第18章 THE VICTIM OF THE LAW(4)

"I have no pals!" she ejaculated, furiously."I never stole anything in my life.Must I go on telling you over and over again?" Her voice rose in a wail of misery."Oh, why won't any one believe me?"Gilder was much offended by this display of an hysterical grief, which seemed to his phlegmatic temperament altogether unwarranted by the circumstances.He spoke decisively.

"Unless you can control yourself, you must go." He pushed away the pad of paper, and tossed the pencil aside in physical expression of his displeasure."Why did you send that message, if you have nothing to say?" he demanded, with increasing choler.

But now the girl had regained her former poise.She stood a little drooping and shaken, where for a moment she had been erect and tensed.There was a vast weariness in her words as she answered.

"I have something to tell you, Mr.Gilder," she said, quietly.

"Only, I--I sort of lost my grip on the way here, with this man by my side.""Most of 'em do, the first time," the officer commented, with a certain grim appreciation.

"Well?" Gilder insisted querulously, as the girl hesitated.

At once, Mary went on speaking, and now a little increase of vigor trembled in her tones.

"When you sit in a cell for three months waiting for your trial, as I did, you think a lot.And, so, I got the idea that if Icould talk to you, I might be able to make you understand what's really wrong.And if I could do that, and so help out the other girls, what has happened to me would not, after all, be quite so awful--so useless, somehow." Her voice lowered to a quick pleading, and she bent toward the man at the desk."Mr.Gilder,"she questioned, "do you really want to stop the girls from stealing?""Most certainly I do," came the forcible reply.

The girl spoke with a great earnestness, deliberately.

"Then, give them a fair chance."

The magnate stared in sincere astonishment over this absurd, this futile suggestion for his guidance.

"What do you mean?" he vociferated, with rising indignation.

There was an added hostility in his demeanor, for it seemed to him that this thief of his goods whom he had brought to justice was daring to trifle with him.He grew wrathful over the suspicion, but a secret curiosity still held his temper within bounds "What do you mean?" he repeated; and now the full force of his strong voice set the room trembling.

The tones of the girl came softly musical, made more delicately resonant to the ear by contrast with the man's roaring.

"Why," she said, very gently, "I mean just this: Give them a living chance to be honest.""A living chance!" The two words were exploded with dynamic violence.The preposterousness of the advice fired Gilder with resentment so pervasive that through many seconds he found himself unable to express the rage that flamed within him.

The girl showed herself undismayed by his anger.

"Yes," she went on, quietly; "that's all there is to it.Give them a living chance to get enough food to eat, and a decent room to sleep in, and shoes that will keep their feet off the pavement winter mornings.Do you think that any girl wants to steal? Do you think that any girl wants to risk----?"By this time, however, Gilder had regained his powers of speech, and he interrupted stormily.

"And is this what you have taken up my time for? You want to make a maudlin plea for guilty, dishonest girls, when I thought you really meant to bring me facts."Nevertheless, Mary went on with her arraignment uncompromisingly.

There was a strange, compelling energy in her inflections that penetrated even the pachydermatous officer, so that, though he thought her raving, he let her rave on, which was not at all his habit of conduct, and did indeed surprise him mightily.As for Gilder, he felt helpless in some puzzling fashion that was totally foreign to his ordinary self.He was still glowing with wrath over the method by which he had been victimized into giving the girl a hearing.Yet, despite his chagrin, he realized that he could not send her from him forthwith.By some inexplicable spell she bound him impotent.

"We work nine hours a day," the quiet voice went on, a curious pathos in the rich timbre of it; "nine hours a day, for six days in the week.That's a fact, isn't it? And the trouble is, an honest girl can't live on six dollars a week.She can't do it, and buy food and clothes, and pay room-rent and carfare.That's another fact, isn't it?"Mary regarded the owner of the store with grave questioning in her violet eyes.Under the urgency of emotion, color crept into the pallid cheeks, and now her face was very beautiful--so beautiful, indeed, that for a little the charm of its loveliness caught the man's gaze, and he watched her with a new respect, born of appreciation for her feminine delightfulness.The impression was far too brief.Gilder was not given to esthetic raptures over women.Always, the business instinct was the dominant.So, after the short period of amazed admiration over such unexpected winsomeness, his thoughts flew back angrily to the matters whereof she spoke so ridiculously.

"I don't care to discuss these things," he declared peremptorily, as the girl remained silent for a moment.

"And I have no wish to discuss anything," Mary returned evenly.

"I only want to give you what you asked for--facts." A faint smile of reminiscence curved the girl's lips."When they first locked me up," she explained, without any particular evidence of emotion, "I used to sit and hate you.""Oh, of course!" came the caustic exclamation from Gilder.

"And then, I thought that perhaps you did not understand," Mary continued; "that, if I were to tell you how things really are, it might be you would change them somehow."At this ingenuous statement, the owner of the store gave forth a gasp of sheer stupefaction.