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Presently her mind, rehearsing the evening, came to David's statement that, for St. Christopher's sake, he must always remain a guilty man. She paused before the declaration. Yes, he was right. As she admitted this a calm fell upon her, and she saw, as she had not seen before, the distance that lay between them. He could not come to her; he was bound where he was. If they came together, she must go to him.
Could she go? She loved the ease and beauty which surrounded her; and this love now pointed out that going to him meant resigning all the comforts of her father's house, all things that thus far had comprised her life. And not alone resigning them, but substituting for them the cramped, mean surroundings of a poor man. Was the love of a poor man sufficient to balance, and balance for the rest of life, the good things that would be given up?
She had said to David with ringing joy, "I shall marry you anyhow!" – and now, with the same glow of the soul, she swept her present life out of consideration. Yes, she could give it up! But following immediately upon the impulse of renunciation came the realisation that David was not only a poor man – he was, and must be always, to the rest of the world a criminal. Was her love strong enough, and was she strong enough, to share a criminal's dishonour and struggles – even though she knew him to be guiltless?
While this question was asking itself her father entered, and with him her Aunt Caroline – in an ermine-lined opera cloak and a rustling cream-lace gown, about her plump throat a collar of pearls and in her gray hair a constellation of diamonds.
"Why, Helen, sitting here all alone, and at one o'clock!" her aunt cried. "Well, at any rate it means you're feeling better." Helen had had her dinner brought to her sitting-room, and had excused herself from the opera on the plea of indisposition.
Helen returned the kiss with which her aunt, bending over, lightly touched her cheek. She would have preferred to say nothing of David's visit, but she knew her aunt, who had charge of the servants, would doubtless learn of it on the morrow from the housekeeper.
"But I haven't been alone the whole evening," she returned quietly. "Mr. Aldrich called."
Mrs. Bosworth hopelessly lifted her shoulders, whose fulness her fifty-odd years had not impaired. "What'll your help-the-poor ideas make you do next!" she cried. "Think of giving up Melba to be bored a whole evening by an East Side protégé! And such a lot of your friends came to our box, too. Mr. Allen was very disappointed."
"It seems to me, too, Helen," said her father who stood with his back to the fire, "that you're carrying your philanthropy a little too far in having your brands-snatched-from-the-burning so much at the house."
Helen did not answer.
"Well, I suppose you must find some satisfaction in it or you wouldn't do it," Mrs. Bosworth sighed. "Good night, dear."
They kissed again, perfunctorily. Helen liked her aunt in that moderate way in which we all like good-natured, fate-made intimates whose interests touch our own at few points. And Mrs. Bosworth's complacent good-nature there was no denying – even if her interest did pause, way-worn, after it had journeyed out as far as those remote people who had only twenty-five thousand a year.
"Don't sit too long," said her father, bending down. During the last four weeks she had tried to wear before her father an unchanged manner. So she now met his lips with her own. "Only a few minutes longer; good night," she said.
When they had gone her gaze returned to the fire, and her mind gathered about her father. Since she had learned he was a great highwayman whose plunderings were so large as to be respectable, her days and nights had been filled with thoughts of him, and of her relation to him and his fortune. She realised that if he were seen by the world as he actually was, and if the world had the same courage to condemn large thefts that it had to condemn small thefts, he would be dishonoured far below David. She realised that his great fortune was founded on theft, that the food she ate, the dresses she wore, the house she lived in, were paid for with money that was rightly others!
What should she do? – for almost a month that question had hardly left her: Should she beg her father to change his business ways, and to restore his money to whom he had defrauded? She knew the power was not in her, nor any other, to change him. Since he was going to continue gathering in other people's money with his own, should she keep silent and remain by him, and see that the money was spent in service of the people? Or should she, refusing to live on dishonest income, withdraw from his house and shape her own life?
She came out of her thoughts with a start to find herself shivering, the bronze clock on the mantel pointing at two, and the glowing romance in the fire-place cooled to gray ashes. When she reached her sitting-room she remembered a yellow photograph of David that on the day he had confessed his guilt she had tried to burn, and which she had since tried to forget, but which she had often taken from its hiding-place and gazed at in pained wonderment. She took this out of the drawer of her writing desk, went into her bedroom and set it upon the reading-table beside her bed. After preparing herself for sleep she lit the candles on the table, turned out the gas, and lying with her head high up on the pillows she looked with glowing eyes on the open boyish face. After a time she reached a white arm for the picture, pressed a kiss upon its yellowed lips, then snuffed the candle and held the picture against her heart; and, lying so, she presently drifted softly away into sleep.
Paradise walked home with David that night. He did not think of the barrier that stood between Helen and him – that must always keep them apart despite her declaration that she would marry him. He thought only of her love. This fact was so supremely large that it had filled his present. At times he thrilled with awe, as though God had descended and were walking at his side. Again he could barely hold down the eruptive cries of his exultation; he clenched his hands, and tensed his arms, and flung his face up at the far, white stars.
He strode through the night, too excited to think of anything but Helen and himself. He and she – they were the world. But presently, after hours of walking, his thoughts went to people without the walls of his paradise. He thought of Rogers – and the misery of Rogers was an accusation against his joy. He had gained everything – Rogers had lost everything. He was ashamed of himself, and he tried to subdue his happiness by thinking of Rogers's failure and hopelessness.
And the thought of Kate shot through him a great jagged pain. He realised how fierce must have been the struggle that had preceded her call on Helen; he realised that he owed his paradise to the apotheosis of her love; and he realised, too, how utterly beyond his power it was to make her any repayment.
When, toward three o'clock, he reached his house, he was surprised to see that a light burned in Roger's office. The office door was unlocked, and he entered. Beside her desk stood Kate, suddenly risen, and on the desk's arm lay a few note-books, a dictionary and a pair of sateen sleeve-protectors.
"I've come for my things – I've got a new job," she said after a moment, in a dry unnatural voice.
David saw instantly through her pitiful craft – knew instantly how long she had been waiting there. He filled tinglingly with a quick rush of pity and pain and tenderness. He wanted to thank her, but he felt the emptiness of words, and dared not. So, confusedly, awkwardly, he stood looking at the white face.
Her eyes holding to his like a magnetic needle, she moved across the room, paused a pace away, and stared, hardly breathing, up at him. Her burning, questioning eyes, ringed with their purple misery, forced from him a low cry of pain.
"Oh, Kate! – Kate!"
She trembled slightly at his voice. "You've seen her!" she whispered.
"Yes."
He felt tears scalding his eyes. Suddenly he caught her hands and broken words leaped from his lips.
"What a wonderful soul you are! – I can't speak my thanks, but in my heart – "
She jerked her hands away and drew back. "Don't!" she gasped. "Don't!"
He hated himself for the suffering he was causing her – for his helplessness to thank her, to say the thing in his heart.
She continued to stare up at him with the same quivering tensity. After a moment she asked in a dry whisper:
"And she loves you?"
"Yes."
A sharp moan escaped her. She put an unsteady hand out and caught her desk, and the edge of David's vision saw how the fingers clenched the wood.
"I knew it – from the way she acted," she said mechanically.
For several moments more she looked up at him, her face as pale as death. Then she turned and, thoughtless of her belongings, walked toward the door, a thin, unsteady figure. As she reached for the knob he sprang across the room with a cry and caught her outstretched hand.
"Oh, Kate – forgive me! – I hate myself! – Forgive me!"
Her hand tightened spasmodically on his, her body swayed, her eyes flamed up into his. "Oh, David!" burst from her in a low moan of infinite pain and loss. For a moment she was all a-tremble. Then she clenched herself in an effort at self-control, answered him with a slow nod, and dropping her head turned and went through the door.
CHAPTER VIII
A PARTIAL RELEASE
When David, after leaving Helen at the end of the next afternoon, sat down to his early dinner in the almost empty Pan-American, the Mayor came swaying toward him. During the last two weeks the Mayor had been daily seeking David for sympathy over his marriage, or advice upon his wedding clothes and upon arrangements for the ceremony that was to make his life a joyless waste. He took an opposite chair, sighed heavily and regarded David in steady gloom.
"D'you, realise, friend," he burst out, "that it's only one day more? Twenty-four hours from to-night at nine o'clock! Only one day more o' life! If God had to make me, why didn't he put a little sense into me – that's what I'd like to know!"
He shook his head despairingly. But after a few moments his face began to lighten and he leaned across the table. "But anyhow, friend, don't you think my weddin' clothes is just about proper!"
David agreed they were, and in the discussion of the marriage garments the Mayor forgot the marriage and became quite happy. From garments he passed on to a description of the preparation for the wedding festivities, which were to be held in the Liberty Assembly Hall.
He leaned proudly back and glowed on David. "It's goin' to be the swellest ever," he said, with a magnificent wave of his right hand. "It's goin' to have every weddin' that was ever pulled off in this part o' town, simply skinned to death – yes, sir, simply faded to nothin'."
He flamed upward into the very incandescence of pride. But on the morrow his pride was ashes. Never did another bridegroom have so severe an attack of the bridegroom's disease as did the Mayor. All the afternoon he kept David beside him, and once when David tried to leave for a few minutes the Mayor frantically caught his arm and would not let him go. The Mayor was too agitated to sit still, too nerveless to move about, too panic-stricken to talk or to listen to David; and when, after dinner, it came to putting on his wedding raiment, he was in such a funk that David had to dress him. He had but one coherent idea, and that he often expressed, his glassy, fearful eyes appealingly on David, with a long-drawn moan: "Friend, ain't it hell!"
When it came time to leave, the Mayor collapsed into a chair and glared defiantly at David. "I ain't goin' to go!" he announced in a tremulous roar. But David, by the use of force and dire pictures, finally got him into the dressing-room of the Liberty Assembly Hall where he was to meet Miss Becker. She was already there, and she came toward him with a blushing smile. He stood motionless, his tongue wet his lips, a hand felt his throat. He gazed at the white gown and at the veil as a condemned man at the noose. He put a limp, fumbling hand into hers. "Howdy do, Carrie," he said huskily.
Some men are cowards till the battle starts, then are heroes. When the Mayor and his triumphant bride, radiant on his arm, paused a moment outside the hall door for the march to begin, he was still the agitated craven. But when he saw within the hall the scores of gorgeous guests, and realised that he was the chief figure in this pageant, his spirit and savoir-faire flowed back into him; and when Professor Bachmann's orchestra struck into the wedding-march he stepped magnificently forward, throwing to right and left ruddy, benign smiles. He bore himself grandly through the ceremony; he started the dancing by leading the grand march with Mrs. Hoffman in his most magnificent manner; and at the wedding supper, which was served in an adjoining room, he beamingly responded to the calls for a speech with phrases and flourishes that even he had never before equalled.
At the end of the supper the party resumed dancing, and the Mayor had a chance to pause a moment beside David. He swept a huge, white-gloved hand gracefully about the room, and demanded in an exultant whisper:
"Didn't I tell you, friend, that this was goin' to be the swellest weddin' that ever happened? Well, ain't it?"
"It certainly is," agreed David.
The Mayor tapped David's shirt-front with his forefinger. "It certainly is the real thing, friend. Nothin' cheap-skate about this, let me tell you. Everything is just so. Why, did you notice even the waiters wore white gloves? Yes, sir – when I get married, it's done right!"
He leaned to within a few confidential inches of David's ear. "And say – have you sized up Carrie? Ain't she simply It! Huh, she makes every other woman in this bunch look like a has-been!"
A little later, during a lull in the dancing, the Mayor and his bride, who had quietly withdrawn, suddenly appeared in the doorway of the hall, hatted and wrapped.
"Good-bye!" boomed the Mayor's mighty voice. "Same luck to you all!"
Mrs. Hoffman's finger-tips flung a kiss from her blushing lips to the guests, and the Mayor's hand gathered a kiss from amid his own glowing face and bestowed it likewise. The guests rushed forward, but the couple went down the stairs in a flurry, into a waiting carriage, and were gone.
The dancing continued till early workmen began to clatter through the streets – for in the supper-room was enough cold meats and cake and punch and ices to gorge the guests for a week, and Professor Bachmann has been paid to keep his musicians going so long as a dancer remained on the floor. But David slipped away soon after the bride and groom.
When he got home he found Kate Morgan sitting by Rogers's side. He looked at her in constraint, and she at him – and it was a very uncomfortable moment till Rogers announced:
"She's going with me."
David turned to his friend. There was an excited glow in Rogers's dark eyes.
"What?" David asked.
"She's going with me – to Colorado."
David stared at him, and then at Kate, who nodded. "Oh, I see!" he said.
Kate's features tightened, and she looked at him defiantly. "It isn't what you think. I offered to marry him, but he wouldn't let me."
"What, let a woman marry a wreck like me!" exclaimed Rogers. "No, she's going as a nurse. I've begged her not to go, but she insists."
"Why shouldn't I?" Kate asked, still with her straight, defiant look full on David. "My father's now in an asylum. Mr. Rogers needs me: he'll be lonely – he ought to have someone to take care of him. I know something about nursing. Why shouldn't I?"
David looked at her slight, rigidly erect figure, standing with one hand on the back of Rogers's chair, and tried to find words for the feelings that rushed up from his heart. But before he could speak she said abruptly, "Good night," and, very pale, marched past David and out of the room.
The following afternoon, as David was helping Rogers with the last of the packing for the western trip, which was to be begun that night, a messenger brought him a letter. He looked at the "St. John's Hospital" printed in one corner of the envelope in some surprise before he opened the letter. It read:
"Dear Sir: —
"There has just been brought here, fatally injured from being run down by an express wagon, a woman whose name seems to be Lillian Drew, judging from a packet of old letters found on her person. As your address was the only one about her, I am sending you this notice on the possibility that you may be an interested party."
The note was signed "James Barnes, House Surgeon." David's first thought was, Morton's letters have been read and the secret has begun to come out! For a space he did not know whether this was a hope or a fear. On the way to the hospital it was of the glory that would follow this disclosure, and not of the disaster, that he thought. He saw his name cleared, himself winning his way unhampered into honour, free to marry Helen – he saw a long stretch of happiness in work and in love.
On reaching the hospital he was led to a small room adjoining the operating-room. Here he found Dr. Barnes, a young fellow of twenty-five, shirt sleeves rolled above his elbows, aproned in a rubber sheet, head swathed in gauze. He was beginning to wash his hands at an iron sink.
"Are you a near friend or relative?" Dr. Barnes asked after David had introduced himself.
"An acquaintance," David answered.
"Then I can break the news point-blank. She died a few minutes ago."
David hardly knew what the young surgeon was saying – his mind was all on the letters.
"It's the old, old story," added the surgeon, with a shrug. "Intoxicated – got in the way of a truck – a cracked skull. I've been trying to do what I could for her" – he nodded toward the open door of the operating-room, – "but she died under the operation."
"In your note," David said as steadily as he could, "you mentioned some letters."
"Oh, yes. I wanted to find the address of friends, so I read a few of them." He smiled at David as he rubbed a cake of yellow soap about in his hands.
David leaned heavily against a window-sill. His mind was reeling.
"They were from relatives?" he forced from his lips.
The surgeon gave a short laugh. "Hardly! They were love letters – and warm ones, too! All about twenty years old. Queer, wasn't it."
He rinsed the soap from his arms and began to rub them with a white powder. "But I got nothing out of them. They were merely signed 'Phil.'"
David's control returned to him, and he was conscious of a tremendous relief. "I suppose," he said, "there's no objection to my claiming and taking the letters."
"We usually turn anything found on a body over to the relatives or friends. But pardon me – I don't know that you're the proper person."
"There's no one else to claim them. I'm perfectly willing to give you security for them."
"Oh, I guess it'll be all right. They're merely a package of old letters."
He walked over to where several coats were hanging, and pointed a scoured hand at one. "I've just washed up for another operation, so I can't take them out for you. You'll find them in the inside pocket."
David transferred the yellow packet to the inside pocket of his own coat. He had thanked the surgeon and said good-bye, when the fear seized him that perhaps the dead woman might after all not be Lillian Drew. He turned back and asked if he might see the body. The surgeon led him into the operating-room where two attendants were starting to push out a wheeled operating-table, burdened with a sheeted figure. The surgeon stopped them, and at his order a nurse drew back the sheet from the head. David gave a single glance at the face. His fear left him.
With the letters buttoned inside his coat he left the hospital and set out for Helen's, on whom he had promised to call that afternoon. At this moment he had not for Lillian Drew that understanding, sympathy even, which he was later to attain; he did not then consider that she, too, might have had a very different ending had her beginning been more fortunately inspired. For such a sympathy he was too dazed by the narrowness of his escape from vindication and of the Mission's from destruction. Had the letters been signed by Morton's full name, then the house surgeon, in trying to learn who Philip Morton was, would certainly have started a scandal there would have been no stopping. But now his secret was safe: Lillian Drew would menace him no more, and the two women who knew his story would keep it forever locked in their hearts.
He chanced to reach the Chambers's home at the same moment as Mr. Chambers, who bowed coldly and passed upstairs. As Mr. Chambers went by the drawing-room door he saw Helen and Mr. Allen at the tea-table. He entered and shook hands cordially with Mr. Allen.
"How are you, Allen?" he said. "But I just stopped for a second. I'll try and see you before you go."
At this moment a footman handed Helen David's card. "Don't you think, Helen," her father asked quietly, "that you're letting that fellow make himself very much of a bore?" Without waiting for an answer he passed out.
"Will you show Mr. Aldrich up," Helen said to the waiting footman. Mr. Allen had begun, before her father's entrance, to draw near the question he had come to put. She shrunk from answering it, so David's coming was doubly welcome.
"A minute, please," Mr. Allen called to the servant. "Now, Helen, is this treating me fair?" he demanded in a whisper. "You know I want to see you. Can't you send down word that you're engaged?"
"He's in the house – I'm here – I can't deny him," she said rapidly. "Besides, for a long while I've been wanting you to meet him. Show him up, Mitchell."
"Well, if I must meet him, I suppose I must," Allen said with a shrug, sharpness cutting through his even tone. "But I warn you, Helen – I'm going to outstay him."
A moment later David entered the room. He was crossing eagerly with a hand held out to Helen, when he saw Allen beside the tea-table. He suddenly paused. Allen slowly rose, and for a space the two men stared at each other.
"So," Allen said, with slow distinctness, "You're Mr. David Aldrich?"
David went pale. He knew, from what Helen had told him of Allen, that he was in the power of a man whose ideas of justice and duty made him merciless. For a moment David had, as on the night Allen had forced him to unmask, a glimpse of the inside of a cell.
"I am," he said.
Helen had looked from one to the other in surprise. "What – you know each other?"
David turned to her. "You remember I told you that about a year ago I broke into a man's house. It was his house."
"What!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, your protégé is a thief!"
There was a vibration of triumph in Allen's voice. An old idea had flashed back upon him. He had often thought that if he could, by some striking example, show Helen the futility of her work, show her that the people whom she thought were improving were really deceiving her, then her belief in her efforts would be shattered and she would abandon them – would come nearer to him. This man Aldrich here summed up to her the success of her ideas.
"I think I shall leave you for a while," Allen said.
He moved toward the door.
David knew where Allen was going. Helpless to save himself, he stood motionless, erect, and watched Allen start from the room.
Helen, very pale, blocked Allen's way. "You intend to have him arrested. It's in your face."
"I certainly do."
"You must not!" cried Helen, desperately. "Why, he took nothing – you yourself told me he took nothing."
"That doesn't make him any less a thief," returned Allen. "He had good reason for not taking anything – he was frightened away."
He started to pass around her, but she caught his arm. "You must not! You'll be committing a crime!"
He looked at her almost pitingly. "Really, Helen, he must have hypnotised you. You know he's a thief. I caught him in the act; he's confessed to you. What more can you want?"
She gazed steadily up into his face. "Won't you let him go if I assure you that in arresting him you'll be making the mistake of your life?"
"No. Because I know that you, in believing that, are mistaken."