"Oh, Bess," he said, "for God's sake, don't go!"
He implored her in his look, then snatching out his watch ran to the hall, seized his hat and top-coat, and went out, flinging on his coat as he ran, and leaving the door flying wide behind him. Elizabeth stood looking after him. When she turned, her mother was in the room.
"What can be the matter with Dick?" said Elizabeth. "I never saw him so excited before. He seemed--" She paused, and bit her lip.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Ward calmly, "you see now, I hope, just how the world regards such a wild action. It was his love and respect for his sister, of course."
XI
"No, don't say anything more. I've thought it all out; my duty's clear now, I must go." Elizabeth laid her hand on her father's shoulder, and though he turned from the great desk at which he sat in his private office, he hesitated. "Come on."
"That conscience of yours, Bess--" he began, drawing down the lid of his desk.
"Yes, I know, but I can't help it."
"How did you decide at last to go?" asked Ward, as they walked rapidly along in the crowded street.
"Well, it tortured me--I couldn't decide. It seemed so difficult,--every one--mama, our dear Modderwell, Mr. Eades, Dick--he nearly lost his reason, and he did lose his temper--thought it impossible. But at last I decided--"
"Yes?"
"--just to go."
Elizabeth gave a little laugh at this not very illuminating explanation.
"I didn't know what the proprieties were," she went on. "Our little code had not provided rules--what to wear, the chaperonage, and all that, you know. And then,"--she abandoned her irony,--"I thought of you."
"As a last resort, eh?" said Ward, looking fondly into her face, flushing behind her veil in the keen November air. She drew close to him, put her hand on his arm.
"Yes," she said, "and as a first resort, as a constant, never-failing resort."
She gave his arm a little squeeze, and he pressed her hand to his side in silence.
"Do you know where it is?" Elizabeth asked presently.
"Oh, yes, I was there once."
"When?"
"When that boy of mine was arrested--Graves."
"Yes, I remember."
"I wonder," he said after a pause, and he paused again at the question he seemed to fear--"whatever became of him!"
She had never told him of that day at the charity bureau; she wondered if she should do so now, but she heard him sigh, and she let it pass.
"Yes," he went on as if she had been privy to his rapid train of thought, "I suppose such things must be; something must be done with them, of course. I hope I did right."
At the Central Station they encountered a young policeman, who, when he saw Ward, evidently recognized him as a man of affairs, for he came forward with flattering alacrity, touching his helmet in the respect which authority always has ready for the rich, as perhaps the real source of its privilege and its strength. The young policeman, with a smile on his pleasant Irish face, took Ward and Elizabeth in charge.
"I'll take yez to the front office," he said, "and let yez speak to the inspector himself."
When McFee understood who Ward was, he came out instantly, with an unofficial readiness to make a difficult experience easy for them; he implied an instant and delicate recognition of the patronage he saw, or thought it proper to see, in this visit, and he even expressed a sympathy for Gusta herself.
"I'm glad you came, Mr. Ward," he said. "We had to hold the poor girl, of course, for a few days, until we could finish our investigation of the case. Will you go up--or shall I have her brought down?"
"Oh, we'll go up," said Ward, wondering where that was, and discovering suddenly in himself the usual morbid desire to look at the inmates of a prison. The sergeant detailed to conduct them led them up two broad flights of stairs, and down a long hall, where, at his step, a matron appeared, with a bunch of keys hanging at her white apron. Elizabeth went with none of the sensations she had expected. She had been surprised to find the police station a quiet place, and the policemen themselves had been very polite, obliging and disinterested. But when the matron unlocked one of the doors, and stood aside, Elizabeth felt her breast flutter with fear.
The sergeant stood in the hall, silent and unconcerned, and when the matron asked him if he would be present at the interview he shook his head in a way that indicated the occasion as one of those when rules and regulations may be suspended. Ward, though he would have liked to go in, elected to remain outside with the sergeant, and as he did this he smiled reassuringly at Elizabeth, just then hesitating on the threshold.
"Oh, just step right in," said the matron, standing politely aside. And Elizabeth drew a deep breath and took the step.
She entered a small vestibule formed of high partitions of flanged boards that were painted drab; and she waited another moment, with its gathering anxiety and apprehension, for the matron to unlock a second door. The door opened with a whine and there, at the other end of the room in the morning light that struggled through the dirty glass of the grated window, she saw Gusta. The girl sat on a common wooden chair that had once been yellow, her hat on, her hands gloved and folded in her lap, as if in another instant she were to leave the room she somehow had an air of refusing to identify herself with.
"She's sat that way ever since she came," the matron whispered. "She hasn't slep' a wink, nor e't a mouthful."
[Illustration: "She's sat that way ever since she came"]
Elizabeth's glance swept the room which was Gusta's prison, its walls lined higher than her head with sheet-iron; on one side a narrow cot, frowsy, filthy, that looked as if it were never made, though the dirty pillow told how many persons had slept in it--or tried to sleep in it.
There was a wooden table, with a battered tin cup, a few crusts and crumbs of rye bread, and cockroaches that raced energetically about, pausing now and then to wave their inquisitive antennae, and, besides, a cheap, small edition of the Bible, adding with a kind of brutal mockery the final touch of squalor to the room.
Gusta moved, looked up, made sure, and then suddenly rose and came toward her.
"I knew you'd come, Miss Elizabeth," the girl said, with a relief that compromised the certainty she had just expressed.
"I came as soon as I could, Gusta," said Elizabeth, with an amused conjecture as to what Gusta might think had the girl known what difficulties she had had in getting there at all.
"Yes," said Gusta, "thank you, I--"
She blushed to her throat. They stood there in the middle of that common prison; a sudden constraint lay on them. Elizabeth, conscious of the difficulty of the whole situation, and with a little palpitating fear at being in a prison at all--a haunting apprehension of some mistake, some oversight, some sudden slip or sliding of a bolt--did not know what to say to Gusta now that she was there. She felt helpless, there was not even a chair to sit in; she shuddered at the thought of contact with any of the mean articles of furniture, and stood rigidly in the middle of the room. She looked at Gusta closely; already, of course, with her feminine instinct, she had taken in Gusta's dress--the clothes that she instantly recognized as being better than Gusta had ever before worn--a hat heavy with plumes, a tan coat, long and of that extreme mode which foretold its early passing from the fashion, the high-heeled boots. Her coat was open and revealed a thin bodice with a lace yoke, and a chain of some sort. An odor of perfume enveloped her.
The whole costume was distasteful to Elizabeth, it was something too much, and had an indefinable quality of tawdriness that was hard to confirm, until she saw in it, somehow, the first signs of moral disintegration. And this showed in Gusta's face, fuller--as was her whole figure--than Elizabeth remembered it, and in a certain coarseness of expression that had scarcely as yet gone the length of fixing itself in lines. Elizabeth felt something that she recoiled from, and her attitude stiffened imperceptibly. But not imperceptibly to Gusta, who was a woman, too, and had an instant sense of the woman in Elizabeth shrinking from what the woman in her no longer had to protect itself with, and she felt the woman's rush of anger and rebellion in such a relation. But then, she softened, and looked up with big tears. She had a sudden yearning to fling herself on Elizabeth's breast, but leave was wanting, and then, almost desperately, for she must assert her sisterhood, must touch and cling to her, she seized Elizabeth's hand and held it.
"Oh, Miss Elizabeth," she said, "I oughtn't to 'av' sent for you. I know I had no right; but you was always good to me, and I had no one.
I've done nothing. I've done nothing, honest, honest, Miss Elizabeth, I've done nothing. I don't know what I'm here for at all; they won't tell me. And Archie, too, it must have something to do with him, but he's innocent, too. He hasn't done nothing either. Won't you believe me? Oh, say you will!"
She still clung to Elizabeth's hand, and now she pressed it in both her own, and raised it, and came closer, and looked into Elizabeth's face.
"Say you believe me!" she insisted, and Elizabeth, half in fear, as though to pacify a maniac, nodded.
"Of course, of course, Gusta."
"You mean it?"