The early autumn twilight dropped among the grimy buildings. The evening tide of Broadway rose and roared into Waverley Place. A cold wind lashed the dust into little whirlpools, wound the girl's cheap lawn skirt tightly about her aching knees, and ate through that thin material to the tingling skin. There was no one with her now, and she felt more than ever alone.
From the shadow of a doorway a man crossed the street and approached her.
He was a man of uncertain age, of almost any age below the early thirties. As he bowed to her, the girl saw that his hair was dark and curly; that the back of his hand, which was not the hand of a worker, was covered with a black down, and that through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks there shone the blue-black banners of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick until they smiled, above white teeth, in greeting, and his gray glance had the character of an appraisement of whatever it looked upon. Carrie noticed, protruding from his breast-coatpocket, a purple bordered handkerchief.
"Hello," he said.
She looked at him gravely. She had never seen him before, but with his kind she had lately grown enough familiar. Wherever there are women on strike, men of his sort gather, as the vultures gather about dying animals in a jungle. Yet Carrie said nothing. She was, as she had expressed it to Katie, still wondering.
"I've beenvatchin' you," said the man. "I've been vatchin' you alltay."
"Have you?" Carrie was totally incurious.
"Yes, I'd think you'd be pretty tired of soochfoolishness."
"I am tired."
"You can't vin. If you go back it will bechoostthe same hell-mill it vas before."
"I suppose it would."
"Vell then"—his hands spread themselves in protest—"vhy don't youqvit? A pretty, strong girl like you could makeloadsof money fer herself."
Carrie was leaning against the factory wall. She did not move.
"How?" she asked.
"Vell, you hafn't got noodder trade, eh?"
"No."
"Und you vouldn't vant to be aservant?"
"Why not?"
"Because that's vorse nor ashirtvaist-factory."
"Then I wouldn't want to be a servant."
Again the man extended his hands.
"Vell?" he said.
"But I knew one girl that went into a house," affirmed Carrie, "and I wouldn't do that for a fortune."
Her practical manner might have disconcerted most men, but this man's business had accustomed him to all forms of rejoinder. He immediately began an endeavor to persuade her by economic arguments.
But Carrie interrupted him.
"No," she said, "if I do it, it will be only because I have to, and then I'll not do it that way. Thank you, just the same. Here comes my relief: I don't have to wait till the girls come out to-day. Good-by."
He essayed to protest, but she walked quietly by him, made her brief report to the oncoming women, and started on her journey homeward. The man, whose trade imposed patience, said no more. He did not again approach her, and, though she knew that he was following her, through the growing crowd that rolled eastward, to mark her hiding-place, she did not attempt to elude him. She was very tired.
This was the evening that preceded the early morning call of Angel the Italian and Mirka the Austrian to Ludwig Schleger's saloon, and it was about eight hours later that Hermann, having seen his assailants leave, turned his back to the bar-room door and, alone in the place, set about washing the discarded glasses. Except that he was sleepy, he was in his usual spirits and he was whistling "Die Wacht Am Rhein." He was whistling so loudly that he did not hear the door reopen.
There was a flash as of a thousand blinding lights, a roar as if a train had fallen from the elevated road overhead, and Hermann, in the smoke-filled saloon, himself fell crashing behind the bar, and lay there, huddled and still.
Mirka quietly reclosed the door and darted around the corner.
Poverty, which produces the slave, breeds, just as surely, the slaver. Take where you will the trail of the trafficker in women, this rule is proven. It is proven in puritan Boston and protected New Orleans, in Chicago and Washington, in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and on the heroic scale it is nowhere more plainly proven than in the heroic city of New York.
On Manhattan Island is, indeed, the Mother-Church, however unconsciously organized, of the black faith, and though, of necessity, there spontaneously arise elsewhere congregations that reach back to her, here is founded and established the Congregation of the Propaganda that reaches out to them. Its missionaries—its women, men, and methods—have stretched to Nome and the Canal Zone; they are preaching their own brand of dogma against the native versions of Buenos Ayres and Sydney, of Shanghai and Cape Town; and within its home city the hierarchy is entrenched by financial strength, political power, and legal negligence. As an industry, it has its wholesalers and retailers; or, as a church, its bishops sit in their national house of peers, while its younger orders, its proselyting priests and evangelizing deacons, perform their especial tasks, the young appealing to the young, the poor preying upon poverty.
The entrance to these lower orders lies, as in most orders and most businesses, through a period of probation: the lad of sixteen plays the rôle of watchdog and spy for his superiors, for which he earns an occasional fifty-cent piece, or a casual kettle of beer, vastly increasing his income if he now and then diverts, as he generally does, his energies to the occupation of amateur theft. From this stage he is admitted, by his own efforts, to the possession of one girl, whom he bullies into working for him along the streets. He may occasionally deign to appear as a waiter in a café, and offer his woman to its drunken habitués; but most frequently he scorns all menial labor, for which, in fact, conditions have utterly unfitted him. Sometimes he increases his slave-holdings to a trio of women, and even farms out his victims to friends in his own or other neighborhoods or towns: more often he delivers his human wares to the proprietors of houses intended for their reception, being paid in a lump sum, or on a royalty basis; but in either case his ambition is, naturally, to rise to the position of the large property-holder or the political receiver of tribute. If he is an Italian, common consent limits his operations to the southern end of the Bowery; if he is a Jew, his field lies about the Houston and Essex Streets districts; whatever his European parentage, he seeks his fellow-countrywomen, and if he is American born he has the freedom of Broadway.
His means are multitude. Wherever there is squalor seeking ease, he is there. Wherever there is distress crying for succor, discontent complaining for relief, weariness sighing for rest, there is this missionary, this "cadet," offering the quack salvation of his temporal church. He knows and takes subtle advantage of the Jewish sisters sent to work for the education of Jewish brothers; the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Syrians ground in one or another economic mill; the restless neurotic native-daughters untrained for work and spoiled for play. He is at the door of the factory when it releases its white-faced women for a breath of night air; he is at the cheap lunch-room where the stenographers bolt unwholesome noonday food handed about by underpaid waitresses; he lurks around the corner for the servant and the shop-clerk. He remembers that these are girls too tired to do household work in their evenings, too untaught to find continued solace in books; that they must go out, that they must move about; and so he passes his own nights at the restaurants and theaters, the moving-picture shows, the dancing academies, the dance-halls. He may go into those stifling rooms where immigrants, long before they learn to make a half-complete sentence of what they call the American language, learn what they are told are American dances: the whirling "spiel" with blowing skirts, the "half-time waltz" with jerking hips. He may frequent the more sophisticated forms of these places, may even be seen in the more expensive cafés, or may journey into the provinces. But he scents poverty from afar.
Where training is as yet too strong or distress too weak to make serve the offer of partnership, the promise of marriage usually suffices. The thing is done, and once done, blows and starvation perpetuate it with the ignorant, and threats of exposure and public shame rivet the shackles on the more knowing. The former suffer for their darkness; the latter are held the faster in proportion to their previous respectability.
One has said that this church is established; in every city it maintains its incestuous marriage to the state. It controls real votes by the thousands and provides false ones by the tens of thousands. It is a church that may be considered to exercise the old ecclesiastical right of trying its own offenders in its own courts. When the magistrates have not begun as slavers, when they own no poor, but highly rented, houses, leased for prostitution, when they do not even accept tithes from the traffic, it is still largely the traffic that elects and can defeat them. What the Black Church owes to the political powers for their protection, the political powers owe to the church for its ballots.
It was this condition that made possible the impunity of such a deed as the Austrian Mirka had done upon Hermann Hoffmann, the bar-keeper; that made certain the assailant's escape, and that made of the entire matter merely a question as to which of several handy means should be employed to free the slaver in the eyes of the law. About those means there had, however, been some debate, and so it befell that, early on the Sunday evening following the shooting, Rafael Angelelli sat in a recognized New York meeting-place of the church's proselyting order, engaged in pleasant converse with Wesley Dyker, candidate for a magistracy. This place was the back-room of a saloon. It was filled with cigarette-smoking young missionaries, who talked shop, and quoted prices, and discussed the prospects of a good season in precisely the businesslike way that men in a livestock-dealers' club talk shop, and quote prices, and discuss the prospects of a good season. Dyker had not at all wanted to come there, but O'Malley had ordered, and so, making peace with the tolerant Angelelli, he had been forced to obey. A special counsel for the sheriff of New York had once been a member of the legal corps of the missionaries and so had two State Senators: O'Malley, remembering Dyker's previous career, could see no reason for present pride.
The room was clouded with smoke. Waiters hurried about serving beer from brass platters and swabbing the small tables with damp rags. There was a buzz of conversation broken by that peculiar form of laughter which responds only to obscenities, and now and then, out of the general clamor, there arose oaths almost technical, descriptions of women that sounded like auctioneers' announcements in a horse-market, and fragments of stories in which the teller bragged of a sharp deal he had effected in capturing a slave or in bargaining with a proprietress.
"I understand," said Dyker, with his eyelids characteristically lowered, "that you want to see me in regard to something about this shooting-affair of your friend Mirka."
Angel's oily head bobbed a ready assent.
"Where's the fellow that was hurt?"
"In Bellevue."
"Is he going to die?"
"Naw; eet was only a leetle one in hees shoulder."
"Anybody else in the bar when it happened?"
"Naw."
That was better. Wesley took a sip of beer.
"Mirka was alone, too?"
"Yas."
"Did the bar-keeper see him?"
"Naw; hees back was rounda to da door."
"There'd been a quarrel beforehand, though?"
"Ah, some small word only."
"And nobody saw Mirka come back or leave the place the second time?"
Nobody had seen him.
Then how was it that the injured man, in the hospital, had said that Mirka had done the shooting?
Angel explained that Hermann based his accusation partly on an uncertain and partial glimpse of Mirka caught in the bar-mirror at the instant that the shot was fired, but largely on the preceding quarrel.
"This Hoffmann couldn't swear to Mirka's identity from that mere glimpse?"
The Italian thought not.
"Well, then," said Wesley, "it all ought to be easy enough. Every bar-keeper knows a lot of drunks that might want to hurt him."
Rafael shrugged.
"You can feex eet," he said. "Meest' O'Malley say you feex eet easy."
"But," replied Dyker, "I don't see how I can act as Mirka's lawyer, unless it is all done quickly. You know, I'm about to be elected magistrate."
"Poof!" said Angel, blowing a thin spiral of blue cigarette-smoke. "We gotta da lawyer."
"Oh!" Dyker looked up quickly, and quickly down again. "Then you want me—I see."
"Good."
The prospective magistrate began making rings on the table with his wet glass.
"But I should think there were other ways. The man hasn't been arrested yet?"
"Naw."
"Then why need the police find him?"
"Thees O'Malley say eet looka better."
"He might jump his bail."
"Naw."
"It's often done that way."
"O'Malley say 'naw'."
"Or he might go up for trial. There's no real evidence against him: nobody saw the shot fired. And besides, even if we couldn't fix things in court, which is always easy enough, we could get him a pardon as we did for Pud Morley or Frank Da Silva."
But Angel would have none of these propositions. Michael O'Malley was, it seemed, inexorable. There had been enough bail-jumping, queer verdicts, and pardons for a few months. The case must come before the new magistrate, and the new magistrate must declare that the testimony was not sufficient to warrant holding the prisoner for court.
"Where is Mirka now?" asked Dyker.
"Een Philadelph'," said Angel.
"Loafing?"
"Naw. He tooka one of heesa girls along. I am takin' care of dees other one."
"Can't we get hold of the Dutchman and make him see who's back of all this?"
"Naw; dees Dutch' ees a fool."
"Won't even be bought?"
"Naw."
"And can't be scared?"
"Naw; I tell you dees Dutch' ees a damn fool."
Wesley did not like the plan; he did not like it at all; but he was already harnessed fast, and he had learned that it was best to follow without protest the directing rein. He achieved a smile.
"All right," he agreed.
The Italian's face lighted with gratification.
"You do eet?" he asked.
"I'll arrange it; don't worry."
"Good! Good! That's good!"
Angel's pleasure was so pronounced that Dyker for a moment feared—though it would have made small difference—lest the cadet make to the entire company a public announcement of his promise. He need not, however, have worried. Rafael was wholly used to these legal fictions and to the etiquette that imposed their formal observance; his delight took the shape of an order for another pair of drinks, and, those dispatched, he leisurely got upon his little feet.
"Now," said he, "I go. I hava da businesses."
He smiled wisely at the concluding word.
Wesley also rose.
"I'll have to be getting along myself," he remarked.
"Ah, but you can stay eef you feel like," said Angel. "I maka you know deesa mens."
"Thanks. I do know most of them," replied Dyker, nodding to two or three of the nearby cadets as he spoke. "But I have some business, too. These are busy times with me."
They both made their way to the saloon's side door.
"Goin' so soon?" chorused some of the habitués as Angel moved among them.
He nodded, smiling cheerfully.
"Goin' to kop out a new skirt?" inquired one.
"Yas," responded Rafael, now with a frank, satisfied chuckle.
"Then here's luck!" cried another.
As the health was being drunk, Dyker passed through the door and turned, alone, into the cool night air of the street.
Notwithstanding his natural bias, his severe schooling, and his honestly cynical and cynically limited view of this portion of his little world, he was ashamed of what he had just seen and heard and done, and he was disgusted. He walked down the avenue in the deepened shadows, for the first time in a long while more than half inclined to ask himself whether what he was to get was worth the price that he had already begun to pay for it; and for the first time, by way of answer, frankly facing the fact that the position of a corrupt magistrate was not much worse than that of a corrupt lawyer, and that neither position was much worse, and both certainly better paid, than the position in which his task had been to render anonymous assistance to the no less dubious course of more esteemed corporation attorneys.
He was too occupied with these reflections, disquieting and consolatory, to observe well the persons that passed him. He continued his way along the curb rather because he had started upon it than because he at all cared about whither it led him, much as he was continuing his progress in the political maze in which his lot was cast. He kept his head bent, and so he did not see a pale-faced, large-eyed woman that, turning a hasty corner, almost collided with him and then suddenly drew back and crossed the street.
There were changes in the woman's face, which might have precluded recognition. He had last seen her on the eve of a surgical operation and she had looked ill, but now, the cumulative effect of that and many other crises sat upon her, and it was only in her habitual gait, the swaying languid pace of an unstudied young animal, that he might have found enough to recall her to his memory. But Dyker's eyes were directed inward and so, when she turned aside to avoid the man that she fancied she had wronged, he did not realize that he had almost touched elbows with the woman he had once rescued, fresh from her dismissal from the sacred precincts of Mrs. Ferdinand Chamberlin's home.
She had started away from Washington Square in the same dull pain in which she had previously left the Ninth Street boarding-house presided over by the stony-breasted Mrs. Alberta Turner; she had been only a wounded dog, whose sole desire was to find a dark corner in which she could suffer unobserved; but slowly there reasserted itself in her torpid brain that new impulse toward a questioning of life which had so appalled Philip Beekman. The whole she could not see; her own case bulked so far in the foreground that little else of the picture was visible to her. But she knew that an ill-constructed world was against her; she concluded that all legitimate doors were closed upon her, and she felt gradually kindling a wrath that would end in general reprisal.
How she chanced into Rivington Street she did not know. She had no clear idea as to where she was to go, except that she must not return to burden Katie Flanagan. Yet, almost before she was clearly conscious of her whereabouts, she found herself accosted by a voice that proved to come from the lips of Marian Lennox.
"Mary Morton! How do you do? Where are you going? Where on earth have you been? Come in here; I'm just getting back from a walk. I am so anxious to hear how you are getting on, and I have been so disappointed because you never let me hear from you."
The rivulet of cheerful words poured from the calm-faced woman with unheeding force. Each one of them fell upon her auditor with an unintended shock. Mary, who had almost forgotten the pseudonym under which she had been presented at the Settlement, could say nothing. She was carried up the steps and into the house, up the stairs and into the deserted sitting-room on the second floor; and there she sank limply into a wicker chair beside a magazine-littered table, tête-à-tête with her former benefactress.
Marian, all good intentions, rested her delicate chin upon her white hands.
"Now," she said, "I am anxious to hear all about you."
Mary, with a perplexed frown, looked hard at the floor.
"Why, there isn't much to tell, Miss Lennox," she replied.
"Nonsense. Of course there is, my dear. You must understand that I am interested in everything about you—in everything."
Mary's eyes sought, for a moment, the pure, cameo-like face. They could see no evil there, and they could see much kindliness.
"Well, then," she hesitated, "I don't know exactly where to begin."
"At the beginning, of course. How do you like your place?"
"Which place, Miss Lennox?"
"The place we sent you to."
"I'm not there no more."
"Not there?" Marian raised her perfectly arched brows. "But, my dear Mary, why not? Didn't you like it?"
"I didn't mind."
"Then you have found a better place?"
Again Mary studied her questioner.
"Miss Lennox," she said, "I guess you people here have all sorts of girls comin' around, don't you?"
There was a surprise in this departure, and Marian's deep eyes mirrored it. The questioner had become the questioned.
"A great many kinds," she replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Girls that work at all sorts of things?"
"To be sure."
"And you want to help 'em?"
"We try to help them all."
"Yes; I thought so. Can you help 'em all, Miss Lennox?"
"When they let us, I think we can."
"Then what do you do about them that hasn't been straight?"
Marian softly caught her breath.
"Oh," she said; "I——" She had learned, since their last meeting, a little about the girls concerning whom Mary was inquiring, and she had learned much regarding the Settlement's attitude toward them; but she had learned, also, that the work of the place most lay with the flowers that bloomed among the weeds, and so, "Well, you see," she lamely continued, "Well, we do the best we can."
"What's that, please, Miss Lennox? I've got a particular reason for wanting to know."
Marian understood. She spoke softly, and softly laced and interlaced her long white fingers, resting in her lap.
"We do the best we can, Mary," she repeated, more confidently. "When we have investigated the case and are sure such a girl is sorry, or wasn't entirely to blame, and that she means to do what is right in the future, we make her our personal friend. We encourage her to come here and talk to us and get all the help possible. We have her around to all the entertainments——"
"Can she learn?" asked Mary.
"Learn?" Marian's voice was puzzled.
"Can she go to the clubs and the classes they talked about when I was here first?" explained Mary.
Marian shook a doubtful head.
"You see that wouldn't do, right away, Mary," she said. "We have to think of the other girls, and we have to protect the girls thatarestraight as well as help those that haven't been. These are their clubs, after all, and they wouldn't like it, if they knew. It wouldn't be just for us to deceive them, and they have the first claim on our protection."
"Why?"
It was the hardest question that Marian Lennox had ever had put to her. She tried to form an answer, but though she could think of many that seemed to her logical, she could think of none that seemed kind. Sympathy sprang to her eyes. She put out her hands.
"Mary!" she said.
But Mary had received her reply.
"It don't matter, Miss Lennox," she said, and she said it so calmly and so coldly that Marian involuntarily drew back in her chair. "I just wondered, that was all."
She stopped an instant. Her hostess tried to speak and could not, but presently the girl pursued:
"I wasn't square with you, that night you gave me the recommedation to Mrs. Turner, Miss Lennox. I suppose I ought to've told you all about myself, but I had to get work, an' I knew if I told you I wouldn't get no job. I'd been—I'd been in a house. I wanted to get away, an' a man had just got me out a little more'n a month or so before."
"It was not exactly honest of you," said Marian.
She was sorry as soon as she had spoken, but Mary, showing no sign of hurt or resentment, was continuing before reparation or explanation could be made.
Very simply she told the hard outward facts of her story. She did not give the history of her capture, because her experience with Mrs. Turner, with the homely little woman that had called at the employment-agency, and with Philip Beekman had shown her that this could not lessen the extent of her contamination. Honestly rejecting her deception of Marian, goaded by that glimpse of Wesley Dyker into an impulse to make, at any cost to herself, the amend of truth for what fault she had committed, she was still more powerfully moved by a determination to accept without reservation the part that the world had now assigned her, and to fight under no colors save her own.
Marian, her fine face drawn with pain, heard the narrative in a silence broken only when Mary had concluded with her departure from the hospital. The girl had mentioned no names.
"And even this one man," murmured Marian at last, "even this man who had the courage to rescue you—even he was a visitor at such a place?"
"Why, of course," said Mary, as yet unused to the idea of any blame attaching to the mere male patronage of slavery. "How else could I have got him for help?"
"But you said he was in love with that woman who conducted the—house."
"With Miss Rose?"
"What did you call her?"
"Mrs. Rose Légère she called herself, but I guess that wasn't her name. Yes, he was kind of in love with her. He was one of her favorites anyhow, but that was just because he had a pull with the politicians, you see. She let him love her so's she could work him, an' when I put him wise to that, he was glad to help me."
Marian clinched her fist.
"The abominable cur!" she said.
"Oh, no! Not that," protested Mary. She had failed this man by retracting her affidavit, but she meant to be loyal to him wheresoever she could. His name slipped from her with no thought of consequences. "It took a lot of nerve an' goodness to do for me what Mr. Dyker done."
Marian's gaze became fixed. She was a woman whose whole training had shaped her against sudden betrayal of emotion, but she needed every precept of that training now. She did not start, she did not flush, but her hands moved to the arms of her chair and gripped them hard.
"Did you say Mr. Wesley Dyker?" she asked.
Her voice did not betray her to the woman opposite, but Mary feared lest her own desire to defend her deliverer had betrayed him.
"That's who it was, Miss Lennox," she admitted, adding anxiously: "But I didn't go to mention it.
"You won't tell it to no one that could use it against him, will you?"
"Oh, no!" Marian laughed a short, hard laugh and rose to hide whatever might be seen of her confusion. "Oh, no," she said; "I shan't speak of this to any enemy."
Her movement had seemed to Mary as a sign that the interview was ending, but the laughter chilled her. She also rose, and stood before her hostess.
"You don't know him?" she tremulously inquired.
"I think," said Marian, "that I used to know somebody by some such name, but I do not know him now. He need not disturb himself, and when you see him you need not disturb him by saying that you spoke of this to me."
"Oh, I won't see him," Mary assured her. "It ain't likely I'll ever see see him again."
Marian's eyes searched her, but they detected nothing disingenuous.
"You have quarreled?" she demanded.
"No, only he wanted me to testify against Miss Rose, an' I was too scared. I just hid myself."
There was a simple appeal in the bare words that brought their hearer to her better self. Within her there burned a new and mounting fire, but her face was cool and her actions were reasoned.
"Mary," she said, determined to sink herself and to be true to her code, "I am very sorry to have heard all this. I am sorry that I seemed harsh when I said you had not been quite honest with us."
"But I hadn't been, Miss Lennox."
"It was not altogether your fault if you weren't, Mary. I begin to see that it must be rather hard, sometimes, to be quite honest."
"It is, sometimes."
"But you have been honest now with me, and I want to help you. I want you to come around here in the way I described. I want you to come often."
She paused, and then, as Mary did not respond, she added:
"Will you?"
Mary's eyes were on the floor.
"Do you think you can get me a job?" she asked. "Do you think anyone can?"
Marian had thought nothing about it.
"Why, really, I don't know, Mary. But I suppose so. Anyhow, I'll see what I can do—though of course I shouldn't feel justified in procuring you a position under false pretenses. You understand that?"
"Yes," said Mary, "I understand."
"And, at any rate, you will come around to-morrow?"
Still Mary did not look up.
"You will come?" repeated Marian.
"Yes, Miss Lennox," said Mary.
"Very well, then: to-morrow afternoon."
Something in the girl's attitude made Marian uneasy. She insisted on her point, but again Mary was slow to answer, and again Marian asked:
"Will you?"
"Yes, Miss Lennox."
"At five o'clock, Mary."
"I'll try, Miss Lennox."
"Promise."
Mary stepped to the door. She looked up and put out her hand, but, although Marian saw this, and started to respond, the settlement-worker's hand fell back to her side. Mary seemed first to observe and then not at all to have observed it.
"I promise," she said quietly, and left the room and the house.
Inside, Marian was looking at her hand as if, because it had refused to seek that of the woman who, she concluded, had shared Rose Légère's intimacy with Dyker, it had been scorched by the new passion aflame in her own heart. Outside, Mary, tramping the evening street, saw, in her memory of that hand withheld, a hand pointing her definitely away from the keeping of her promise, pointing her onward down the street as the place where, for the future, she must live and work.
The election came, and went in just the way that everybody expected it to go. Wesley Dyker's political craft, along with many others, was carried on the inrushing waves of his party's success to the haven where he had desired it to rest, and the prosperity that had raised the price of votes to five dollars apiece immediately resumed its unostentatious levy upon the voters against the next election. The defeated candidates forgot their so recent denunciations and congratulated their victorious opponents; the victorious opponents forgot their tinsel pledges and resumed the safe and sure business of government for revenue only, and the population of New York, like the population of most cities, forgot all the good things that had been pledged it, and turned its energies to the everyday task of taking what it could get.
Meanwhile Carrie Berkowicz, homely and hopeless, pursued, with a dogged earnestness, the path that conditions had hewn for her, and always she pursued it not alone. As the waiting beast prowls behind the slowly weakening traveler lost in a jungle, as the bird of prey circles calmly above the wounded man in the forest, as both beast and bird stand by until there comes the moment when strength can no longer oppose them, so, day after day, rarely speaking, but always watching, there followed in this girl's footsteps the dark young man with curling hair and shining teeth, who had accosted her on Waverley Place. He seemed to watch for her morning entrance upon the street, and to be the last to see her when she dragged her wasting body into the tenement at night. Much of the time he dogged her like a foul shadow. She would pass him in a doorway, she would see him lounging at a corner, she would catch glimpses of him across a crowded street. There were times when she feared to look up lest she should have to answer that prosperous leer and ornate bow; there were others, at last, when, as his well-fed body brushed by her, she almost plucked at his sleeve with her hungry hands. He never stopped, but sometime, she knew, he would stop; he never said more than "Good-morning" or "Good-evening,", but sometime, sometime soon, he would, she knew, say more.
And meanwhile, too, the politically unaffected routine of the Lennox department-store began gradually to provide for one of its victims at least the sense of approaching variety: Katie Flanagan realized that the end of her usefulness—as that phrase is termed by employers, boarding-school principals, and others in authority—was rapidly nearing. She managed to avoid the immaculate Mr. Porter for one week, and, but for her worry over the condition of the wounded Hermann, would have had moments when the sport was amusing. As the taskmaster paused at her counter one time during the second week, she achieved a sick aunt, who sufficed to account for her occupied evenings. But when the days and the nights dragged by with no change for either the better or the worse in the condition of this bed-ridden relative, and when the girl's invention began to flag, and her spirit to tire, Mr. Porter's glance grew more and more searching, his manner less and less warm, and Katie knew that she must soon retreat or surrender.
"I have not seen much of you lately, Miss Flanagan," remarked Mr. Porter as, late one afternoon, he came mincing to the counter where she stood.
"I've been here pretty regular, Mr. Porter," answered Katie.
Mr. Porter caressed a gray side-whisker.
"Um," said he. "I presume, then, that your grandmother is no worse."
"It's me aunt, sir," rejoined Katie, with the mental addition: "You didn't catch me that time, you ould tom-cat." And she added: "The good woman's some better, thanks."
"I see," said Mr. Porter, and, indeed, his cold gaze seemed to see a great deal more than he was inclined to mention. "At this rate of improvement, I hope you will soon find time to consider the matter we discussed that day in my office."
"I hope that, Mr. Porter," smiled Katie.
"Yes," concluded Mr. Porter, turning from her—he always turned away when he was most significant. "I hope so, too, for I can't well keep your case under advisement much longer."
Several of the salesgirls nearby laughed openly, and Katie, when he was out of sight, looked at them with a grimace half sad, half mocking.
The next morning she was transferred to a bargain-counter for the day.
What the outcome might have been there is no imagining. What it was depended, at any rate in part, upon the fact that, on what proved to be her last day at the shop, she had come to work with a tired body and an aching head. She had sat up half the night in a long endeavor to persuade Carrie to leave the futile battle of the strikers and turn to other employment; and, when Carrie had rejected all proposals on the ground that, though the fight was lost, she knew no other sort of work, Katie had spent about all the remainder of the dark hours in an attempt to convince her roommate that the Irish girl's wages were enough to support both of them for some time to come. The result, so far as went her conduct at the store, was a temper ready to explode with the first spark, and that spark came when, in midafternoon, a nervous woman, who persisted in examining everything and buying nothing, interpreted Katie's lassitude as indifference and so reported it to the floor-walker.
Katie was sent for to come to Mr. Porter's office.
Mr. Porter looked up from the light at his desk, and then down again. He stroked a whisker.
"Sit down, Miss Flanagan," he said.
"Thanks," replied Katie, "I can take it just as well standin'."
"Take what?" asked Mr. Porter.
"Anythin' at all you have to say," said Katie.
Mr. Porter continued to look at his desk and, by the name of "Miss Flanagan," addressed it severely.
"Miss Flanagan," he said, "you have again been reported to me for discourtesy to a customer. The other case had not yet been adjusted. It might have been adjusted had not your cousin——"
"Me aunt," prompted Katie.
"Your aunt," frowned Mr. Porter to his desk, "had not your aunt been so disinclined to recover."
"She was gettin' absent treatment from a bad doctor."
"I know nothing of that——"
"I think meself it was Malicious Animal Magnetism."
"Please do not interrupt," said Mr. Porter, shaking his whiskers at the desk. "I say that the previous case was not adjusted, though it might have been, if your mother had not remained so ill."
"Me aunt."
"Your aunt, if you prefer it. Now comes this second case, and really, I am curious to know whether you can suggest anything that will make me regard it with the smallest degree of lenience."
He looked again at the desk, as if the desk were the case he had referred to, but neither the desk nor Katie answered.
"If you cannot," he at last concluded, "I see no course but one for me to pursue."
Katie folded her arms across her breast and tossed her black head.
"There's only one thing I can think of," said she, and waited.
Mr. Porter breathed hard.
"And what," he inquired, still without looking at her, "is that?"
Katie took a soft step forward. She rested her hands upon the arm of his desk and leaned her face toward him.
"Don't you know?" she asked in a low voice.
Mr. Porter shot, from the corner of his eyes, one of his crooked glances at her.
"I am not quite sure," he said.
"Then," replied Katie, "I'll tell you. The only one thing I can think of that'd get you to let me off is the only one you can think of yourself—an' that's the one I won't do!"
Her voice, which had begun so softly, ended in a loud note. Her hands, which had been open, clinched. Her body, which had been relaxed, stiffened.
Mr. Porter sprang back from her, looked at her with hot fright in his usually cool eyes, and then shrank as far away as his desk-armchair would permit.
"Miss Flanagan," he spluttered, "not so loud, please! You will alarm the store."
"I wish I could alarm it!" said Katie.
"But what—what—I don't understand——"
"Yes, you do understand, all right, all right, Mr. Porter. I know what you want; I've known it all along, an' if I hadn't liked to make a fool of you, I'd have told you long since what I tell you now:You won't get it!"
If it were possible for Mr. Porter to grow whiter than his habit, he grew whiter then.
"I shall—I shall ring for assistance!" he protested.
"No you won't; you won't dare; you'll sit there, an' write me out a recommendation an' an order for me pay—if your hand ain't shakin' too much, an' if it is, I'll write it for you."
And he did write it. After one look at her, he wrote it without a word, and "without," as Katie carefully stipulated, "any dockin' for the last offense," and as she left him she delivered one Parthian bolt.
"Remember me to the girl you start after in the mornin'," she said; "an' when you go home to-night, just give me grandmother-mother-aunt-cousin's best regards to your grown-up great-grandchildren."
The taste in which her revolution expressed itself may have been as doubtful as the courage that inspired it was certain; but, had Mr. Porter been able to see into her mind as she hurried homeward, he would have been gratified at what he found there. The excitement had gone, and with it the bravery. She had preserved her individual ideals, but she now realized at what a cost she had preserved them. Against masculine attack it was sometimes inspiriting to defend herself, but to the slow and continuous advance of penury she well knew that, at last, she must succumb.
She passed her ugly little parish-church, and, remembering that she had missed her last confession, entered its forbidding doors.
The swinging portal closed softly behind her. It shut out the glare of the day, it shut out the noises of the street, and it seemed to shut out the entire malicious power of the world. Inside the cruel sunshine became kindly shade and comforting candle-light; the only sound was the occasional footfall of an unseen suppliant, and on the distant high altar, shimmering and white at the end of the long perspective of the empty aisle, there rested the power she believed more powerful than all on earth beside.
She made her confession—not the easy and formal confession of the strong, who need it most, but the frank probing question and full reply of the weak, who can profit by it least—and at its end she received not only the benediction that she traced to Heaven, but the shrewd advice that came direct from the big heart of a worldly-wise and beneficent man.
"Thank you, father," she added to the words of the ritual, as she rose to go, "I'll do me best to stick it out, but times be when it's powerful hard."
The experience had encouraged her, but, when she came at last into her barren home, there fell a blow that shook to its foundations the structure of hope which she had so briefly reared. On the bare table was a single sheet of paper, and on the paper was written:
"Dear Katie:—I have gone away. There was no use in saying good-by, for that would only have hurt both of us, and I could not have made you see that I was right not to board here any longer at your expense, any more than you could make me see last night that you were right on your side. Pretty soon I'll come to see you and bring the money I owe you, but I can't ever pay you back all your other goodness, although I would give my right arm to do it.
"Another thing. By the time you get this letter Hermann will be to see you at the store. I was around to Bellevue yesterday, and we kept it as a surprise for you that he was coming out to-day. I hope by this time you two will have fixed it all up; but if you haven't, well, I never talked to you about it much before, but I feel I must say something now, because I seem to know more about life than I used to: take him, Katie dear, for there are only horrors ahead for any girls like you and me if we don't marry. He's a fine man and you love him, and the two of you will do better together than you can do apart.
"Now, good-by. Don't please bother to hunt for me—I won't be on picket-duty any more, butI am all right.
"Lovingly,"CARRIE."
Katie Flanagan put down the note. She went to the narrow window and gazed blindly at the unsightly wing of the tenement across the narrow court outside.
"All right?" she said, the paper crumpling in her tightened hand. "All right? The poor girl's got no money an' no job. I know what she's thinking an' there's no good followin'. 'All right,' she says! Dear God, pity her: she means, 'all wrong'!"
Katie felt too deeply for her lost comrade to think much, if at all, of that portion of the note which touched her own interest. Her eyes clouded; her shoulders shook; she fell upon her knees before the window-sill, and it was there that Hermann's strong arms went about her neck.
Even then, glad as she was to have him back again, she could do little but sob brokenly with her cheek against his breast, while he told her how he had gone to the store, learned of her dismissal, and come at once to the tenement, not pausing to knock when he heard her sobs. He comforted her as best he could, but it was some time before any comfort availed.
All had ended well for Hermann, but all had not easily so ended. His wound had proved relatively slight, and he was sound and whole again: but, the day before his dismissal from the hospital, Schleger had waited upon him shamefacedly to confess that the rulers of the ward, dissatisfied with the bar-keeper's Laodicean attitude toward their political labors, and urged by Mirka's friends, had forbidden his re-engagement in the saloon. Ludwig had been sorry, but helpless, and then, after exacting a score of promises, had disclosed his plan to open incognito a grocery-store on the West Side, himself remaining in charge of the saloon and Hoffmann appearing, on a good salary, as the owner of the new venture.
Katie looked up at him with eyes shining blue through a dispersing mist of tears.
"An' what about the dirty Dago that shot you?" she inquired.
Hermann smiled broadly. His face was thinner and not so ruddy as once, but it was cheerful still and more determined than of old.
"The Austrian?" he asked.
"'Tis the same thing," said she.
"Ach, vell, I guess ve von't do nussing about him."
"You won't be lettin' him go?"
"Vhy not? Dere's none to swear fur me and a hun'red to swear fur him. I kind of belief Schleger gif me de new blace as brice fur keepin' quiet, so dere's nussing to gain und efferysing to lose."
At first she would not hear of it, and she used her opposition to this dropping of the charge against Mirka as if it were an argument properly formed to oppose the next scheme that he proposed to her. But he had found her in her moment of weakness when he had come to her in his hour of strength renewed.
"No," he said firmly, "und dis evenin' ve'll be married. I got der license; I stopped at der church; Father Kelly's vatin'—dis evenin', Katie."
The world was slipping from beneath her feet. She did not answer.
"In two year'," he went on, "one part of dot store ve'll own. Katie, it's our chance; und in de meanvhile, if der Herr Gott sends der babies—und pray Gott he vill—dey von't at least do no vorse as ve hof done."
He drew her tighter, but she twisted in his arms and got free, so that he held only one of her firm hands. They stood there face to face, between them the unfathomable chasm of sex, their feet trembling at its brink.
Across the areaway the straight shafts of the setting sun caught the dirty little window-panes of the nearby squalid rooms and turned them to a shining glory. The rays were reflected into Katie's own room; they burnished the cheap paper into cloth of gold, they touched the floor and gilded it, they made of the rickety table a thing of splendor, and of the worn chairs fairy thrones. Hermann's blonde head was crowned with a halo, and as he looked at the girl, against the background of those yellow windows like a Madonna against the background that the Etruscan painters loved, he saw in her eyes what he had never seen before.
In the momentary struggle the coils of her black hair had loosened and fallen below her waist. They framed a face no longer strong with restraint, handsome from the flush of battle against the world, no longer set and self-reliant, but a face through which shone the light of the life-force, the motive-power of the universe, a beautiful face, white, frightened, wonderful.
"Can—can you really love me?"
She scarcely said the words. Rather her lips formed them with no voice behind. But he had heard her before her lips so much as moved.
"Ach," he cried, "I hof alvays lofed you, Katie, but now it is somesing new und more. Katie, I sink—I belief sings I neffer belief before, und I sink it must be der blessing of Gott dot I canseein you."
"An' there won't be anny other woman?"
"You areallvomen, Katie."
She raised her head.
"Yes, Hermann," she said, "I think I will be all women for you. I will be all you want. I will work an' share, good luck an' bad. I never before was glad I knew how to work, but now Iwillbe all you want—all,all!"
He put her hand to his lips, and held it there an instant: Fifth Avenue does these things, casually, no better than the Bowery, when the Bowery has a mind for them.
"Katie," he whispered.
She took her hand away. She tried to laugh a little, but the laughter, clear and silvery, caught suddenly in her throat. Her mouth twisted, and she raised the hand and put her lips where his had been.
Reeling with the tremor of that sight, his arms recaptured her, and this time held her fast. She swayed and yielded. Her own arms answered his, and his lips met, for the first time freely, the lips she had so bravely kept for him.
The case against Mirka was then and there dismissed, and the High Court handed down a final decisionin reHoffmannvs.Flanagan.
Wesley Dyker looked with unaffected approval about the second-story front room in Rivington Street. He saw the calmly colored walls, the excellent mats upon the floor, the ordered writing-desk and, near the center, the heavy library-table, covered with carefully piled magazines.
"Hello!" he said, nodding easily to the woman that stood motionless before him.
The woman's answer was not ready, but Dyker, whose eyes were on surroundings almost as animate, pursued:
"Upon my word, you have it rather cozy here, considering the neighborhood. I'm not half so well fixed myself. I'm glad to see that, Marian, and I'm more than glad to see you."
He raised his heavy lids to look at her. He had resolved when, a short while before, she had sent for him, to make no mention of their long separation. He was sure that the sending meant he was to have a chance to recall to her the superior wisdom that had expressed itself in his advice against working among the poor; but of the time that had elapsed since that advice was given he had meant to say nothing. Always he had confidently expected this moment, and, now that it had come, she must find him prepared. He put out his hand.
But Marian was thinking of how, in this same room, she had said good-by to Mary. She compressed her lips a moment before answering, and, when she did answer, it was only to say, quite calmly:
"I don't want to shake hands with you, Wesley."
Day and night the words that Mary had so innocently dropped concerning Dyker had stirred the fire in Marian's breast. Supposing that her protégée had shared with Rose the easy caresses of Wesley, even at a time when Marian had been on the point of accepting them, the failure of that protégée to return to the Settlement for aid or consolation had made Marian the prey to a hundred contending emotions. She was glad that Mary had not come back, because Mary adrift meant Mary suffering. She was sorry that Mary had not come back, because she wanted to ask the girl so many things that she had at first neglected to ask. She doubted Mary and was ashamed of her doubts; she doubted Dyker and was still ashamed. One thought tore at another, and all tore at her heart.
On entering the Settlement she had left Dyker in a proud anger that forbade her acting upon his offer to come to her whenever she should send for him; on dismissing Mary she had so framed her promise of secrecy that she might repeat to Wesley the unfortunate woman's unconscious accusation; and on twisting and turning the reptilian thing over in her mind, she said in one breath that she could not send for Dyker and could not be at peace unless she did send. The fiercest passion that a conventional woman has is the passion for the knowledge that will most likely clinch her unhappiness. Marian was certain that she must know the truth, and she told herself that she was certain of but one fact beside: that she did not love this man; that she had never loved him—and, presumably because of that, she had at last, on this day shortly after the election, incontinently telephoned to him to come to Rivington Street.
She had said to herself that it was unfair to condemn him unheard. She had replied to herself that she did not care enough about him either to condemn or to acquit. She had ended by the realization that, deny it as she might, the fact of condemnation remained; and she had inclined solely toward the attitude of impartial justice until, in the briefest possible time after receiving her message, Dyker had entered this room. Then, immediately, her mood had once more changed, as it was to change so often during the ensuing interview; she had left the bench and had become the prosecutor.
Perhaps Dyker's appearance was in part to blame for this. She had, of course, not seen him since that summer parting; it is seldom pleasant for a woman to find that separation from her has left no scar upon an admirer, and it is always annoying to a district-attorney to detect no consciousness of guilt in the countenance of the accused; yet Dyker had come into her presence with a buoyant step and a ready smile. The pressure of campaigning had lessened, though it could not wholly check, the progress of his dissipations, and his face still flaunted the tokens of its former glory. His eyes were not noticeably more timid than of old, and his mouth was, as of old, hidden. Add to this the pleasure, still fresh, of his election, and the satisfaction of a man fancying himself just placed in a position to say "I told you so" to the woman he loves, and it will be seen that Magistrate Dyker, if not at his best, had been at least in a moment of expansion.
And now she had said that she would not take his hand! He could scarcely believe his ears.
"You don't want—I am afraid I do not understand you, Marian," he said.
Her great brown eyes looked steadily into his puzzled gaze.
"Sit down, please," she responded.
Mechanically, he drew a deep wicker chair to the window, and obeyed her.
She sat opposite him and, for fully a minute, while with galloping brain he watched her, she looked through the glass at crowded, shuffling Rivington Street.
"It is simple enough, Wesley," she at last resumed. "Before I can think of renewing anything like my old friendly attitude toward you——"
"Your friendly attitude!"
"It was scarcely more than that. Before I can renew it, there is something that must be explained."
Dyker's own attitude was still that of the average lover, and the average lover cannot see beyond his own shadow.
"Oh,"—he was momentarily relieved and prepared, in consequence, to show a proper magnanimity—"you needn't explain, Marian! I knew you would find that I was right, and that this was no place for you. I appreciate perfectly how you feel: you have been disappointed and disillusioned, and it is like you handsomely to want to confess that you were wrong. But let's merely consider that done, and say no more about it."
He ended in a warmth of good feeling; but the did not seem inclined to accept this proffer, and, as he paused, he wondered what was in her gaze.
"No," she said, "you are not quite correct in your surmise. I have been disappointed and disillusioned. I have been disappointed in one of the people among whom I have been working; but I have been disillusioned in regard to you."
She stopped. He began to guess now what was back of those calm eyes of hers. Disillusioned in regard to him? At the first breath it seemed incredible, but at the next his mind filled with the ghosts of his experience, the grim figures that compose the pageant of that real life of a man, upon which he never raises the curtain for the feminine eyes most dear to him.
"In regard to me?" he echoed. He was wondering, in hidden panic, which especial image had been revealed to her, and he sought defense in general denial. "You have been listening to East Side neighborhood gossip, Marian, and I shouldn't have believed it of you. You have heard one of the hundreds of groundless ante-election libels that are the common ammunition used against anyone in politics."
Her face, always fair, was gently tinted.
"What I have heard," she replied, "I heard from somebody that has nothing to do with politics."
"Down here," insisted Dyker, still seeking to dislodge the enemy and force it into the open field of recognition, "down here all the men have something to do with politics."
"This was a woman, Wesley."
He had feared that. He had feared it when she first spoke of coming to the Settlement. But he wasted no time in such thought; he must, before he committed himself, discover which of several possible women, was concerned.
"Oh," he laughed, "the women are mixed up in political gossip, too; or, at any rate," he added, "they are always glad to repeat what their menfolk don't hesitate to tell them."
"The woman I refer to was a part of the thing she told."
Marian said it softly, but her white throat trembled.
Dyker looked at her swiftly, and as swiftly lowered his eyes. Instantly now he guessed what it was that she had heard; an instant more and he thought the thing improbable. Then, resolved at all events not to approach self-betrayal by showing his intuition, he assumed the point of view of the lawyer.
"Marian," he said, pulling at his mustache that she might see—as she did—that his hand was steady, "is this fair? Is it right to condemn me on a charge of which I know nothing and because of evidence of which I haven't heard a syllable?"
"No," she answered, "it isn't fair. That is why I sent for you."
He bit his lip, but faced her.
"Well," he said, "what is it?"
Steadily she met his renewed gaze until his eyes failed her.
Even then her own eyes, never wavering, could find in him not enough to determine her. The desire to get at the truth, whatever the truth might be, was plying its angry whip upon her shoulders. When Mary had spoken, Marian had received the intelligence as innocently imparted fact. But now the man before her gave nothing that her inexperience could set down as a sign of what she considered a great sin.
"Wesley," she began, leaning towards him, "the girl that told me this told it inadvertently. More than that, she did not even know that I had ever heard of you. She did not want to hurt you: she was grateful to you, because you had rescued her."
His intuition, then, had not failed him: it was Violet.
"Why," he smiled, his heart heavy with the fear of losing Marian's love, his lips still sparring for a more open lead, "I am afraid I'm no knight-errant, Marian, to go about rescuing damsels in distress." But he did not like the sound of the phrase, and, seeing that she liked it no better, he explained: "You surely remember how I feel about these poor women."
"But she said that your politics brought you into touch with the worst sort of them."
Marian paused there to give him another chance, but his only protest was:
"Not my politics. The duties of my profession, before I was elected a magistrate, sometimes made it necessary to defend such women. You must have known that. There was no dishonor there."
"And my informant added," continued Marian, "that you used your political influence to gain their friendship, perhaps even to protect them, and"—she felt the depths before her; her cheeks went hot; her brown eyes filled—"and certainly to—to——"
She faltered.
He felt it and looked up with anger in his eyes.
"To what?" he demanded.
She clasped her damp hands tight.
"To live with them," she said.
Though he had expected the implication, he had hardly expected so close an approach to the specific, and therefore the start to which it behooved him to give way was not altogether disingenuous.
"Marian!" he cried.
She bent her head.
"Do you believe that?" he asked.
The accusation uttered, sick uncertainty gripped and tossed her again.
"I don't know what to believe."
"But how can you think I would be capable of such things? The girl lied."
Her judgment swayed dizzily. Between word and word she was now for and now against him.
"I can't think of any motive that this girl might have to lie," she said.
"How do you know what motive she has?" returned Dyker, realizing in what good stead his training as a pleader of bad cases might stand him. "How do you know what political enemies of mine may have sent her to you? You say that, on her own confession, she is a vile woman——"
"I did not say that."
"You said she charged herself with being part of this alleged business. You confessed that you were disappointed in her personally. What possible credit can be given to the story of a woman that begins by admitting such abominations?"
Marian tried to speak, but indecision choked her.
"I tell you, you were tricked," he pursued, with a glib rapidity that she did not know whether to attribute to innocence or guilt. "I may have lost a case for some friend of this girl. I may have won a suit against one of her hangers-on. There are men in the lower sort of politics, I'm ashamed to say, that don't hesitate to use such tools, and I have offended a good many of them. Before you considered this story true, don't you feel that you should have thought of one of these explanations?"
"I don't know," Marian faltered. The relentless tide of her emotions now set in again in his favor. Mary had told her story so calmly, with so little feeling concerning her own sufferings, that Marian kept wondering if it might not have been an invention. She was sure that, all along, somewhere in her heart, she had wanted to think the best of him; wanted, despite her accusing jealousy, to acquit him. "I don't know," she repeated despairingly; "but"—and the tide began to flow once more—"unless I can be certain of her motive for lying to me, don't you see, Wesley, don't you see that I must have proof of your innocence from you?"
She looked at him in wide appeal. The undertow had caught her, and she was crying for help from shore. She knew now that she loved him, and she had learned the ultimate tragedy of love: that love and mistrust may be one.
"How can I know anything?" she went on. "How can I be sure of anything? How can I understand such a world as this? It seems as if all the earth was lying to me, and as if all the earth could lie and still look honest. I trusted the girl; I trusted you. I beg of you to prove to me that I was right only when I trusted you. Wesley,"—she almost extended her arms to him—"tell me that you didn't do it!"
Dyker saw his advantage, but decided that the way to keep it was to be firm. He spoke quickly, yet coldly.
"Who was this woman?" he asked.
"Do you think I ought to tell you?" she pleaded.
"Ought to tell me? Why, Marian, how else am I to prove what you ask me to prove? If you are to be at all fair with me, how can you start by hiding the false witnesses against me?"
He was right, she felt.
"Did you ever hear," she asked, "of Mary Morton?"
Too late to weigh his words he remembered the name that the girl whom he had called Violet had signed to her affidavit. Before that recollection was clear to him, he made his reply in the deceit that is the refuge of all the confused.
"I never did."
"You are sure?"
"Absolutely";—he had to keep it up now—"although, if she is the sort of woman she says she is, she probably has as many aliases as a safe-cracker."
"But this girl—I should think you would not forget her if you had ever known her: she must have been good-looking once. She has blue eyes and brown hair. You could see from her face that she has suffered, but you could see that she used to be almost beautiful. She has the walk of a queen."
"I don't know her."
"Think."—Marian was still intent upon certainty.—"When I saw her she was both times dressed alike, though on her second visit her clothes, first new, had grown a little shabby. She wore a cloak—I forget its color, but it was dark—and a beaver hat. She——"
He knew those clothes; he had reason to; but his interruption was in strict accord with his previous denial:
"There are thousands of women answering that vague description. I am sure, however, that I don't know this one."