"No."
"Well, I confess," he leaned back helplessly, "you baffle me."
"Oh, but it wasn't a _bargain_," she said. Her gray eyes looked calmly into his as she told him what she knew was not accurately the truth, and she was glad of the moment because it gave her the opportunity to declare false what had so long been true to her, and, just as she had feared, true to him. She felt restored, rehabilitated in her old self-esteem, and she relished his perplexity.
"It seems inconsistent," he said.
"Does it? How strange!" She said it coldly, and slowly she took her eyes from him. They were silent for a while.
"Then my fate is settled--irrevocably?" he asked at length.
"Yes, irrevocably."
"I wish," he complained, "that I understood."
"I wish you did," she replied.
"Can't you tell me?"
"Don't force me to."
"Very well," he said, drawing himself up. "I beg your pardon." These words, however, meant that the apology should have been hers.
As they drove home, her mother said to her:
"What were you and John Eades talking about back there in that corner?"
"An old subject."
"Was he--" Mrs. Ward was burning with a curiosity she did not, however, like to put into words.
Elizabeth laughed.
"Yes," she said, "he _was_. But I settled him."
"I hope you were not--"
"Brutal?"
"Well, perhaps not that--you, of course, could not be that."
"Don't be too sure."
They discussed Eades as the carriage rolled along, but their points of view could never be the same.
"And yet, after all, dear," Mrs. Ward was saying, "we must be just. I don't see--"
"No," Elizabeth interrupted her mother. "You don't see. None of you can see. It wasn't because he wouldn't let Dick go. It was because that one act of his revealed his true nature, his real self; showed me that he isn't a man, but a machine; not a human being, but a prosecutor; he's an institution, and one can't marry an _institution_, you know,"
she concluded oddly.
"Elizabeth!" said Mrs. Ward. "That doesn't sound quite ladylike or nice!"
Elizabeth laughed lightly now, in the content that came with the new happiness that was glowing within her.
XXXIII
Curly Jackson was hurrying along Race Street, glad of his old friend, the darkness, that in February had begun to gather at five o'clock. He passed a factory, a tall, ugly building of brick, and in the light of the incandescent lamps he could see the faces of the machinists bent over the glistening machines. Curly looked at these workmen, thought of their toil, of the homes they would go to presently, of the wives that would be waiting, and the children--suddenly a whistle blew, the roar of machinery subsided, whirred, hummed and died away; a glad, spontaneous shout went up from the factory, and, in another minute, a regiment of men in overalls and caps, begrimed and greasy, burst into the street and went trooping off in the twilight. The scene moved Curly profoundly; he longed for some touch of this humanity, for the fellowship of these working-men, for some one to slap his back, and, in mere animal spirits and joy at release, sprint a race for half a block with him.
Curly felt that these workmen were like him, at least, in one respect, they were as glad to be released from the factory as he had been half an hour before to be released from the jail. He had left the jail, but he was not free. Inside the jail he had the sympathy and understanding of his fellows; here he had nothing but hatred and suspicion. Even these men trooping along beside him and, to his joy, brushing against him now and then, would have scorned and avoided him had they known he was just released from prison. There was no work for him among them, and his only freedom lay still in the fields, the woods, and along the highways of gravel and of iron.
"Well," he thought, grinding his teeth bitterly, "they'll have to pay toll now!"
He found Gibbs in his back room, alone, and evidently in a gloomy mood.
Gibbs stretched his hand across the table.
"Well, Curly, I'm glad to see some one in luck."
"You're right, Dan, my luck's good. I'm no hoodoo. To be in the way I was and have your pal topped, to make a clear lamas--that looks like good luck to me."
"Oh, well, they never had anything on you."
"They didn't have anything on Dutch neither--but in the frame-up I didn't know but they'd put a sinker on me, too. What made me sore was having that Flanagan rap against me--why, great God! a job like that--that some fink, some gay cat done after he'd got scared!" Jackson could not find the words to express his disgust, his sense of injury, the stain, as it were, on his professional reputation.
"It was that they put Dutch away on."
"Sure, I know that, Dan, and everybody knows that. It was just like a mob of hoosiers after you with pitchforks; like that time old Dillon and Mason and me gave 'em battle in the jungle in Illinois. Well, that's the way these people was. They was howlin' around that court-house and that pogey--God! to think of it! To think of a fellow's getting a lump like that handed to him--all for croakin' a copper!" Curly shook his head a moment in his inability to understand this situation, and he held his hands out in appeal to Gibbs, and said in his high, shrill voice, emphasizing certain words:
"What in hell do you make of it, Dan?"
"What's the use wasting time over that?" Gibbs asked. "That's all over, ain't it? Then cut it out. Course,"--it seemed, however, that Gibbs had some final comment of his own to make--"you might say the kid ought to've had a medal for croaking a gendie. I wisht when he pushed his barker he'd wiped out a few more bulls. He was a good shot."
Gibbs said this with an air of closing the discussion, and of having paid his tribute to Archie.
"Well, Dan," Curly began, "you'll have to put me on the nut until I can get to work. I haven't even got pad money. I gave my bit to Jane; she says graft's on the fritz. She twisted a super, but it was an old canister--has she been in to-day?"
Gibbs shook his head gloomily.
"She didn't expect 'em to turn me out to-day." Curly mused in a moment's silence. "Ain't she the limit? One day she was goin' to bash that sister of poor Dutch, the next she's doubled with her, holdin' her up. She had me scared when she landed in; I was 'fraid she'd tip off the lay somehow--course"--he hastened to do her justice--"I knew she wouldn't throw me down, but the main bull-- What's wrong, Dan?" Curly, seeing that Gibbs was not interested, stopped suddenly.
"Oh, everything's wrong. Dean's been here--now he's pinched!"
"No! What for?"
"You'd never guess."