Still very pale, she formed a half-inarticulate "Yes!" with her full lips. Then, seeming to brace herself by a tighter clasp on the hard steel grating, she listened while he spoke.
Earnestly, honestly and with perfect straightforwardness, omitting nothing, adding nothing, he gave her the narrative of that fatal night's events, from the first moment he had laid eyes on the wonderfully-disguised woman, till her cudgel-blow had laid him senseless on the floor.
He told her the part that every actor therein had played; how the whole drama had been staged, to dishonor and convict him, to railroad him to the Pen for a long term, perhaps to kill him. He spoke in a low voice, to prevent the watching officer from overhearing; and as he talked, he thanked his stars that in all this network of conspiracy and crime against the Party and against himself, his captors had not yet placed him incommunicado. For some reason—perhaps because they thought their case against him absolutely secure and wanted to avoid any appearance of unfairness or of martyrizing him—this restriction had not yet been laid upon him. So now his message of the truth could reach the ears of her who, more than all the world beside, had grown dear to him and precious beyond words.
He told her, then, not only the story of that night, but also all that had since happened—the newspaper attacks on him and on the Party; the deliberate attempt to poison the community and the nation against him; the struggle to fix a foul and lasting blot upon his name, and ruin him beyond redemption.
"And why, all this?" he added, while she—listening so intently that she hardly breathed—knew that he spoke the living, vital truth. "Why this persecution, this plotting, this labor and expense to 'get' me. Do you want to know?"
"Yes, tell me!" she whispered. "I don't understand. I can't! It—it all seems so horrible, so unreal, so—so different from what I've always believed about the majesty and purity of the law! Can these things be, indeed?"
He laughed bitterly.
"Can they?" he repeated. "When you see that they are, isn't that answer enough? And the reason of it all is that I'm a Socialist and know certain secrets of certain men, which—if I should tell the world—might, nay, surely would precipitate a revolution. So, these men, and the System behind them, have tried to discredit me by this foul charge. After this, if the charge sticks, I may shout my head off, exposing what I know; and who will listen? You know the answer as well as I! Do I complain? No, not once! What I must suffer, for this wondrous Cause, is not a tenth what thousands suffer every day, in silence and high courage. What has happened to me, personally, is but the merest trifle beside what has already happened to thousands, fighting for life and liberty, for wife and home and children; for the right to work and live like men, not beasts!"
"You mean the—the working class?" she ventured, wonderingly. "Is this outrage really a minor one, compared with what they, who feed and warm and carry the whole world, have to suffer? Tell me, for I—God help me, I am ignorant! I am beginning to see, to half-see, awful, dim, ghostly shapes of huge, unspeakable wrongs. Tell me the truth about all this, as you have told it about yourself—and let me know!"
Then Gabriel talked as never he had talked before. To this, his audience of one, there in the dirty and ill-smelling police station, he unfolded the sad tale of the disinherited, the enslaved, the wretched, as never to a huge, and spell-bound audience in hall or park or city street. His eloquence, always convincing, now became sublime.