She turned brimming eyes to the girl now, and there was an appeal in them that could not be misunderstood—a dumb, fearful eagerness, a hungry waiting for a word, a touch, a smile; a look like that of some wretched penitent craving mercy. A painful, tragic pause ensued.
“You’re his mother?” repeated Dot slowly at last. She gazed almost in ludicrous unbelief at the withered, wistful, old countenance raised to hers. Then suddenly an ineffable tenderness suffused the girl’s face, poured from her eyes. She fell on her knees beside Mrs. Liggs and gathered her close in her arms. “You’re a wonderful little mother, and I love you better for being his mother—because I know it,” she breathed, half sobbing, and kissed the aged cheeks again and again, and fondled the thin, tired hands against her bosom.
For the next quarter of an hour Mrs. Liggs opened her heart, laid it bare of its secrets—for the first time since the criminal career of her only child, Jerome, had darkened the future for her and filled her life with fears and heartaches. Weeping softly, she told that tragic story, from that awful morning in Marysville, three years before, when the police came to the Liggs home searching for Jerome—charged by City Treasurer Gene Miles with embezzlement of city funds—up to the day of his capture by Lemuel Huntington.
As any mother would, she tried to excuse her wayward boy for everything he had subsequently done in defiance of law, by pointing out that the criminal authorities had hounded him, made him a social outcast, thereby forcing him to pursue his desperate calling as a means of living. Nor was she wholly wrong in her accusation, as any ex-convict will straightway affirm. A penitentiary record—though Billy Gee had never known the interior of a prison cell—is a full brother to guilt forever after, in the eyes of the law’s bloodhounds.
Society seems to forget that the man who pays the debt it imposes on him regains, by every moral principle, his standing among the ranks of righteous humankind. Instead, breaking faith with the very justice it presumes to mete out, it claps the stigma of ignominy on the wrongdoer and never removes it; once a jailbird, always a jailbird, is the tenor of its smug opinion, and being itself ruthless in the exercise of its self-bestowed powers, it gives to men of the Coates and Tyler type authority to apprehend law-breakers. Incompetency and political patronage rule the system of law enforcement, making it a stupid, clumsy institution whose methods of operation serve rather to increase than decrease the commission of crime.
Mrs. Liggs was still speaking when a sharp rap sounded on the parlor door. It was the maid, coming to inform Dot that Miss Jessie Longwell, president of the seminary, wished to speak with her in the office. The girl thought for a moment; then, insisting that her little old friend accompany her, she escorted Mrs. Liggs out of the room and down the spacious hall to another apartment, fitted with correct businesslike furnishings, including a large flat-top oak desk before which sat the head of the school.
Miss Longwell was, at a glance, a most unattractive specimen of middle-aged person, haughty, self-contained, precision itself, and thin as a lath. She sat rigid as a steel spring in her straight-back chair, and let her stony, gimlet eyes back of their immense shell-rimmed glasses, rest icily on Dot; then she focused them inquiringly on Mrs. Liggs.
“Miss Huntington,” she began, in a quick, crisp voice, “I said, I believe, that I wished to speak with you privately.”
“This is Mrs. Liggs, Miss Longwell, a very dear friend of mine,” returned Dot, by way of explanation, at the same time going through the formalities of introduction. “Whatever must be said may be done so in her presence. I think I know the nature of the interview,” she added.
Miss Longwell’s lips tightened, then she got up very decidedly and closed the door. On her way back to her desk she halted before Dot.