with startling abruptness, and looked straight into those of the man who had employed her.
“Would you be humble,” she demanded, and now her voice was become softly musical, yet forbidding, too, with a note of passion, “would you be humble if you were going to prison for three years—for something you didn't do?”
There was anguish in the cry torn from the girl's throat in the sudden access of despair. The words thrilled Gilder beyond anything that he had supposed possible in such case. He found himself in this emergency totally at a loss, and moved in his chair doubtfully, wishing to say something, and quite unable. He was still seeking some question, some criticism, some rebuke, when he was unfeignedly relieved to hear the policeman's harsh voice.
“Don't mind her, sir,” Cassidy said. He meant to make his manner very reassuring. “They all say that. They are innocent, of course! Yep—they all say it. It don't do 'em any good, but just the same they all swear they're innocent. They keep it up to the very last, no matter how right they've been got.”
The voice of the girl rang clear. There was a note of insistence that carried a curious dignity of its own. The very simplicity of her statement might have had a power to convince one who listened without prejudice, although the words themselves were of the trite sort that any protesting criminal might utter.
“I tell you, I didn't do it!”
Gilder himself felt the surge of emotion that swung through these moments, but he would not yield to it. With his lack of imagination, he could not interpret what this time must mean to the girl before him. Rather, he merely deemed it his duty to carry through this unfortunate affair with a scrupulous attention to detail, in the fashion that had always been characteristic of him during the years in which he had steadily mounted from the bottom to the top.
“What's the use of all this pretense?” he demanded, sharply. “You were given a fair trial, and there's an end of it.”
The girl, standing there so feebly, seeming indeed to cling for support to the man who always held her thus closely by the wrist, spoke again with an astonishing clearness, even with a sort of vivacity, as if she explained easily something otherwise in doubt.
“Oh, no, I wasn't!” she contradicted bluntly, with a singular confidence of assertion. “Why, if the trial had been fair, I shouldn't be here.”
The harsh voice of Cassidy again broke in on the passion of the girl with a professional sneer.
“That's another thing they all say.”
But the girl went on speaking fiercely, impervious to the man's coarse sarcasm, her eyes, which had deepened almost to purple, still fixed piercingly on Gilder, who, for some reason wholly inexplicable to him, felt himself strangely disturbed under that regard.
“Do you call it fair when the lawyer I had was only a boy—one whom the court told me to take, a boy trying his first case—my case, that meant the ruin of my life? My lawyer! Why, he was just getting experience—getting it at my expense!” The girl paused as if exhausted by the vehemence of her emotion, and at last the sparkling eyes drooped and the heavy lids closed over them. She swayed a little, so that the officer tightened his clasp on her wrist.
There followed a few seconds of silence. Then Gilder made an effort to shake off the feeling that had so possessed him, and to a certain degree he succeeded.
“The jury found you guilty,” he asserted, with an attempt to make his voice magisterial in its severity.
Instantly, Mary was aroused to a new outburst of protest. Once again, her eyes shot their fires at the man seated behind the desk, and she went forward a step imperiously, dragging the officer in her wake.
“Yes, the jury found me guilty,” she agreed, with fine scorn in the musical cadences of her voice. “Do you know why? I can tell you, Mr. Gilder. It was because they had been out for three hours without reaching a decision. The evidence didn't seem to be quite enough for some of them, after all. Well, the judge threatened to lock them up all night. The men wanted to get home. The easy thing to do was to find me guilty, and let it go at that. Was that fair, do you think? And that's not all, either. Was it fair of you, Mr. Gilder? Was it fair of you to come to the court this morning, and tell the judge that I should be sent to prison as a warning to others?”
A quick flush burned on the massive face of the man whom she thus accused, and his eyes refused to meet her steady gaze of reproach.
“You know!” he exclaimed, in momentary consternation. Again, her mood had affected his own, so that through a few hurrying seconds he felt himself somehow guilty of wrong against this girl, so frank and so rebuking.
“I heard you in the courtroom,” she said. “The dock isn't very far from the bench where you spoke to the judge about my case. Yes, I heard you. It wasn't: Did I do it? Or, didn't I do it? No; it was only that I must be made a warning to others.”
Again, silence fell for a tense interval. Then, finally, the girl spoke in a different tone. Where before her voice had been vibrant with the instinct of complaint against the mockery of justice under which she suffered, now there was a deeper note, that of most solemn truth.
“Mr. Gilder,” she said simply, “as God is my judge, I am going to prison for three years for something I didn't do.”
But the sincerity of her broken cry fell on unheeding ears. The coarse nature of the officer had long ago lost whatever elements of softness there might have been to develop in a gentler occupation. As for the owner of the store, he was not sufficiently sensitive to feel the verity in the accents of the speaker. Moreover, he was a man who followed the conventional, with never a distraction due to imagination and sympathy. Just now, too, he was experiencing a keen irritation against himself because of the manner in which he had been sensible to the influence of her protestation, despite his will to the contrary. That irritation against himself only reacted against the girl, and caused him to steel his heart to resist any tendency toward commiseration. So, this declaration of innocence was made quite in vain—indeed, served rather to strengthen his disfavor toward the complainant, and to make his manner harsher when she voiced the pitiful question over which she had wondered and grieved.
“Why did you ask the judge to send me to prison?”
“The thieving that has been going on in this store for over a year has got to stop,” Gilder answered emphatically, with all his usual energy of manner restored. As he spoke, he raised his eyes and met the girl's glance fairly. Thought of the robberies was quite enough to make him pitiless toward the offender.
“Sending me to prison won't stop it,” Mary Turner said, drearily.
“Perhaps not,” Gilder sternly retorted. “But the discovery and punishment of the other guilty ones will.” His manner changed to a business-like alertness. “You sent word to me that you could tell me how to stop the thefts in the store. Well, my girl, do this, and, while I can make no definite promise, I'll see what can be done about getting you out of your present difficulty.” He picked up a pencil, pulled a pad of blank paper convenient to his hand, and looked at the girl expectantly, with aggressive inquiry in his gaze. “Tell me now,” he concluded, “who were your pals?”
The matter-of-fact manner of this man who had unwittingly wronged her so frightfully was the last straw on the girl's burden of suffering. Under it, her patient endurance broke, and she cried out in a voice of utter despair that caused Gilder to start nervously, and even impelled the stolid officer to a frown of remonstrance.
“I have no pals!” she ejaculated, furiously. “I never stole anything in my life. Must I go on telling you over and over again?” Her voice rose in a wail of misery. “Oh, why won't any one believe me?”
Gilder was much offended by this display of an hysterical grief, which seemed to his phlegmatic temperament altogether unwarranted by the circumstances. He spoke decisively.
“Unless you can control yourself, you must go.” He pushed away the pad of paper, and tossed the pencil aside in physical expression of his displeasure. “Why did you send that message, if you have nothing to say?” he demanded, with increasing choler.
But now the girl had regained her former poise. She stood a little drooping and shaken, where for a moment she had been erect and tensed. There was a vast weariness in her words as she answered.
“I have something to tell you, Mr. Gilder,” she said, quietly. “Only, I—I sort of lost my grip on the way here, with this man by my side.”
“Most of 'em do, the first time,” the officer commented, with a certain grim appreciation.
“Well?” Gilder insisted querulously, as the girl hesitated.
At once, Mary went on speaking, and now a little increase of vigor trembled in her tones.
“When you sit in a cell for three months waiting for your trial, as I did, you think a lot. And, so, I got the idea that if I could talk to you, I might be able to make you understand what's really wrong. And if I could do that, and so help out the other girls, what has happened to me would not, after all, be quite so awful—so useless, somehow.” Her voice lowered to a quick pleading, and she bent toward the man at the desk. “Mr. Gilder,” she questioned, “do you really want to stop the girls from stealing?”
“Most certainly I do,” came the forcible reply.
The girl spoke with a great earnestness, deliberately.
“Then, give them a fair chance.”
The magnate stared in sincere astonishment over this absurd, this futile suggestion for his guidance.
“What do you mean?” he vociferated, with rising indignation. There was an added hostility in his demeanor, for it seemed to him that this thief of his goods whom he had brought to justice was daring to trifle with him. He grew wrathful over the suspicion, but a secret curiosity still held his temper within bounds “What do you mean?” he repeated; and now the full force of his strong voice set the room trembling.
The tones of the girl came softly musical, made more delicately resonant to the ear by contrast with the man's roaring.
“Why,” she said, very gently, “I mean just this: Give them a living chance to be honest.”
“A living chance!” The two words were exploded with dynamic violence. The preposterousness of the advice fired Gilder with resentment so pervasive that through many seconds he found himself unable to express the rage that flamed within him.
The girl showed herself undismayed by his anger.
“Yes,” she went on, quietly; “that's all there is to it. Give them a living chance to get enough food to eat, and a decent room to sleep in, and shoes that will keep their feet off the pavement winter mornings. Do you think that any girl wants to steal? Do you think that any girl wants to risk——?”
By this time, however, Gilder had regained his powers of speech, and he interrupted stormily.
“And is this what you have taken up my time for? You want to make a maudlin plea for guilty, dishonest girls, when I thought you really meant to bring me facts.”
Nevertheless, Mary went on with her arraignment uncompromisingly. There was a strange, compelling energy in her inflections that penetrated even the pachydermatous officer, so that, though he thought her raving, he let her rave on, which was not at all his habit of conduct, and did indeed surprise him mightily. As for Gilder, he felt helpless in some puzzling fashion that was totally foreign to his ordinary self. He was still glowing with wrath over the method by which he had been victimized into giving the girl a hearing. Yet, despite his chagrin, he realized that he could not send her from him forthwith. By some inexplicable spell she bound him impotent.
“We work nine hours a day,” the quiet voice went on, a curious pathos in the rich timbre of it; “nine hours a day, for six days in the week. That's a fact, isn't it? And the trouble is, an honest girl can't live on six dollars a week. She can't do it, and buy food and clothes, and pay room-rent and carfare. That's another fact, isn't it?”
Mary regarded the owner of the store with grave questioning in her violet eyes. Under the urgency of emotion, color crept into the pallid cheeks, and now her face was very beautiful—so beautiful, indeed, that for a little the charm of its loveliness caught the man's gaze, and he watched her with a new respect, born of appreciation for her feminine delightfulness. The impression was far too brief. Gilder was not given to esthetic raptures over women. Always, the business instinct was the dominant. So, after the short period of amazed admiration over such unexpected winsomeness, his thoughts flew back angrily to the matters whereof she spoke so ridiculously.
“I don't care to discuss these things,” he declared peremptorily, as the girl remained silent for a moment.
“And I have no wish to discuss anything,” Mary returned evenly. “I only want to give you what you asked for—facts.” A faint smile of reminiscence curved the girl's lips. “When they first locked me up,” she explained, without any particular evidence of emotion, “I used to sit and hate you.”
“Oh, of course!” came the caustic exclamation from Gilder.
“And then, I thought that perhaps you did not understand,” Mary continued; “that, if I were to tell you how things really are, it might be you would change them somehow.”
At this ingenuous statement, the owner of the store gave forth a gasp of sheer stupefaction.
“I!” he cried, incredulously. “I change my business policy because you ask me to!”
There was something imperturbable in the quality of the voice as the girl went resolutely forward with her explanation. It was as if she were discharging a duty not to be gainsaid, not to be thwarted by any difficulty, not even the realization that all the effort must be ultimately in vain.
“Do you know how we girls live?—but, of course, you don't. Three of us in one room, doing our own cooking over the two-burner gas-stove, and our own washing and ironing evenings, after being on our feet for nine hours.”
The enumeration of the sordid details left the employer absolutely unmoved, since he lacked the imagination necessary to sympathize actually with the straining evil of a life such as the girl had known. Indeed, he spoke with an air of just remonstrance, as if the girl's charges were mischievously faulty.
“I have provided chairs behind the counters,” he stated.
There was no especial change in the girl's voice as she answered his defense. It continued musically low, but there was in it the insistent note of sincerity.
“But have you ever seen a girl sitting in one of them?” she questioned, coldly. “Please answer me. Have you? Of course not,” she said, after a little pause during which the owner had remained silent. She shook her head in emphatic negation. “And do you understand why? It's simply because every girl knows that the manager of her department would think he could get along without her, if he were to see her sitting down ——loafing, you know! So, she would be discharged. All it amounts to is that, after being on her feet for nine hours, the girl usually walks home, in order to save carfare. Yes, she walks, whether sick or well. Anyhow, you are generally so tired, it don't make much difference which you are.”
Gilder was fuming under these strictures, which seemed to him altogether baseless attacks on himself. His exasperation steadily waxed against the girl, a convicted felon, who thus had the audacity to beard him.
“What has all this to do with the question of theft in the store?” he rumbled, huffily. “That was the excuse for your coming here. And, instead of telling me something, you rant about gas-stoves and carfare.”
The inexorable voice went on in its monotone, as if he had not spoken.
“And, when you are really sick, and have to stop work, what are you going to do then? Do you know, Mr. Gilder, that the first time a straight girl steals, it's often because she had to have a doctor—or some luxury like that? And some of them do worse than steal. Yes, they do—girls that started straight, and wanted to stay that way. But, of course, some of them get so tired of the whole grind that—that——”
The man who was the employer of hundreds concerning whom these grim truths were uttered, stirred uneasily in his chair, and there came a touch of color into the healthy brown of his cheeks as he spoke his protest.
“I'm not their guardian. I can't watch over them after they leave the store. They are paid the current rate of wages—as much as any other store pays.” As he spoke, the anger provoked by this unexpected assault on him out of the mouth of a convict flamed high in virtuous repudiation. “Why,” he went on vehemently, “no man living does more for his employees than I do. Who gave the girls their fine rest-rooms upstairs? I did! Who gave them the cheap lunch-rooms? I did!”
“But you won't pay them enough to live on!” The very fact that the words were spoken without any trace of rancor merely made this statement of indisputable truth obnoxious to the man, who was stung to more savage resentment in asserting his impugned self-righteousness.
“I pay them the same as the other stores do,” he repeated, sullenly.
Yet once again, the gently cadenced voice gave answer, an answer informed with that repulsive insistence to the man who sought to resist her indictment of him.
“But you won't pay them enough to live on.” The simple lucidity of the charge forbade direct reply.
Gilder betook himself to evasion by harking back to the established ground of complaint.
“And, so, you claim that you were forced to steal. That's the plea you make for yourself and your friends.”
“I wasn't forced to steal,” came the answer, spoken in the monotone that had marked her utterance throughout most of the interview. “I wasn't forced to steal, and I didn't steal. But, all the same, that's the plea, as you call it, that I'm making for the other girls. There are hundreds of them who steal because they don't get enough to eat. I said I would tell you how to stop the stealing. Well, I have done it. Give the girls a fair chance to be honest. You asked me for the names, Mr. Gilder. There's only one name on which to put the blame for the whole business—and that name is Edward Gilder!... Now, won't you do something about it?”
At that naked question, the owner of the store jumped up from his chair, and stood glowering at the girl who risked a request so full of vituperation against himself.
“How dare you speak to me like this?” he thundered.
There was no disconcertion exhibited by the one thus challenged. On the contrary, she repeated her question with a simple dignity that still further outraged the man.
“Won't you, please, do something about it?”
“How dare you?” he shouted again. Now, there was stark wonder in his eyes as he put the question.
“Why, I dared,” Mary Turner explained, “because you have done all the harm you can to me. And, now, I'm trying to give you the chance to do better by the others. You ask me why I dare. I have a right to dare! I have been straight all my life. I have wanted decent food and warm clothes, and—a little happiness, all the time I have worked for you, and I have gone without those things, just to stay straight.... The end of it all is: You are sending me to prison for something I didn't do. That's why I dare!”
Cassidy, the officer in charge of Mary Turner, had stood patiently beside her all this while, always holding her by the wrist. He had been mildly interested in the verbal duel between the big man of the department store and this convict in his own keeping. Vaguely, he had marveled at the success of the frail girl in declaiming of her injuries before the magnate. He had felt no particular interest beyond that, merely looking on as one might at any entertaining spectacle. The question at issue was no concern of his. His sole business was to take the girl away when the interview should be ended. It occurred to him now that this might, in fact, be the time to depart. It seemed, indeed, that the insistent reiteration of the girl had at last left he owner of the store quite powerless to answer. It was possible, then, that it were wiser the girl should be removed. With the idea in mind, he stared inquiringly at Gilder until he caught that flustered gentleman's eye. A nod from the magnate sufficed him. Gilder, in truth, could not trust himself just then to an audible command. He was seriously disturbed by the gently spoken truths that had issued from the girl's lips. He was not prepared with any answer, though he hotly resented every word of her accusation. So, when he caught the question in the glance of the officer, he felt a guilty sensation of relief as he signified an affirmative by his gesture.
Cassidy faced about, and in his movement there was a tug at the wrist of the girl that set her moving toward the door. Her realization of what this meant was shown in her final speech.
“Oh, he can take me now,” she said, bitterly. Then her voice rose above the monotone that had contented her hitherto. Into the music of her tones beat something sinister, evilly vindictive, as she faced about at the doorway to which Cassidy had led her. Her face, as she scrutinized once again the man at the desk, was coldly malignant.
“Three years isn't forever,” she said, in a level voice. “When I come out, you are going to pay for every minute of them, Mr. Gilder. There won't be a day or an hour that I won't remember that at the last it was your word sent me to prison. And you are going to pay me for that. You are going to pay me for the five years I have starved making money for you—that, too! You are going to pay me for all the things I am losing today, and——”
The girl thrust forth her left hand, on that side where stood the officer. So vigorous was her movement that Cassidy's clasp was thrown off the wrist. But the bond between the two was not broken, for from wrist to wrist showed taut the steel chain of the manacles. The girl shook the links of the handcuffs in a gesture stronger than words. In her final utterance to the agitated man at the desk, there was a cold threat, a prophecy of disaster. From the symbol of her degradation, she looked to the man whose action had placed it there. In the clashing of their glances, hers won the victory, so that his eyes fell before the menace in hers.
“You are going to pay me for this!” she said. Her voice was little more than a whisper, but it was loud in the listener's heart. “Yes, you are going to pay—for this!”