Part 47 (1/2)

But it is not as if we had done this thing deliberately and selfishly. We have renounced. We have struggled against it until we were beaten. And now we are driven together, not by our doing but Fate's. After this affair this morning there is nothing for you but to come to me. And as for me, despite my best, I am finished. I have failed. As I told you, the papers are stolen.

There will be no speech this afternoon.

{Margaret}

(_Quietly._) Yes there will.

{Knox}

Impossible. I would make a triple fool of myself. I would be unable to substantiate my charges.

{Margaret}

You will substantiate them. What a chain of theft it is. My father steals from the people. The doc.u.ments that prove his stealing are stolen by Gherst. Hubbard steals them from you and returns them to my father. And I steal them from my father and pa.s.s them back to you.

{Knox} (_Astounded._) You?--You?--

{Margaret}

Yes; this very morning. That was the cause of all the trouble.

If I hadn't stolen them nothing would have happened. Hubbard had just returned them to my father.

{Knox}

(_Profoundly touched._) And you did this for me--?

{Margaret}

Dear man, I didn't do it for you. I wasn't brave enough. I should have given in. I don't mind confessing that I started to do it for you, but it soon grew so terrible that I was afraid. It grew so terrible that had it been for you alone I should have surrendered. But out of the terror of it all I caught a wider vision, and all that you said last night rose before me. And I knew that you were right. I thought of all the people, and of the little children. I did it for them, after all. You speak for them. I stole the papers so that you could use them in speaking for the people. Don't you see, dear man?

(_Changing to angry recollection._) Do you know what they cost me? Do you know what was done to me, to-day, this morning, in my father's house? I was shamed, humiliated, as I would never have dreamed it possible. Do you know what they did to me?

The servants were called in, and by them I was stripped before everybody--my family, Hubbard, the Reverend Mr. Rutland, the secretary, everybody.

{Knox}

(_Stunned._) Stripped--you?

{Margaret}

Every st.i.tch. My father commanded it

{Knox}

(_Suddenly visioning the scene._) My G.o.d!

{Margaret}

(_Recovering herself and speaking cynically, with a laugh at his shocked face._) No; it was not so bad as that. There was a screen.

(_Knox appears somewhat relieved._) But it fell down in the midst of the struggle.