She did not answer; she seemed not to have heard. A moment later she lifted a gray, drawn face to David.
"Mr. Aldrich," she said tremulously, "will you please put me in a cab?"
In the cab she sat with the same stricken look upon her face. She had, as David had once said to the Mayor, always regarded her father as a man of highest honour. She had never felt concern in his business affairs, or any business affairs, despite the fact that her interests overreached in so many directions the usual interests of women, and despite the fact that her heart was in various material conditions which business had created and which business could relieve.
Seen from the intimate view-point of the home, her father was generous and kind. She had heard of the reports that circulated in the distant land of business, and she had glanced at some of the articles that had appeared in years past in magazines and newspapers, and she knew that stories were at this time current. Her conception of her father had given the silent lie to all these reports. She believed they sprang from jealousy, or false information, or a distorted view. They had troubled her little, save to make her indignant that her father was so maligned; and even this indignation had been tempered with philosophic mildness, for she had remembered that it had ever been a common fate of men of superior purpose, or superior parts, or superior fortune, to be misunderstood and to be hated.
But, all of a sudden, her conception of her father was shattered. This thing he had indubitably done was certainly not without the legal law, and perhaps not wholly without the cold lines of the moral—but it was hard-hearted, brutal. "The man who would do that would do anything," she had said to David; and all the way home in the cab this thought kept ringing through her consciousness, and kept ringing for days afterwards. It led logically and immediately to the dread question: "After all, may not these other stories be true?"
Helen did not belong to that easy-conscienced class who can eliminate unpleasantness by closing their eyes against it. She had to face her question with open vision—learn what truth was in it. She secured all she could find in print about her father and read it behind the locked door of her room. There was case after case in which her father, by skilful breaking of the law, or skilful compliance with it, or complete disregard of moral rights, had moved relentlessly, irresistibly, to his ends over all who had opposed him. The picture these cases drew was of a man it sickened her daughter-love to look upon—a man who was truly, as the articles frequently called him, an "industrial brigand," and whose vast fortune was the "loot of a master bandit."
The articles seemed woven of fact, but she could not accept them unsubstantiated. She must know the truth—beyond a single doubt. At the same time, she, her father's daughter, could not go to the men he had wronged, demanding proof. At length she thought of her Uncle Henry, whom she loved and trusted, and whom she knew to be intimately acquainted with her father's career.
To him she went one night and opened her fears. "Are these things true?" she asked.
And he said: "They are true."