“Yes, I have,” said he, with slow emphasis, “and I regret to say, my dear child, that my diagnosis of his character is precisely what I first thought. Any interest you may feel in that quarter is being applied to a very unworthy object. The man is one of my discharged employees, a thorough rascal and hard ticket in every way—one of the lowest-bred and most villainous persons yet unhung, I grieve to state. The fact that he carried you in his arms, and that I owe your preservation to him, is one of the bitterest facts in my life. Had it been any other man, no matter of what humble birth—”
“Father!” she cried, bending forward and gazing at him with strange eyes. “Father! By what right and on what authority do you make these accusations? That man, I know, was all that innate gentleness and upright manhood could make any man. His nobility was not of wealth or title, but of—”
“Nonsense!” Flint interrupted. “Nobility, eh? Read that, will you?”
Leering, despite himself, he handed the paper across the table to his daughter.
“Those marked passages,” said he. “And remember, this is only the beginning. Wait till all the facts are known, the whole conspiracy laid bare and everything exposed to public view! Then tell me, if you can, that he is poor but noble! Bah! Sunday-school dope, that! Noble, yes!”
Catherine sat there staring at the paper, a minute, as though quite unable to decipher a word. Through a kind of wavering mist that seemed to swim before her eyes, she vaguely saw the words: “Socialist White Slaver!” but that these bore any relation to the man she remembered, back there at the sugar-house, had not yet occurred to her mind. She simply could not grasp the significance of the glaring headlines. And, turning a blank gaze on her father’s face, she stammered:
“Why—why do you give me this? What has this got to do with—me? With him?”
“Everything!” snarled the Billionaire, violently irritated by his daughter’s seeming obtuseness. “Everything, I tell you! That man, that strong and noble hero of yours, is this man! This white slaver! This wild beast—this Socialist—this Anarchist! Do you understand now, or don’t you? Do you grasp the truth at last, or is your mind incapable of apprehending it?”
He had risen, and now was standing there at his side of the table, shaking with violent emotion, his glasses awry, face wrinkled and drawn, hands twitching. His daughter, making no answer to his taunts, sat with the paper spread before her on the table. A wine glass, overset, had spilled a red stain—for all the world like the workers’ blood, spilled in war and industry for the greater wealth and glory of the masters—out across the costly damask, but neither she nor Flint paid any heed.
For he was staring only at her; and she, now having mastered herself a little, though her full breast still rose and fell too quickly, was struggling to read the slanderous lies and foul libels of the blue-penciled article.
Silently she read, paling a little but otherwise giving no sign to show her father how the tide of her thought was setting. Twice over she read the article; then, pushing the paper back, looked at old Flint with eyes that seemed to question his very soul—eyes that saw the living truth, below.
“It is a lie!” said she, at last, in a grave, quiet voice.
“What?” blurted the old man. “A—a lie?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” said she. “A lie.”
Furious, he ripped open the paper, and once more shoved it at her.
“Fool!” cried he. “Read that!” And his shaking, big-knuckled finger tapped the editorial on “Socialism Unveiled.”
“No,” she answered, “I need read no more. I know; I understand!”
“You—you know what?” choked Flint. “This is an editorial, I tell you! It represents the best thought and the most careful opinion of the paper. And it condemns this man, absolutely, as a criminal and a menace to society. It denounces him and his whole gang of Socialists or Anarchists or White-slavers—they’re all the same thing—as a plague to the world. That’s the editor’s opinion; and remember, he’s on the ground, there. He has all the facts. You—you are at a distance, and have none! Yet you set up your futile, childish opinion—”
“No more, father! No more!” cried Catherine, also standing up. She faced him calmly, coldly, magnificently. “You can’t talk to me this way, any more. Cannot, and must not! As I see this thing—and my woman’s intuition tells me more in a minute than you can explain away in an hour—this fabrication here has all, or nearly all, been invented and carried out by you. For what reason? This—to discredit this man! To make me hate and loathe him! To force me back to Waldron. To—”
“Stop!” shouted the old man, in a well-assumed passion. “No daughter of mine shall talk to me this way! Silence! It is monstrous and unthinkable. It—it is horrible beyond belief! Silence, I tell you—and—”
“No, father, not silence,” she replied, with perfect poise. “Not silence now, but speech. Either this thing is true or it is false. In either case, I must know the facts. The papers? No truth in those! The finding of the courts? today, they are a by-word and a mockery! All I can trust is the evidence of my own senses; what I hear, and feel, and see. So then—”
“Then?” gulped the Billionaire, holding the back of his chair in a trembling grasp.
“Just this, father. I’m going to Rochester, myself, to investigate this thing, to see this man, to hear his side of the story, to know—”
“Do that,” cried Flint in a terrible voice, “and you never enter these doors again! From the minute you leave Idle Hour on that fool’s errand, my daughter is dead to me, forever!”
Swept clean off his feet by rage, as well as by the deadly fear of what might happen if his daughter really were to learn the truth, he had lost his head completely.
With quiet attention, the girl regarded him, then smiled inscrutably.
“So it be,” she replied. “Even though you disinherit me or turn me off with a penny, my mind is made up, and my duty’s clear.
“While things like these are going on in the world, outside, I have no right to linger and to idle here. I am no child, now; I have been thinking of late, reading, learning. Though I can’t see it all clearly, yet, I know that every bite we eat, means deprivation to some other people, somewhere. This light and luxury mean poverty and darkness elsewhere. This fruit, this wine, this very bread is ours because some obscure and unknown men have toiled and sweat and given them to us. Even this cut glass on our table—see! What tragedies it could reveal, could it but speak! What tales of coughing, consumptive glass-cutters, bending over wheels, their lungs cut to pieces by the myriad spicules of sharp glass, so that we, we of our class, may enjoy beauty of design and coloring! And the silken gown I wear—that too has cost—”
“No more! No more of this!” gurgled old Flint, now nearly in apoplexy. “I deny you! I repudiate you, Anarchist that you are! Go! Never come back—never, never—!”
Stumbling blindly, he turned and staggered out of the room. She watched him go, nor tried to steady his uncertain steps. In the hallway, outside, she heard him ring for Slawson, heard the valet come, and both of them ascend the stairs.
“Father,” she whispered to herself, a look of great and pure spiritual beauty on her noble face, “father, this had to come. Sooner or later, it was inevitable. Whatever you have done, I forgive you, for you are my father, and have surely acted for what you think my interest.
“But none the less, the end is here and now. Between you and me, a great gulf is fixed. And from tonight I face the world, to battle with it, learn from it, and know the truth in every way. Enough of this false, easy, unnatural life. I cannot live it any longer; it would crush and stifle me! Enough! I must be free, I shall be free, to know, and dare, and do!”
That night, having had no further speech with old Flint, Kate left Idle Hour, taking just a few necessities in a suit-case, and a few dollars for her immediate needs.
Giving no explanation to maid, valet or anyone, she let herself out, walked through the great est
ate and down Englewood Avenue, to the station, where she caught a train for Jersey City.
The midnight special for Chicago bore her swiftly westward. No sleeping car she took, but passed the night in a seat of an ordinary coach. Her ticket read “Rochester.”
The old page of her Book of Life was closed forever. A new and better page was open wide.
CHAPTER XXV.
THROUGH STEEL BARS.
True to her plan, Catherine ended her journey at Rochester. She engaged a room at a second-rate hotel—marvelling greatly at the meanness of the accommodations, the like of which she had never seen—and, at ten o’clock of the morning, appeared at the Central Police Station. The bundle of papers in her hand indicated that she had read the latest lies and venom poured out on Gabriel’s defenseless head.
The haughty, full-fed sergeant in charge of the station made some objections, at first, to letting her see Gabriel; but the tone of her voice and the level look of her gray eye presently convinced him he was playing with fire, and he gave in. Summoning an officer, he bade the man conduct her. Iron doors opened and closed for her. She was conscious of long, ill-smelling, concrete-floored corridors, with little steel cages at either side—cages where hopeless, sodden wrecks of men were standing, or sitting in attitudes of brutal despair, or lying on foul bunks, motionless and inert as logs.
For a moment her heart failed her.
“Good Lord! Can such things be?” she whispered to herself. “So this—this is a police station? And real jails and penitentiaries are worse? Oh, horrible! I never dreamed of anything like this, or any men like these!”
The officer, stopping at a cell-door and banging thereon with some keys, startled her.
“Here, youse,” he addressed the man within, “lady to see youse!”
Catherine was conscious that her heart was pounding hard and her breath coming fast, as she peered in through those cold, harsh metal bars. For a minute she could find no thought, no word. Within, her eyes—still unaccustomed to the gloom—vaguely perceived a man’s figure, big and powerful, and different in its bearing from those other cringing wretches she had glimpsed.
Then the man came toward her, stopped, peered and for a second drew back. And then—then she heard his voice, in a kind of startled joy:
“Oh—is it—is it you?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I must see you! I must talk with you, again, and know the truth!”
The officer edged nearer.
“Youse can talk all y’ want to,” he dictated, hoarsely, “but don’t you pass nothin’ in. No dope, nor nothin’, see? I’ll stick around an’ watch, anyhow; but don’t try to slip him no dream powders or no ‘snow.’ ‘Cause if you do—”
“What—what on earth are you talking about?” the girl demanded, turning on the officer with absolute astonishment. But he, only winking wisely, repeated:
“You heard me, didn’t you? No dope. I’m wise to this whole game.”
At a loss for his meaning, yet without any real desire to fathom it, Kate turned back toward Gabriel.
A moment they two looked at each other, each noting any change that might have taken place since that wonderful hour in the sugar-house, each hungering and thirsting for a sight of the other’s face. In her heart, already Kate knew as well as she knew she was alive, that this man was totally innocent of the foul charges heaped upon him. And so she looked at him with eyes wherein lay no reproach, no doubt and no suspicion. And, as she looked, tears started, and her heart swelled hotly in her breast; for he was bruised and battered and a helpless captive.
“He, caged like a trapped animal!” her thought was. “He, so strong, and free, and brave! Oh, horrible, horrible!”
He must have read something of this feeling, in her face; for now, coming close to the bars, he said in a low tone:
“Girl—your name I don’t know, even yet—girl, you mustn’t pity me! That’s one thing I can’t have. I’m here because the master class is stronger than my class, the working class. Here, because I’m dangerous to that master class. This isn’t said to make myself out a martyr. It’s only to make you see things right. I’m not complaining at this plight. I’ve richly earned it—under Capitalism. So, then, that’s settled.
“And now, what’s more important, tell me how you are! And did your wound cause you much trouble? I confess I’ve passed many an anxious hour, thinking of your narrow escape and of your injury. It wasn’t too bad, was it? Tell me!”
“No,” she answered, still holding to the bars, for she somehow felt quite unaccountably weak. “It wasn’t very bad. There’s hardly any scar at all—or won’t be, when it’s fully healed. But all this is trifling, compared to what you’ve suffered and are suffering. Oh, what a horrible affair! What frightful accusations! Tell me the truth, Boy—how, why could—?”
He looked at her a moment, in silence, noting her splendid hair and eyes and mouth, the firm, well-moulded chin, the confident and self-reliant poise of the shapely head; and as he looked, he knew he loved this woman. He understood, at last, how dear she was to him—dearer than anything else in all the world save just his principles and stern life work. He comprehended the meaning of all, his dreams and visions and long thoughts. And, caring nothing for consequences, unskilled in the finesse of dealing with women, acting wholly on the irresistible impulses of a heart that overflowed, he looked deep into those gray eyes and said in a tone that set her heart-strings vibrating:
“Listen! The truth? How could I tell you anything else? I know not who you are, and care not. That you are rich and powerful and free, while I am poor and in captivity, means nothing. Love cares not for such trifles. It dares all, hopes all, trusts all, believes all—and is patient in adversity.”
“Love?” she whispered, her face paling. “How do you dare to—?”
“Dare? Because my heart bids me. And where it bids, I care not for conventions or consequences!” He flung his hand out with a splendid gesture, his head high, his eyes lustrous in the half-light of the cell. “Where it leads, I have to follow. That is why I am a Socialist! That is why I am here, today, outcast and execrated, a prisoner, in danger of long years of living death in the pestilential tomb of some foul penitentiary!”
“You’re here because—because you are a Socialist?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Yes,” said he. “I tried to help a suffering, outcast woman—or one who posed as such. And she betrayed me to my enemies. And so—”
“There was a woman in this affair, then?” Catherine queried with sudden pain. “The newspapers haven’t made the story all up out of whole cloth?”
“No. There was a woman. A Delilah, who delivered me into the hands of the Philistines, when I tried to help her in what she lied in telling me was her need. Will you hear the story?”
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.
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