- -
- 100%
- +
At last the success he had prayed for – striven for – given up – had come!
He turned northward, to carry the news to Helen. A suggestion of hers flashed into his mind: the book might help pay his debt to the Mission. Obeying impulse he walked into a bank he was at the instant passing, and when he came out there was in an inner coat pocket a draft for two hundred dollars made out to the Reverend Joseph Franklin.
All the way to Helen's door there was no pavement beneath his feet. When he had called here the last time – the time he had read her part of the story; he was a shabby creature then – he had borne himself very humbly toward the footman. Now he asked for Helen with a buoyant ring in his voice and fairly flung his coat and hat upon the astonished servant; and he bowed with a new dignity to Helen's aunt, Mrs. Bosworth, whom he met on the stairway.
Helen met him at the drawing-room door. "I can read the news in your face!" she cried. "I'm so glad!"
He laughed joyously as he caught her hand. "Yes, Mr. Osborne took it!"
"I knew he would! And he likes it? Tell me – how does he like it?"
"You must ask him. But – he likes it!"
"Immensely – I'm certain! Come, you must tell me all!"
They sat down and David told her of his half-hour with Mr. Osborne. Since receiving her note that morning he had not once thought of the end of their last meeting. If he had, and had been aware of the pain that meeting had brought her, he would have marvelled at the ease with which she threw her misery aside for the sake of a mere friend, a dishonoured friend. But he did not wonder; he just drank recklessly of this glorious draught, compounded of her praise and her joy in his joy.
At the end he told her of the three hundred dollars – never thinking that it was barely more than the price of the simple-looking gown she wore, that it was but a penny to the rich furnishings of the drawing-room, that it was her father's income for perhaps less than a quarter of a business hour. And completely abandoned to the boyish happiness that forced him to share everything, he told her of the draft for two hundred dollars.
Her face shadowed; this man, who was paying back, had suddenly brought to mind her father, who was not paying back. But quickly a deep glow came into her eyes.
"You should be as proud of this as of any of the rest," she said.
She gazed at him thoughtfully, her head slightly nodding. "Yes – you are going to win all you started out to win," she went on, her low voice vibrating with belief. "You are going to clear your name; you are going to achieve a personal success; you are going to carry out your dream to help save the human waste. Yes, you are going to do it all."
His success, her words, the glowing sincerity in her brown eyes, swept him to the heights of exaltation. Suddenly his love made another of its trials to burst from him.
He leaned toward her. "And there's something else to tell you."
"Yes?"
But he did not go on. Instantly his love was being fought back. Exalted though he was, the old compelling reasons for silence had rushed into him.
"Yes? What is it?" she asked.
He swallowed hard. "Some other time," he said.
"When the time comes, I shall be glad to hear it."
He looked into her steady eyes, and saw she had no guess of what the thing might be.
"When the time comes – I shall tell," he said. But in his heart was no belief that time would ever come.
CHAPTER III
HELEN'S CONSCIENCE
When David reached home he found the Mayor had just brought over Rogers's lunch and Kate, with the help of Tom, was arranging it on the table. He threw his happiness among them in a score of words.
The Mayor stepped forward, his face ruddied with a smile. "Friend, put 'er there!" invited his gruff diaphragm, and David put his hand to bed in the big, mattress-soft palm. "Well, sir, I'm certainly happy – that's me! On the level, when I first heard you were tryin' to write a book, said I to myself, private-like, 'he'd better be makin' tidies.' But you're the goods, friend! Every man and woman on the Avenue has got to buy one o' your books, you bet!"
"Say, pard, you're certainly it!" cried Tom, who had seized him from the other side. "Dat puts you on top – way up where you belongs. An' no more worryin' about de coin!"
"I'm glad too, – you know that, Aldrich!" said Rogers, grasping David's hand. Rogers's face was drawn; David's success had freshened, emphasised, his own failure. "I wish both of us could have pulled out. But if only one of us could, it's best that that one is you. I'm glad, Aldrich!"
David felt the pain behind Rogers's words, felt their pathos, and he suddenly was ashamed of his success. "It's because I was doing something where the world did not have to trust me," he said apologetically.
"It's because you are the exceptional man, doing the exceptional thing. They have a chance. The others have not."
Kate had not moved since David had announced his good fortune. She stood with her hands on the table and leaning slightly against it, her white, strained face fastened on David. "I'm glad, too," she now said, in a voice that had a trace of tremolo; and, turning abruptly, she went into the office.
In there, alone, she sat at her desk with her cheeks in her hands. Soon, with a little burst of despair, she cried out: "Why did this have to happen!" And she added, with a moan: "Oh, David, this puts you such a long ways off!"
That afternoon and evening David could settle to nothing; and that night he slept not a minute for sweeping joy, for flashing ideas for stories, for swift, vivid visions of the future.
The next morning he had a note from Helen asking him to call in the afternoon. "You remember my speaking to you about the check for twenty thousand dollars my father gave me," she said, when he had come. Her face was pale and she spoke with an effort. "I've decided what to do with it. I want you to help me."
"If I can," he said.
"I've been thinking a great deal about Mr. Rogers." She paused, then went on, her voice more strained. "He should not have lost that money. I have cashed the check. I want to give the money to Mr. Rogers – not as a gift, but as property that belongs to him."
He looked wonderingly into her pained eyes. "You're in earnest?" he said slowly.
"I am – I must do it. And I want you to take the money to him, from" – she obeyed a sudden instinct of blood-loyalty – "from my father."
His anger against her father suddenly flamed up. "From your father? I know how much your father knows of this plan!"
She went on as if she had not heard him, though she had quivered at his words. "I want you to take the money to Mr. Rogers. You will know what to say."
The full significance of what she had said was just dawning upon him. He gazed at her, wondering what must have been passing in her mind these last few days.
"Mr. Rogers is very proud," he said. "He'll not take the money – at least not from me."
"You're certain?"
"From me – never."
"Then I must take it to him myself." She rose. "I'll be ready in a few minutes. You must go with me."
He rose also. Her white face, that met his so squarely, told him how deeply she felt, how strong her determination was.
"Yes, I'll go with you," he said.
When she re-entered the library she was dressed in the suit of autumn brown and the brown hat with its single rose, which she had worn the day they had met at St. Christopher's. He knew she felt the matter of her errand too keenly to speak of it, and too absorbingly to speak of anything else; and so, in silence, they went out into the street.
Half an hour later they entered Rogers's office. "Just wait a minute, while I tell him you're here," whispered David, and went into the living room where Rogers was. Presently he brought her in, introduced her to Rogers, and withdrew.
Helen had never seen Rogers. Her picture of him was purely of the imagination, and imagination had put in its vague portrait the hard lines, the hang-dog look, the surly bearing that might well remain with a reformed criminal. So she was totally unprepared for the slight figure with the wasted, intellectual face that rose from an easy-chair by the air-shaft window, and for the easy gesture and even voice with which he asked her to be seated. She recognised instantly that to make him accept the money would prove a harder task than she had counted.
"Thank you," she said, and sitting down she studied Rogers's face for the moment she was adjusting her faculties to the new difficulty. "Did Mr. Aldrich tell you why I wished to see you?"
"No." He would be courteous to her for the sake of the request David had made to him, but his hatred of her father allowed him only a monosyllabic reply.
To speak words that would show warm sympathy for him and no disloyalty to her father, this was her problem. "Mr. Aldrich has told me of your land enterprise and how – it failed," she said with a great effort, feeling that her words were cold and ineffective. "He told me how you lost a large sum that you had practically gained. He told me that it was – my father – who made you lose it."
Her first effort would carry her no further. He nodded.
She clutched the arms of her chair, breathed deeply, and drove herself on. "You should not have lost it. I have come to bring you – to ask you to let me return to you" – a brown-gloved hand drew a roll of bills from the bag in her lap "this money that belongs to you."
She held the elastic-bound roll out to him. His interlocked hands did not move from his lap.
"I don't just understand," he said slowly. "You mean that this money is the equivalent of what I should have made in the land deal?"
"Yes."
His face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her.
"Do you think I can take as a gift that which I honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice.
"But it is not offered as a gift. It is restitution."
"Restitution! So you want to make restitution? Can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? My good name was built on deception, but I had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. Can you restore my good name? I've lost everything! Can you restore everything?"
The ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her – all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. Before, she had sympathised with Rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes.
Her words rushed from her, in them the throb of her heart. "No! No! I can't give them back – no one can. Oh, what a wrong it was!"
He stared at her. The wrath and bitterness on his face slowly gave place to surprise.
"Oh, but it was a shame!" she cried, her face aflame, her voice aquiver. And then a sense of the irretrievableness of this wreck laid hold upon her and a quick sob broke forth. She felt a sympathetic agony for Rogers, and an agony that she, through her blood, was the cause of his wrecked life.
"Oh, it was terrible, terrible! You are right! Restitution cannot be made – only the pitiful restitution of money. But you must let me make that – you must!"
He felt that he was speaking to a friend, and it was as to a friend that he said quietly: "I can't."
"But you must!" She was now thinking of but one thing, how to force him to take the bills. "I'm not doing you a favour. I'm asking a favour from you. I come to you in humility, contrition. The money I bring is not my money – it is your money. My father entered your house and took it; I bring it back to you. You merely accept your own. You see that, don't you? Surely you see that!"
Rogers did not answer at once. He was so dazed by the rush of her words – words that sprang from complete sympathy and understanding, words that might have come from his own heart – that he could not.
She had risen and now stood above him. "You understand, don't you?" she went on imploringly. "My father has done wrong; I feel it just as though I had done it. I must repair the wrong as far as I can. You must take this money for my sake, don't you see?"
He rose and started to speak, but she cut him off. "I know what is in your heart; your pride wants you to refuse. If you refuse, you do only one thing: you deny me the relief of partially correcting a wrong. That is all. Is it right for you to deny me that? Will you yourself not be doing a wrong?"
He was trembling; she had taken the only road to his consent. But he made no motion toward the money in her outstretched hand.
"For my sake – I beg you – I implore you." She spoke tremulously, simply.
He held out a thin hand, and she laid the money in it. "For your sake," he breathed.
"Thank you," she said.
Helen felt herself growing weak and dizzy. The reaction was setting in. "I must go. I can't ask you to forgive me – but won't you let me, as one that would like to be regarded as a friend, wish that there may be brightness ahead which you don't see."
She held out her hand, timidly. He grasped it. He could not speak.
"Thank you," she whispered, and slowly turned away. At the door she paused, and looked back. "My best wishes are with you," she said, and went out.
CHAPTER IV
THE ORDEAL OF KATE MORGAN
That night David and Rogers had a long talk. In consequence, correspondence was re-opened with the sanitarium at Colorado Springs, and David began to spend part of his time in helping equip Rogers for the distant struggle against death.
During the two weeks since his exposure Rogers had not railed; he had borne his defeat in grim, quiet despair. His bitterness did not now depart; he had not forgotten his defeat, and he had not forgiven the world. But his life now had an object, and the hope, which the really brave always save from even the worst wreck, began to stir within him.
The next two weeks David worked with his pen as he had never worked before. He was in that rare mood when things flow from one. Before the end of the two weeks he turned in to Mr. Osborne two short stories which Mr. Osborne, with the despatch a publisher gives a new author he is desirous of holding, immediately examined, accepted and paid for at a very respectable rate. Mr. Osborne suggested a series of articles for his magazine, spoke of more stories, assured David he would have no difficulty in marketing his writing elsewhere; and when David left the publisher's office it was with the exultant sense that financially his future was secure.
Mr. Osborne assured him his book was going to turn much serious thought to our treatment of the criminal and other wasted people, and that his shorter writings were going to help to the same end. His publisher asked him to speak before a club interested in reform measures, and his talk, straight from the heart and out of his own experience, made a profound impression. The success of this speech suggested to him another means of helping – the spoken word. He felt that at last his life was really beginning to count.
But he realised he was still only at the beginning. Before him was that giant's task, conquering the respect of the world – with the repayment of St. Christopher's as the first step. The task would require all his mind and strength and courage and patience, for years and years and years – with success at the end no more than doubtful.
The more David pondered upon the ills he saw about him, the less faith did he have in superficial reforms, the deeper did he find himself going for the real cure. And gradually he reached the conclusion that the idea behind the present organization of society was wrong. That idea, stripped to its fundamentals, was selfishness – and even a mistaken selfishness: for self to gain for self all that could be gained. Under this organization they that have the greatest chance are they that are strong and cunning and unscrupulous, and he that is all three in greatest measure can take most for himself. So long as the world and its people are at the mercy of such an organization, so long as self-interest is the dominant ideal – just so long will the great mass of the people be in poverty, just so long will crime and vice remain unchecked.
He began to think of a new organization of society, where individual selfishness would be replaced as the fundamental idea by the interest of the whole people – where "all men are born free and equal" would not be merely a handsome bit of rhetoric, but where there would be true equality of chance – where the development of the individual in the truest, highest sense would be possible – where that major portion of vice and crime which spring from poverty and its ills would be wiped out, and there would remain only the vice and crime that spring from the instincts of a gradually improving human nature. And so, without losing interest in immediate changes that might alleviate criminal-making conditions, David set his eyes definitely upon the great goal of a fundamental change.
Since Rogers would soon be gone, David began to look for new quarters. His pride shrunk from a boarding-house, where he knew he would be liable to snubs and insults. As money matters troubled him no longer, he leased a small flat with a bright southern exposure, in an apartment house just outside the poorer quarter. If he and Tom prepared most of their own meals they could live here more cheaply than in a boarding-house, and he could save more to quiet Lillian Drew and to pay off the debt to St. Christopher's.
One afternoon, while David was at the Pan-American talking to the Mayor, and Kate was at her desk type-writing a manuscript, the office door opened and closed, and a low, satiric voice rasped across the room:
"Hello, little girl!"
Kate looked about, then quickly rose. Her cheeks sprang aflame. At the door stood Lillian Drew, smiling mockingly, her face flushed with spirits.
"Hello, little girl!" she repeated.
Kate's instinctive hatred of this woman, founded partly on what Lillian Drew obviously was, but more on the certainty that she had some close and secret connection with David's life, made Kate tremble. A year before the wrathful words that besought to pass her lips would have burst forth unchecked. But she controlled herself.
"What do you want?" she demanded.
To pain a person who stirred her antagonism, this twenty uncurbed years had made one of Lillian Drew's first instincts. She had observed before that Kate disliked her and stung under her "little girl;" consequently to inflict her presence and the phrase on Kate was to gratify instinct.
She walked with a slight unsteadiness to David's chair, sat down and smiled baitingly up into Kate's face. "I've just come around to have a visit with you, little girl. Sit down."
Kate grew rigid. "If you want Mr. Aldrich, he's not here."
"Oh, yes, he is. But I don't want him just yet. I want to have a visit with you." She looked Kate up and down. "Well, now, for such a little girl, you're not so bad."
Kate's eyes blazed. "I tell you he's not here. There's no use of your waiting."
"I'm in no hurry at all. But you're too thin. You've got to put on ten or fifteen pounds if you expect to catch his eye."
Kate pointed to the door. "Get out of here! – with that breath of yours!"
The vindictive fire gathered in Lillian Drew's eyes; the return blow of her victim had roused her pain-giving desire into wrath.
"Oh, you want to catch him, all right!" she laughed, malignantly. "I saw that in a second the other day from the way you looked at him. But d'you think he'll care for a girl like you? I came the other day and found no one around but that nice father of yours. I had a little talk with him, and – well, I've got you sized up just about right. And you think you're the girl for him!"
Kate took one step forward and drew back her open hand. But the hand paused in mid-blow. "You drunken she-devil!" she blazed forth, "get out of here! – or I'll have the police put you out!"
Lillian Drew sprang up, as livid as if the hand had indeed cracked upon her cheek, and glared at the flame of hatred and wrath that was Kate Morgan. Rage, abetted by liquor, had taken away every thought, every desire, save to strike this girl down. Her hands clenched; but blows make only a passing hurt. All her life she had used words; words, if you have the right sort, are a better weapon – their wound is deep, permanent.
"You little skinny alley-cat!" she burst out furiously. "You think you're going to marry him, don't you. You marry him! Oh, Lord!"
Kate shivered with her passion. "Get out!"
Lillian Drew gave a sharp, crunching, gloating laugh. "That's it! – you think you're going to marry him. You think he's a thief, don't you. You think you're in his class. Well – let me tell you something."
She drew close to Kate and her eyes burned upon Kate with wild vindictive triumph. "He's not a thief – he never was one!"
"It's a lie!" cried Kate.
"Oh, he says he is, but he's not. He never took that five thousand dollars from St. Christopher's. He pretends he did, but he didn't. You hear that, little girl? – he didn't. Phil Morton took it. I know, because I got it. – D'you understand now? – that he's not a thief? – that he's ten thousand miles above you? And yet you, you skinny little nothing, you've got the nerve to think you're going to catch him! Oh, Lord!"
"You're drunker than I thought!" sneered Kate.
"If it wasn't true, d'you suppose he'd be paying me to keep still about it?"
"Pay you to keep still about his not being a thief! And you want me to believe that too?" Kate laughed with contempt. Then she inquired solicitously: "Would you like a bucket of water over you to sober you a bit?"
At this moment the hall door opened and David entered the room. He paused in astonishment. "What's the matter?" he asked sharply.
The two had turned at his entrance, and, their faces ablaze with anger, were now glaring at him. Kate was the first to speak, and her words tingled with her wrath.
"Nothing. Only this charming lady friend of yours – don't come too near her breath! – has been telling me that you didn't take the money from the Mission – that Mr. Morton did – that she got it – that you're paying her not to tell that you're innocent."
The colour slowly faded from David's face. He held his eyes a moment on Kate's infuriate figure, and then he gazed at Lillian Drew. She gazed back at him defiantly, but the thought that her betrayal of the secret might cut off her supplies began to cool her anger. David thought only of the one great fact that the truth had at last come out; and finally he exclaimed, almost stupidly, more in astoundment than wrath:
"So this's how you've kept it secret!"
Kate paled. Her eyes widened and her lips fell apart. She caught herself against her desk and stared at him.
"So – it's the truth!" she whispered with dry lips.
But David did not hear her. His attention was all pointed at Lillian Drew. "This is the way you've kept it, is it!" he said.
"She's the only one I've told," she returned uneasily.
Her effrontery began to flow back upon her. "She's only one more you've got to square things with. Come, give me a little coin and I'll get out, and give you a chance to settle with her."
"You've had your last cent!" he said harshly.
"Oh, no, I haven't. I don't leave till you come up with the dough!" She sat down, and looked defiantly at him.
Kate moved slowly, tensely, across to David, gripped his arms and turned her white, strained face upon his.
"So – you never took that Mission money!" Her voice was an awed, despairing whisper.
Her tone, her fierce grip, her white face, sent through him a sickening shiver of partial understanding. "I'm sorry – but you know the truth."
She gazed wide-eyed at him; then her voice, still hardly more than a whisper, broke out wildly: "Yes – yes – you took it, David! Say that you took it!"
He was silent for a moment. "If I said so – would you believe me?" he asked.
Her head slowly sank, and her hands fell from his arms. "Oh, David!" she gasped – a wild, choked moan of despair. She took her hat and jacket from their hooks, and not stopping to put them on, not hearing the triumphant "Good-bye, little girl" of Lillian Drew, she walked out of the office.