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.
She moved through the acid-sharp November air, a white-faced automaton. She felt a vague, numb infinity of pain. She perceived neither the causes of the blow nor its probable results; she merely felt its impact, and that impact had made her whole being inarticulate.
But presently her senses began to rouse. She began to see the outlines of her disaster, its consequences; her great vague pain separated into distinct pangs, each agonisingly acute. She felt an impulse to cry out in the street, but her instinctive pride closed her throat. She turned back and hurried to her room, locked herself in, and flung her hat upon the floor and herself upon the bed.
But even here she could not cry. All her life she had been strong, aggressive, self-defending; she had cried so rarely that she knew not how. So she lay, dry-eyed, her whole body clenched, retched with sobs that would not come up.
Lillian Drew's words, "He's ten thousand miles above you," sat upon her pillow and cried into her ear. She had seen David's superior quality and his superior training; but she and he had both been thieves—they were both struggling to rise clear of thievery. This commonness of experience and of present effort had made him seem very near to her—very attainable. It was a bond between them, a bond that limited them to one another. And she had steadfastly seen a closer union a little farther ahead.
But now he was not a thief. The bond was snapped—he was ten thousand miles above her! Her despair magnified him, diminished herself; and when she contrasted the two she shrunk to look upon the figure of her insignificance. He must see her as such a pigmy—how could he ever care for such paltriness? He never could. He was lost to her—utterly lost!
All that afternoon she was tortured by her hopelessness. In the evening she became possessed by an undeniable craving to see David, and she went to David's house and asked him to walk with her. For the first minute after they were in the street the silence of constraint was between them. David could but know, in a vague way, of Kate's suffering; he was pained, shamed, that he was its cause.
In the presence of her suffering, to him, with his feeling of guilt, all else seemed trivial. But there was one matter that had to be spoken of. "You've not told a soul, have you, what you learned this afternoon?" he asked.
"No," she returned, in a muffled voice.
"I was sure you hadn't. I was afraid this afternoon that Rogers had overheard, but he didn't; either you talked in low voices, or he was asleep. No one must ever know the truth—no one—and especially Rogers."
"Why him especially?" she asked mechanically.
David hesitated. "Well, you see one thing that makes him feel close to me is that he believes we have both been in the same situation. In a way that has made us brothers. If he knew otherwise, it might make a difference to him."
"I understand!" said Kate's muffled voice.
She asked him details of the story Lillian Drew had revealed, and since she already knew so much, he told her—though he felt her interest was not in what he told her.
At length—he had yielded himself to her guidance—they came out upon the dock where they had talked a month before. She had wanted to be with him alone, and she had thought of no better place. Despite the wind's being filled with needles, they took their stand at the dock's end.
They looked out at the river that writhed and leaped under the wind's pricking—black, save beneath the arc lamps of the Williamsburg bridge, where the rearing little wave-crests gleamed, sunk, and gleamed again. For several minutes they were silent. Then the choked words burst from her:
"I'm not fit to be your friend!"
"You mustn't let this afternoon make a difference, Kate," he besought. "It doesn't to me. Fit to be my friend! You are—a thousand times over! I admire you—I honour you—I'm proud to have you for a friend!"
She quickly looked up at him. The light from the bridge lamps, a giant string of glowing beads, lay upon her face. In it there gleamed the sudden embers of hope.
"But can you love me—some time?" she whispered.
It was agony to him to shake his head.
"I knew it!" she breathed dully.
When he saw the gray, dead despair in her face, he cried out, in his agony and abasement:
"Don't take it so, Kate! I'm not worthy to be the cause of so much pain."
She looked back at the river; the wind had set her shivering, but she did not know she was cold. He saw that she was thinking, so he did not speak. After several minutes she asked in a low voice:
"Do you still love Miss Chambers?"
He remained silent.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"As much as I love you?"
"Yes."
There was a pause. When she next spoke she was looking him tensely in the face.
"Would she love you if she knew the truth?"
"I shall never tell her."
"But would she love you?" she repeated, fiercely. She clutched his arms and her eyes blazed. "She'd better not!—I'd kill her!"
The face he looked down into was that of a wild animal. He gazed at it with fear and fascination.
The vindictive fire began slowly to burn lower, then, at a puff, it was out. "No!—No!" she cried, convulsively, gripping his arms tighter. "I wouldn't! You know I wouldn't!"
The face, so rageful a minute before, was now twitching, and the tears, that came so hard, were trembling on her lashes. Her eyes embraced his face for several moments.
"Ah, David!" she cried, and her words were borne upward on the sobs that now shook her, "even if you don't love me, David—I want you to be happy!"