CHAPTER X.

A CONVICT’S CONFIDENCE.

That very afternoon Dr. Brookes got a letter from Dr. Greenaway. It was the first time he had heard from him since he loaned him the five thousand dollars.

“Poor chap! He little knows what a shock I had,” he thought, “when for a moment I thought I had discovered his sweetheart in that drunken woman!”

He tore open the letter and read it hastily. It was very brief and only took a minute.

“I am nicely settled,” wrote Greenaway, “and would be perfectly happy, but my sweetheart has thrown me over—jilted me—to be honest. Of course you will think that if I can talk of it I do not suffer, but at just this minute I must talk or die, and you, doc, are my friend, the only one I have in creation. Yes, May has left me and gone, I don’t know where, but to be honest again, I think it is to the devil! She was always gay, but I trusted her, doc, even while she was abroad for three months. I did not doubt her, but now there is no use denying it any longer, she is a bad, dissolute woman—and yet I love her!”

There was a little more to the doctor’s strange letter, but it was the postscript that Dr. Brookes remembered longest and wondered most over.

“I haven’t forgotten the name of your little nurse-friend, yet, doc,” it said, “for I have a curious presentiment, in some way, that some sorrow will come to me through Miss Marion Marlowe!”

“As queer as ever—queerer, perhaps,” muttered Dr. Brookes as he finished the letter.

Then as he went about his work in the meagerly furnished wards he found himself wondering if Greenaway was going crazy.

“What a fool to throw himself away on a woman like that!” he said aloud. The next instant he noticed with embarrassment that “Big Belle” had heard him.

“By Jove!” thought the doctor, suddenly, “I am going to talk to this woman. Prison rules be hanged! She is a human being, and if any one knows the world this woman knows it.”

He turned toward her instantly—there was no one within hearing.

“Belle,” he said, quietly, “tell me something of your life. I want to know your motive for being dishonest.”

The woman stared at him a moment, and then smiled broadly. There was a vestige of her old shrewdness in the way she answered him.

“I have never been proven dishonest,” she said, quietly. “I came up this time on the strength of my reputation, but, granted that I am dishonest, this is my only motive, I wish to hold my own in the struggle of life—I am what you might call a rabid believer in the ‘survival of the fittest.’”

“But how long do you expect to survive?” he asked quickly, “and do you call your present existence living?”

“I have some money,” said the woman quietly, “and this fortune is put away where no law can touch it. I have fifteen years yet before I shall be fifty-five; more of those years I expect to spend in prison, but after that——”

She stopped a moment and chuckled before she added:

“After that I presume I shall enter society.”

To save himself, the doctor could not help laughing. He was amused, to say the least, at this woman’s philosophy.

“You seem to have no fear of results,” he said after a minute. “What was your early training? Were your parents religious?”

For once “Big Belle’s” eyes snapped with a hidden fire. He had touched the chord that was most responsive.

“I was a country girl like that nurse who was in this morning,” she said, quickly; “I came to the city because my parents could not support me. I was only one of the thousands who are kicked out at an early age to battle with the world’s evils, and oh, how I was tossed and buffeted about! How readily my superiors made a football of me! How willingly women inveigled me into foolish ways, and how quickly and thoroughly they abused me for being inveigled! I was a fresh field daisy, innocent as a lamb, but oh, how gladly men sullied the whiteness of my soul, how eagerly they flattered me and led me astray, and then, when I was as they were, how brutally they served me! There were times when I thought I would gladly die, Dr. Brookes, but there was something in me that kept urging and urging, and at last I turned, as a worm will turn, and yes, I will tell you, my motive was to get even!”

The black eyes were scintillating with fury now, and Dr. Brookes almost regretted that he had stirred up such a passion.

“I don’t entirely blame you,” he said quietly, “and yet I know that you are wrong. It is better to suffer than to persecute—apart from all religious sentiment, I believe that thoroughly!”

“Well, I don’t!” said the woman in a cold, hard voice. “I prefer to take things as they come, Dr. Brookes, and you cannot say that I do not take my punishment philosophically.”

They were at one end of a long ward when this conversation took place; five minutes later they were both bending over a patient.

“You can take the bandages off now, Belle,” said the doctor, softly. “Poor soul, she is dying and perhaps she will be more comfortable.”

“Did you learn her name?” asked the female convict.

“No, she came as Mary Jones, which means absolutely nothing. We have wired to the police for further information.”

“Well, it will come too late, I’m afraid,” said the woman softly. The patient had breathed her last before she had fairly removed the dressings.

Marion Marlowe was standing by a window in Charity Hospital, watching the setting sun just as the “vitriol patient’s” remains were taken to the criminal “dead-house.”

Little did she dream what tragedy had been enacted, or how closely connected was her life with this poor creature’s.

She was thinking of Mr. Ray and his great grief as she stood there, and it was only the stroke of the bell that roused her from her reverie.

As she passed through the corridor on her way to the dining-room an office assistant came along with a handful of letters.

“Oh, have you one for me?” asked Marion, quickly. “I am Marion Marlowe, I’m in the linen-room at present.”

“You were at the ‘medical,’” said the young man as he handed her a letter. “There ain’t much danger of any of us losing track of you, Miss Marlowe.”

Marion looked at him quickly, and an admiring glance rewarded her.

“Prettiest girl in the building,” he said, blandly. “Every man on the Island is in love with you, Miss Peaches.”

“Convicts and all?” asked Marion, laughing.

“If they ain’t, then they are in the right place,” was the answer; “but I guess if they wasn’t they wouldn’t all of ’em be breaking rules to look at you! Don’t you remember that fellow that got shot, Miss Marlowe?”

Marion shuddered as she recalled the terrible scene, and as she walked slowly away her face paled a little.

It had happened during the first week of her stay on the Island, and ever since then she had been trying hard to forget it. Then a vision of the black-souled Lawson’s tragic end flitted across her brain and she put up both hands as if to ward off such pictures.

“That poor convict that jumped into the water and was shot is to be envied,” she whispered sadly. “He went down out of sight beneath the smiling waters, but Lawson, the abductor, goes to Potter’s Field. It is right! It is just! He richly deserves it!”