She wheeled about and wrung out with a sudden passionate “Oh, what’s the good of all this! I am here tapping wires, and you are here doing the same. Neither of us belongs at this sort of work, but—but, we’re here!”
“Can’t you tell me?” he asked, more gently, yet inwardly more dogged.
“Yes, I shall tell you,” she answered him, at last. “It began, really, six years ago when my mother died, in London, and my father went to pieces, went pitifully to pieces, and had to give up his profession as a barrister. I felt sorry for him, and stayed with him, through his months of drunkenness, and his gradual downfall. He started a little office for genealogical research—as we called it—digging up pretentious alliances, and suitable ancestors for idle and wealthy nobodies. This was bad enough, but little by little it degenerated into a sort of next-of-kin agency, and wrung its money from the poor, instead of the rich!”
She paused for a moment, before she went on, gazing at the man before her in grim and terrible candor, steeled with the purpose to purge her soul of all she had to say, and have it over and done with.
“But I stayed with father, through it all. I told myself I could live it down, the squalor, and the meanness, and the deceits, and even the drunkenness—I stayed with him because I pitied him. Even then he was a brilliant man. And I would have worked and fought for him to the end, only, at last, he wanted me to pose as a claimant for an estate then in chancery. That I would not and could not do. I went to Reading, and became an invalid’s companion. Then, after father’s death—after his horrible death—his older brother, at Oxford, offered to give me a home. He was an old man, a curate with five daughters, and I felt, then, that it would be unjust. So I answered an advertisement in a London paper, and came to America to be a governess in a New York family, in the house of a diamond importer named Ottenheimer. At the end of my first week there my mistress unjustly suspected me of—Oh, I can’t explain it all to you here, but she was a vulgar and unscrupulous woman, and said I was too good-looking to be a governess, and discharged me without even a reference. I was penniless in two weeks, and would gladly have crept back to my uncle in Oxford, if I had been able. Then, when I was almost starving, I was glad enough to become the secretary of an investment company, with an office in Wall Street. They had trouble with the Post-Office department in Washington, and then the police raided the office, for it turned out to be nothing more than a swindling scheme. . . . And then, oh, I don’t know, I seemed to drift from one thing to another, until I was the English heiress in a matrimonial bureau, and a French baroness in some foreign litigation scheme. But all the time I was only waiting to get enough money to creep back to Oxford. I kept telling myself that in a few weeks more I should be able to escape. I kept dreaming of it, until Oxford seemed to grow into a sort of sanctuary. But things went on and on, and still I waited.”
“And then what?” demanded Durkin, startled at the rising note of self-hate in her feverish declamation.
“Then, at last, I thought I had escaped into honesty, even in America. But it was the same as before. I met MacNutt!”
“And then what?” Durkin’s customarily careless shoulders were very upright.
“Oh, first it was a woman’s get-rich-quick concern in Chicago; then a turf-investment office in St. Louis; then a matrimonial bureau of our own, until the police put a stop to it because of the post-office people; then it was chasing the circuit for a season; and, finally, this wire-tapping scheme!”
She looked at him, weary-eyed, hiding nothing, smiling hopelessly.