第51章 AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY(1)

The Gilders, both father and son, endured much suffering throughout the night and day that followed the scene in Mary Turner's apartment, when she had made known the accomplishment of her revenge on the older man by her ensnaring of the younger.

Dick had followed the others out of her presence at her command, emphasized by her leaving him alone when he would have pleaded further with her.Since then, he had striven to obtain another interview with his bride, but she had refused him.He was denied admission to the apartment.Only the maid answered the ringing of the telephone, and his notes were seemingly unheeded.

Distraught by this violent interjection of torment into a life that hitherto had known no important suffering, Dick Gilder showed what mettle of man lay beneath his debonair appearance.

And that mettle was of a kind worth while.In these hours of grief, the soul of him put out its strength.He learned beyond peradventure of doubt that the woman whom he had married was in truth an ex-convict, even as Burke and Demarest had declared.

Nevertheless, he did not for an instant believe that she was guilty of the crime with which she had been originally charged and for which she had served a sentence in prison.For the rest, he could understand in some degree how the venom of the wrong inflicted on her had poisoned her nature through the years, till she had worked out its evil through the scheme of which he was the innocent victim.He cared little for the fact that recently she had devoted herself to devious devices for making money, to ingenious schemes for legal plunder.In his summing of her, he set as more than an offset to her unrighteousness in this regard the desperate struggle she had made after leaving prison to keep straight, which, as he learned, had ended in her attempt at suicide.He knew the intelligence of this woman whom he loved, and in his heart was no thought of her faults as vital flaws.It seemed to him rather that circumstances had compelled her, and that through all the suffering of her life she had retained the more beautiful qualities of her womanliness, for which he reverenced her.In the closeness of their association, short as it had been, he had learned to know something of the tenderer depths within her, the kindliness of her, the wholesomeness.

Swayed as he was by the loveliness of her, he was yet more enthralled by those inner qualities of which the outer beauty was only the fitting symbol.

So, in the face of this catastrophe, where a less love must have been destroyed utterly, Dick remained loyal.His passionate regard did not falter for a moment.It never even occurred to him that he might cast her off, might yield to his father's prayers, and abandon her.On the contrary, his only purpose was to gain her for himself, to cherish and guard her against every ill, to protect with his love from every attack of shame or injury.He would not believe that the girl did not care for him.

Whatever had been her first purpose of using him only as an instrument through which to strike against his father, whatever might be her present plan of eliminating him from her life in the future, he still was sure that she had grown to know a real and lasting affection for himself.He remembered startled glances from the violet eyes, caught unawares, and the music of her voice in rare instants, and these told him that love for him stirred, even though it might as yet be but faintly, in her heart.

Out of that fact, he drew an immediate comfort in this period of his misery.Nevertheless, his anguish was a racking one.He grew older visibly in the night and the day.There crept suddenly lines of new feeling into his face, and, too, lines of new strength.The boy died in that time; the man was born, came forth in the full of his steadfastness and his courage, and his love.

The father suffered with the son.He was a proud man, intensely gratified over the commanding position to which he had achieved in the commercial world, proud of his business integrity, of his standing in the community as a leader, proud of his social position, proud most of all of the son whom he so loved.Now, this hideous disaster threatened his pride at every turn--worse, it threatened the one person in the world whom he really loved.

Most fathers would have stormed at the boy when pleading failed, would have given commands with harshness, would have menaced the recalcitrant with disinheritance.Edward Gilder did none of these things, though his heart was sorely wounded.He loved his son too much to contemplate making more evil for the lad by any estrangement between them.Yet he felt that the matter could not safely be left in the hands of Dick himself.He realized that his son loved the woman--nor could he wonder much at that.His keen eyes had perceived Mary Turner's graces of form, her loveliness of face.He had apprehended, too, in some measure at least, the fineness of her mental fiber and the capacities of her heart.Deep within him, denied any outlet, he knew there lurked a curious, subtle sympathy for the girl in her scheme of revenge against himself.Her persistent striving toward the object of her ambition was something he could understand, since the like thing in different guise had been back of his own business success.He would not let the idea rise to the surface of consciousness, for he still refused to believe that Mary Turner had suffered at his hand unjustly.He would think of her as nothing else than a vile creature, who had caught his son in the toils of her beauty and charm, for the purpose of eventually making money out of the intrigue.

Gilder, in his library this night, was pacing impatiently to and fro, eagerly listening for the sound of his son's return to the house.He had been the guest of honor that night at an important meeting of the Civic Committee, and he had spoken with his usual clarity and earnestness in spite of the trouble that beset him.