Chapter 11. The Thief

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER XI. THE THIEF

Mary remained in joyous spirits after her victorious matching of brains against a lawyer of high standing in his profession. For the time being, conscience was muted by gratified ambition. Her thoughts just then were far from the miseries of the past, with their evil train of consequences in the present. But that past was soon to be recalled to her with a vividness most terrible.

She had entered the telephone-booth, which she had caused to be installed out of an extra closet of her bedroom for the sake of greater privacy on occasion, and it was during her absence from the drawing-room that Garson again came into the apartment, seeking her. On being told by Aggie as to Mary's whereabouts, he sat down to await her return, listening without much interest to the chatter of the adventuress.... It was just then that the maid appeared.

"There's a girl wants to see Miss Turner," she explained.

The irrepressible Aggie put on her most finically elegant air.

"Has she a card?" she inquired haughtily, while the maid tittered appreciation.

"No," was the answer. "But she says it's important. I guess the poor thing's in hard luck, from the look of her," the kindly Fannie added.

"Oh, then she'll be welcome, of course," Aggie declared, and Garson nodded in acquiescence. "Tell her to come in and wait, Fannie. Miss Turner will be here right away." She turned to Garson as the maid left the room. "Mary sure is an easy boob," she remarked, cheerfully. "Bless her soft heart!"

A curiously gentle smile of appreciation softened the immobility of the forger's face as he again nodded assent.

"We might just as well pipe off the skirt before Mary gets here," Aggie suggested, with eagerness.

A minute later, a girl perhaps twenty years of age stepped just within the doorway, and stood there with eyes downcast, after one swift, furtive glance about her. Her whole appearance was that of dejection. Her soiled black gown, the cringing posture, the pallor of her face, proclaimed the abject misery of her state.

Aggie, who was not exuberant in her sympathies for any one other than herself, addressed the newcomer with a patronizing inflection, modulated in her best manner.

"Won't you come in, please?" she requested.

The shrinking girl shot another veiled look in the direction of the speaker.

"Are you Miss Turner?" she asked, in a voice broken by nervous dismay.

"Really, I am very sorry," Aggie replied, primly; "but I am only her cousin, Miss Agnes Lynch. But Miss Turner is likely to be back any minute now."

"Can I wait?" came the timid question.

"Certainly," Aggie answered, hospitably. "Please sit down."

As the girl obediently sank down on the nearest chair, Garson addressed her sharply, so that the visitor started uneasily at the unexpected sound.

"You don't know Miss Turner?"

"No," came the faint reply.

"Then, what do you want to see her about?"

There was a brief pause before the girl could pluck up courage enough for an answer. Then, it was spoken confusedly, almost in a whisper.

"She once helped a girl friend of mine, and I thought--I thought----"

"You thought she might help you," Garson interrupted.

But Aggie, too, possessed some perceptive powers, despite the fact that she preferred to use them little in ordinary affairs.

"You have been in stir--prison, I mean." She hastily corrected the lapse into underworld slang.

Came a distressed muttering of assent from the girl.

"How sad!" Aggie remarked, in a voice of shocked pity for one so inconceivably unfortunate. "How very, very sad!"

This ingenuous method of diversion was put to an end by the entrance of Mary, who stopped short on seeing the limp figure huddled in the chair.

"A visitor, Agnes?" she inquired.

At the sound of her voice, and before Aggie could hit on a fittingly elegant form of reply, the girl looked up. And now, for the first time, she spoke with some degree of energy, albeit there was a sinister undertone in the husky voice.

"You're Miss Turner?" she questioned.

"Yes," Mary said, simply. Her words rang kindly; and she smiled encouragement.

A gasp burst from the white lips of the girl, and she cowered as one stricken physically.

"Mary Turner! Oh, my God! I----" She hid her face within her arms and sat bent until her head rested on her knees in an abasement of misery.

Vaguely startled by the hysterical outburst from the girl, Mary's immediate thought was that here was a pitiful instance of one suffering from starvation.

"Joe," she directed rapidly, "have Fannie bring a glass of milk with an egg and a little brandy in it, right away."

The girl in the chair was shaking soundlessly under the stress of her emotions. A few disjointed phrases fell from her quivering lips.

"I didn't know--oh, I couldn't!"

"Don't try to talk just now," Mary warned, reassuringly. "Wait until you've had something to eat."

Aggie, who had observed developments closely, now lifted her voice in tardy lamentations over her own stupidity. There was no affectation of the fine lady in her self-reproach.

"Why, the poor gawk's hungry!" she exclaimed! "And I never got the dope on her. Ain't I the simp!"

The girl regained a degree of self-control, and showed something of forlorn dignity.

"Yes," she said dully, "I'm starving."

Mary regarded the afflicted creature with that sympathy born only of experience.

"Yes," she said softly, "I understand." Then she spoke to Aggie. "Take her to my room, and let her rest there for a while. Have her drink the egg and milk slowly, and then lie down for a few minutes anyhow."

Aggie obeyed with an air of bustling activity.

"Sure, I will!" she declared. She went to the girl and helped her to stand up. "We'll fix you out all right," she said, comfortingly. "Come along with me.... Hungry! Gee, but that's tough!"

Half an hour afterward, while Mary was at her desk, giving part of her attention to Joe Garson, who sat near, and part to a rather formidable pile of neatly arranged papers, Aggie reported with her charge, who, though still shambling of gait, and stooping, showed by some faint color in her face and an increased steadiness of bearing that the food had already strengthened her much.

"She would come," Aggie explained. "I thought she ought to rest for a while longer anyhow." She half-shoved the girl into a chair opposite the desk, in an absurd travesty on the maternal manner.

"I'm all right, I tell you," came the querulous protest.

Whereupon, Aggie gave over the uncongenial task of mothering, and settled herself comfortably in a chair, with her legs merely crossed as a compromise between ease and propriety.

"Are you quite sure?" Mary said to the girl. And then, as the other nodded in assent, she spoke with a compelling kindliness. "Then you must tell us all about it--this trouble of yours, you know. What is your name?"

Once again the girl had recourse to the swift, searching, furtive glance, but her voice was colorless as she replied, listlessly:

"Helen Morris."

Mary regarded the girl with an expression that was inscrutable when she spoke again.

"I don't have to ask if you have been in prison," she said gravely. "Your face shows it."

"I--I came out--three months ago," was the halting admission.

Mary watched the shrinking figure reflectively for a long minute before she spoke again. Then there was a deeper resonance in her voice.

"And you'd made up your mind to go straight?"

"Yes." The word was a whisper.

"You were going to do what the chaplain had told you," Mary went on in a voice vibrant with varied emotions. "You were going to start all over again, weren't you? You were going to begin a new life, weren't you?" The bent head of the girl bent still lower in assent. There came a cynical note into Mary's utterance now.

"It doesn't work very well, does it?" she asked, bitterly.

The girl gave sullen agreement.

"No," she said dully; "I'm whipped."

Mary's manner changed on the instant. She spoke cheerfully for the first time.

"Well, then," she questioned, "how would you like to work with us?"

The girl looked up for a second with another of her fleeting, stealthy glances.

"You--you mean that----?"

Mary explained her intention in the matter very explicitly. Her voice grew boastful.

"Our kind of work pays well when you know how. Look at us."

Aggie welcomed the opportunity for speech, too long delayed.

"Hats from Joseph's, gowns from Lucile's, and cracked ice from Tiffany's. But it ain't ladylike to wear it," she concluded with a reproachful glance at her mentor.

Mary disregarded the frivolous interruption, and went on speaking to the girl, and now there was something pleasantly cajoling in her manner.

"Suppose I should stake you for the present, and put you in with a good crowd. All you would have to do would be to answer advertisements for servant girls. I will see that you have the best of references. Then, when you get in with the right people, you will open the front door some night and let in the gang. Of course, you will make a get-away when they do, and get your bit as well."

There flashed still another of the swift, sly glances, and the lips of the girl parted as if she would speak. But she did not; only, her head sagged even lower on her breast, and the shrunken form grew yet more shrunken. Mary, watching closely, saw these signs, and in the same instant a change came over her. Where before there had been an underlying suggestion of hardness, there was now a womanly warmth of genuine sympathy.

"It doesn't suit you?" she said, very softly. "Good! I was in hopes it wouldn't. So, here's another plan." Her voice had become very winning. "Suppose you could go West--some place where you would have a fair chance, with money enough so you could live like a human being till you got a start?"

There came a tensing of the relaxed form, and the head lifted a little so that the girl could look at her questioner. And, this time, the glance, though of the briefest, was less furtive.

"I will give you that chance," Mary said simply, "if you really want it."

That speech was like a current of strength to the wretched girl. She sat suddenly erect, and her words came eagerly.

"Oh, I do!" And now her hungry gaze remained fast on the face of the woman who offered her salvation.

Mary sprang up and moved a step toward the girl who continued to stare at her, fascinated. She was now all wholesome. The memory of her own wrongs surged in her during this moment only to make her more appreciative of the blessedness of seemly life. She was moved to a divine compassion over this waif for whom she might prove a beneficent providence. There was profound conviction in the emphasis with which she spoke her warning.

"Then I have just one thing to say to you first. If you are going to live straight, start straight, and then go through with it. Do you know what that means?"

"You mean, keep straight all the time?" The girl spoke with a force drawn from the other's strength.

"I mean more than that," Mary went on earnestly. "I mean, forget that you were ever in prison. I don't know what you have done--I don't think I care. But whatever it was, you have paid for it--a pretty big price, too." Into these last words there crept the pathos of one who knew. The sympathy of it stirred the listener to fearful memories.

"I have, I have!" The thin voice broke, wailing.

"Well, then," Mary went on, "just begin all over again, and be sure you stand up for your rights. Don't let them make you pay a second time. Go where no one knows you, and don't tell the first people who are kind to you that you have been crooked. If they think you are straight, why, be it. Then nobody will have any right to complain." Her tone grew suddenly pleading. "Will you promise me this?"

"Yes, I promise," came the answer, very gravely, quickened with hope.

"Good!" Mary exclaimed, with a smile of approval. "Wait a minute," she added, and left the room.

"Huh! Pretty soft for some people," Aggie remarked to Garson, with a sniff. She felt no alarm lest she wound the sensibilities of the girl. She herself had never let delicacy interfere between herself and money. It was really stranger that the forger, who possessed a more sympathetic nature, did not scruple to speak an assent openly. Somehow, he felt an inexplicable prejudice against this abject recipient of Mary's bounty, though not for the world would he have checked the generous impulse on the part of the woman he so revered. It was his instinct on her behalf that made him now vaguely uneasy, as if he sensed some malign influence against her there present with them.

Mary returned soon. In her hand she carried a roll of bills. She went to the girl and held out the money. Her voice was business-like now, but very kind.

"Take this. It will pay your fare West, and keep you quite a while if you are careful."

But, without warning, a revulsion seized on the girl. Of a sudden, she shrank again, and turned her head away, and her body trembled.

"I can't take it," she stammered. "I can't! I can't!"

Mary stood silent for a moment from sheer amazement over the change. When she spoke, her voice had hardened a little. It is not agreeable to have one's beneficence flouted.

"Didn't you come here for help?" she demanded.

"Yes," was the faltering reply, "but--but--I didn't know--it was you!" The words came with a rush of desperation.

"Then, you have met me before?" Mary said, quietly.

"No, no!" The girl's voice rose shrill.

Aggie spoke her mind with commendable frankness.

"She's lying."

And, once again, Garson agreed. His yes was spoken in a tone of complete certainty. That Mary, too, was of their opinion was shown in her next words.

"So, you have met me before? Where?"

The girl unwittingly made confession in her halting words.

"I--I can't tell you." There was despair in her voice.

"You must." Mary spoke with severity. She felt that this mystery held in it something sinister to herself. "You must," she repeated imperiously.

The girl only crouched lower.

"I can't!" she cried again. She was panting as if in exhaustion.

"Why can't you?" Mary insisted. She had no sympathy now for the girl's distress, merely a great suspicious curiosity.

"Because--because----" The girl could not go on.

Mary's usual shrewdness came to her aid, and she put her next question in a different direction.

"What were you sent up for?" she asked briskly. "Tell me."

It was Garson who broke the silence that followed.

"Come on, now!" he ordered. There was a savage note in his voice under which the girl visibly winced. Mary made a gesture toward him that he should not interfere. Nevertheless, the man's command had in it a threat which the girl could not resist and she answered, though with a reluctance that made the words seem dragged from her by some outside force--as indeed they were.

"For stealing."

"Stealing what?" Mary said.

"Goods."

"Where from?"

A reply came in a breath so low that it was barely audible.

"The Emporium."

In a flash of intuition, the whole truth was revealed to the woman who stood looking down at the cowering creature before her.

"The Emporium!" she repeated. There was a tragedy in the single word. Her voice grew cold with hate, the hate born of innocence long tortured. "Then you are the one who----"

The accusation was cut short by the girl's shriek.

"I am not! I am not, I tell you."

For a moment, Mary lost her poise. Her voice rose in a flare of rage.

"You are! You are!"

The craven spirit of the girl could struggle no more. She could only sit in a huddled, shaking heap of dread. The woman before her had been disciplined by sorrow to sternest self-control. Though racked by emotions most intolerable, Mary soon mastered their expression to such an extent that when she spoke again, as if in self-communion, her words came quietly, yet with overtones of a supreme wo.

"She did it!" Then, after a little, she addressed the girl with a certain wondering before this mystery of horror. "Why did you throw the blame on me?"

The girl made several efforts before her mumbling became intelligible, and then her speech was gasping, broken with fear.

"I found out they were watching me, and I was afraid they would catch me. So, I took them and ran into the cloak-room, and put them in a locker that wasn't close to mine, and some in the pocket of a coat that was hanging there. God knows I didn't know whose it was. I just put them there--I was frightened----"

"And you let me go to prison for three years!" There was a menace in Mary's voice under which the girl cringed again.

"I was scared," she whined. "I didn't dare to tell."

"But they caught you later," Mary went on inexorably. "Why didn't you tell then?"

"I was afraid," came the answer from the shuddering girl. "I told them it was the first time I had taken anything and they let me off with a year."

Once more, the wrath of the victim flamed high.

"You!" Mary cried. "You cried and lied, and they let you off with a year. I wouldn't cry. I told the truth--and----" Her voice broke in a tearless sob. The color had gone out of her face, and she stood rigid, looking down at the girl whose crime had ruined her life with an expression of infinite loathing in her eyes. Garson rose from his chair as if to go to her, and his face passed swiftly from compassion to ferocity as his gaze went from the woman he had saved from the river to the girl who had been the first cause of her seeking a grave in the waters. Yet, though he longed with every fiber of him to comfort the stricken woman, he did not dare intrude upon her in this time of her anguish, but quietly dropped back into his seat and sat watching with eyes now tender, now baleful, as they shifted their direction.

Aggie took advantage of the pause. Her voice was acid.

"Some people are sneaks--just sneaks!"

Somehow, the speech was welcome to the girl, gave her a touch of courage sufficient for cowardly protestations. It seemed to relieve the tension drawn by the other woman's torment. It was more like the abuse that was familiar to her. A gush of tears came.

"I'll never forgive myself, never!" she moaned.

Contempt mounted in Mary's breast.

"Oh, yes, you will," she said, malevolently. "People forgive themselves pretty easily." The contempt checked for a little the ravages of her grief. "Stop crying," she commanded harshly. "Nobody is going to hurt you." She thrust the money again toward the girl, and crowded it into the half-reluctant, half-greedy hand.

"Take it, and get out." The contempt in her voice rang still sharper, mordant.

Even the puling creature writhed under the lash of Mary's tones. She sprang up, slinking back a step.

"I can't take it!" she cried, whimpering. But she did not drop the money.

"Take the chance while you have it," Mary counseled, still with the contempt that pierced even the hardened girl's sense of selfishness. She pointed toward the door. "Go!--before I change my mind."

The girl needed, indeed, no second bidding. With the money still clutched in her hand, she went forth swiftly, stumbling a little in her haste, fearful lest, at the last moment, the woman she had so wronged should in fact change in mood, take back the money--ay, even give her over to that terrible man with the eyes of hate, to put her to death as she deserved.

Freed from the miasma of that presence, Mary remained motionless for a long minute, then sighed from her tortured heart. She turned and went slowly to her chair at the desk, and seated herself languidly, weakened by the ordeal through which she had passed.

"A girl I didn't know!" she said, bewilderedly; "perhaps had never spoken to--who smashed my life like that! Oh, if it wasn't so awful, it would be--funny! It would be funny!" A gust of hysterical laughter burst from her. "Why, it is funny!" she cried, wildly. "It is funny!"

"Mary!" Garson exclaimed sharply. He leaped across the room to face her. "That's no good!" he said severely.

Aggie, too, rushed forward.

"No good at all!" she declared loudly.

The interference recalled the distressed woman to herself. She made a desperate effort for self-command. Little by little, the unmeaning look died down, and presently she sat silent and moveless, staring at the two with stormy eyes out of a wan face.

"You were right," she said at last, in a lifeless voice. "It's done, and can't be undone. I was a fool to let it affect me like that. I really thought I had lost all feeling about it, but the sight of that girl--the knowledge that she had done it--brought it all back to me. Well, you understand, don't you?"

"We understand," Garson said, grimly. But there was more than grimness, infinitely more, in the expression of his clear, glowing eyes.

Aggie thought that it was her turn to voice herself, which she did without undue restraint.

"Perhaps, we do, but I dunno! I'll tell you one thing, though. If any dame sent me up for three years and then wanted money from me, do you think she'd get it? Wake me up any time in the night and ask me. Not much--not a little bit much! I'd hang on to it like an old woman to her last tooth." And that was Aggie's final summing up of her impressions concerning the scene she had just witnessed. _

Read next: Chapter 12. A Bridegroom Spurned

Read previous: Chapter 10. Marked Money

Table of content of Within the Law: From the Play of Bayard Veiller


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book