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The Quality of Mercy

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #30108 · 663,594 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Quality of Mercy

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: September 27, 2009 [eBook #30108]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUALITY OF MERCY ***

                         THE QUALITY OF MERCY

                               A NOVEL

                           BY W. D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "AN IMPERATIVE DUTY" "ANNIE KILBURN" "A HAZARD OF NEW
FORTUNES" ETC.

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1892




THE QUALITY OF MERCY.




PART FIRST.




I.


Northwick's man met him at the station with the cutter. The train was a
little late, and Elbridge was a little early; after a few moments of
formal waiting, he began to walk the clipped horses up and down the
street. As they walked they sent those quivers and thrills over their
thin coats which horses can give at will; they moved their heads up and
down, slowly and easily, and made their bells jangle noisily together;
the bursts of sound evoked by their firm and nervous pace died back in
showers and falling drops of music. All the time Elbridge swore at them
affectionately, with the unconscious profanity of the rustic Yankee
whose lot has been much cast with horses. In the halts he made at each
return to the station, he let his blasphemies bubble sociably from him
in response to the friendly imprecations of the three or four other
drivers who were waiting for the train; they had apparently no other
parlance. The drivers of the hotel 'bus and of the local express wagon
were particular friends; they gave each other to perdition at every
other word; a growing boy, who had come to meet Mr. Gerrish, the
merchant, with the family sleigh, made himself a fountain of meaningless
maledictions; the public hackman, who admired Elbridge almost as much as
he respected Elbridge's horses (they were really Northwick's, but the
professional convention was that they were Elbridge's), clothed them
with fond curses as with a garment. He was himself, more literally
speaking, clothed in an old ulster, much frayed about the wrists and
skirts, and polished across the middle of the back by rubbing against
counters and window-sills. He was bearded like a patriarch, and he wore
a rusty fur cap pulled down over his ears, though it was not very cold;
its peak rested on the point of his nose, so that he had to throw his
head far back to get Elbridge in the field of his vision. Elbridge had
on a high hat, and was smoothly buttoned to his throat in a plain
coachman's coat of black; Northwick had never cared to have him make a
closer approach to a livery; and it is doubtful if Elbridge would have
done it if he had asked or ordered it of him. He deferred to Northwick
in a measure as the owner of his horses, but he did not defer to him in
any other quality.

"Say, Elbridge, when you goin' to give me that old hat o' your'n?" asked
the hackman in a shout that would have reached Elbridge if he had been
half a mile off instead of half a rod.

"What do you want of another second-hand hat, you ---- ---- old fool,
you?" asked Elbridge in his turn.

The hackman doubled himself down for joy, and slapped his leg; at the
sound of a whistle to the eastward, he pulled himself erect again, and
said, as if the fact were one point gained, "Well, there she blows, any
way." Then he went round the corner of the station to be in full
readiness for any chance passenger the train might improbably bring him.

No one alighted but Mr. Gerrish and Northwick. Mr. Gerrish found it most
remarkable that he should have come all the way from Boston on the same
train with Northwick and not known it; but Northwick was less disposed
to wonder at it. He passed rapidly beyond the following of Mr. Gerrish,
and mounted to the place Elbridge made for him in the cutter. While
Elbridge was still tucking the robes about their legs, Northwick drove
away from the station, and through the village up to the rim of the
highland that lies between Hatboro' and South Hatboro'. The bare line
cut along the horizon where the sunset lingered in a light of liquid
crimson, paling and passing into weaker violet tints with every moment,
but still tenderly flushing the walls of the sky, and holding longer the
accent of its color where a keen star had here and there already pierced
it and shone quivering through. The shortest days were past, but in the
first week of February they had not lengthened sensibly, though to a
finer perception there was the promise of release from the winter dark,
if not from the winter cold. It was not far from six o'clock when
Northwick mounted the southward rise of the street; it was still almost
light enough to read; and the little slender black figure of a man that
started up in the middle of the road, as if it had risen out of the
ground, had an even vivid distinctness. He must have been lying in the
snow; the horses crouched back with a sudden recoil, as if he had struck
them back with his arm, and plunged the runners of the cutter into the
deeper snow beside the beaten track. He made a slight pause, long enough
to give Northwick a contemptuous glance, and then continued along the
road at a leisurely pace to the deep cut through the snow from the next
house. Here he stood regarding such difficulty as Northwick had in
quieting his horses, and getting underway again. He said nothing, and
Northwick did not speak; Elbridge growled, "He's on one of his tears
again," and the horses dashed forward with a shriek of all their bells.
Northwick did not open his lips till he entered the avenue of firs that
led from the highway to his house; they were still clogged with the
snowfall, and their lowermost branches were buried in the drifts.

"What's the matter with the colt?" he asked.

"I don't know as that fellow understands the colt's feet very well. I
guess one of the shoes is set wrong," said Elbridge.

"Better look after it."

Northwick left Elbridge the reins, and got out of the cutter at the
flight of granite steps which rose to the ground-floor of his wooden
palace. Broad levels of piazza stretched away from the entrance under a
portico of that carpentry which so often passes with us for
architecture. In spite of the effect of organic flimsiness in every
wooden structure but a log cabin, or a fisherman's cottage shingled to
the ground, the house suggested a perfect functional comfort. There were
double windows on all round the piazzas; a mellow glow from the
incandescent electrics penetrated to the outer dusk from them; when the
door was opened to Northwick, a pleasant heat gushed out, together with
the perfume of flowers, and the odors of dinner.

"Dinner is just served, sir," said the inside man, disposing of
Northwick's overcoat and hat on the hall table with respectful scruple.

Northwick hesitated. He stood over the register, and vaguely held his
hands in the pleasant warmth indirectly radiated from the steam-pipes
below.

"The young ladies were just thinking you wouldn't be home till the next
train," the man suggested, at the sound of voices from the dining-room.

"They have some one with them?" Northwick asked.

"Yes, sir. The rector, sir; Mr. Wade, sir."

"I'll come down by and by," Northwick said, turning to the stairs. "Say
I had a late lunch before I left town."

"Yes, sir," said the man.

Northwick went on up stairs, with footfalls hushed by the thickly-padded
thick carpet, and turned into the sort of study that opened out of his
bedroom. It had been his wife's parlor during the few years of her life
in the house which he had built for her, and which they had planned to
spend their old age in together. It faced southward, and looked out over
the greenhouses and the gardens, that stretched behind the house to the
bulk of woods, shutting out the stage-picturesqueness of the summer
settlement of South Hatboro'. She had herself put the rocking-chair in
the sunny bay-window, and Northwick had not allowed it to be disturbed
there since her death. In an alcove at one side he had made a place for
the safe where he kept his papers; his wife had intended to keep their
silver in it, but she had been scared by the notion of having burglars
so close to them in the night, and had always left the silver in the
safe in the dining-room.

She was all her life a timorous creature, and after her marriage had
seldom felt safe out of Northwick's presence. Her portrait, by Hunt,
hanging over the mantelpiece, suggested something of this, though the
painter had made the most of her thin, middle-aged blond good looks, and
had given her a substance of general character which was more expressive
of his own free and bold style than of the facts in the case. She was
really one of those hen-minded women, who are so common in all walks of
life, and are made up of only one aim at a time, and of manifold
anxieties at all times. Her instinct for saving long survived the days
of struggle in which she had joined it to Northwick's instinct for
getting; she lived and died in the hope, if not the belief, that she had
contributed to his prosperity by looking strictly after all manner of
valueless odds and ends. But he had been passively happy with her; since
her death, he had allowed her to return much into his thoughts, from
which her troublesome solicitudes and her entire uselessness in
important matters had obliged him to push her while she lived. He often
had times when it seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, and
then he found he had been thinking of her. At such times, with a pang,
he realized that he missed her; but perhaps the wound was to habit
rather than affection. He now sat down in his swivel-chair and turned it
from the writing-desk which stood on the rug before the fireplace, and
looked up into the eyes of her effigy with a sense of her intangible
presence in it, and with a dumb longing to rest his soul against hers.
She was the only one who could have seen him in his wish to have not
been what he was; she would have denied it to his face, if he had told
her he was a thief; and as he meant to make himself more and more a
thief, her love would have eased the way by full acceptance of the
theories that ran along with his intentions and covered them with
pretences of necessity. He thought how even his own mother could not
have been so much comfort to him; she would have had the mercy, but she
would not have had the folly. At the bottom of his heart, and under all
his pretences, Northwick knew that it was not mercy which would help
him; but he wanted it, as we all want what is comfortable and bad for us
at times. With the performance and purpose of a thief in his heart, he
turned to the pictured face of his dead wife as his refuge from the face
of all living. It could not look at him as if he were a thief.

The word so filled his mind that it seemed always about to slip from his
tongue. It was what the president of the board had called him when the
fact of his fraudulent manipulation of the company's books was laid so
distinctly before him that even the insane refusal, which the criminal
instinctively makes of his crime in its presence, was impossible. The
other directors sat blankly round, and said nothing; not because they
hated a scene, but because the ordinary course of life among us had not
supplied them with the emotional materials for making one. The
president, however, had jumped from his seat and advanced upon
Northwick. "What does all this mean, sir? I'll tell you what it means.
It means that you're a thief, sir; the same as if you had picked my
pocket, or stolen my horse, or taken my overcoat out of my hall."

He shook his clenched fist in Northwick's face, and seemed about to take
him by the throat. Afterwards he inclined more to mercy than the others;
it was he who carried the vote which allowed Northwick three days'
grace, to look into his affairs, and lay before the directors the proof
that he had ample means, as he maintained, to meet the shortage in the
accounts. "I wish you well out of it, for your family's sake," he said
at parting; "but all the same, sir, you are a thief."

He put his hands ostentatiously in his pockets, when some others
meaninglessly shook hands with Northwick, at parting, as Northwick
himself might have shaken hands with another in his place; and he
brushed by him out of the door without looking at him. He came suddenly
back to say, "If it were a question of you alone, I would cheerfully
lose something more than you've robbed me of for the pleasure of seeing
you handcuffed in this room and led to jail through the street by a
constable. No honest man, no man who was not always a rogue at heart,
could have done what you've done; juggled with the books for years, and
bewitched the record so by your infernal craft, that it was never
suspected till now. You've given _mind_ to your scoundrelly work, sir;
all the mind you had; for if you hadn't been so anxious to steal
successfully, you'd have given more mind to the use of your stealings.
You _may_ have some of them left, but it looks as if you'd made ducks
and drakes of them, like any petty rascal in the hands of the Employees'
Insurance Company. Yes, sir, I believe you're of about the intellectual
calibre of that sort of thief. I can't respect you even on your own
ground. But I'm willing to give you the chance you ask, for your
daughter's sake. She's been in and out of my house with my girl like one
of my own children, and I won't send her father to jail if I can help
it. Understand! I haven't any sentiment for _you_, Northwick. You're the
kind of rogue I'd like to see in a convict's jacket, learning to make
shoe-brushes. But you shall have your chance to go home and see if you
can pay up somehow, and you sha'n't be shadowed while you're at it. You
shall keep your outside to the world three days longer, you whited
sepulchre; but if you want to know, I think the best thing that could
happen to you on your way home would be a good railroad accident."

The man's words and looks were burnt into Northwick's memory, which now
seemed to have the faculty of simultaneously reproducing them all.
Northwick remembered his purple face, with its prominent eyes, and the
swing of his large stomach, and just how it struck against the jamb as
he whirled a second time out of the door. The other directors, some of
them, stood round buttoned up in their overcoats, with their hats on,
and a sort of stunned aspect; some held their hats in their hands, and
looked down into them with a decorous absence of expression, as people
do at a funeral. Then they left him alone in the treasurer's private
room, with its official luxury of thick Turkey rugs, leathern
arm-chairs, and nickel-plated cuspidors standing one on each side of the
hearth where a fire of soft coal in a low-down grate burned with a
subdued and respectful flicker.




II.


If it had not been for the boisterous indignation of the president,
Northwick might have come away from the meeting, after the exposure of
his defalcations, with an unimpaired personal dignity. But as it was, he
felt curiously shrunken and shattered, till the prevailing habit of his
mind enabled him to piece himself together again and resume his former
size and shape. This happened very quickly; he had conceived of himself
so long as a man employing funds in his charge in speculations sometimes
successful and sometimes not, but at all times secured by his personal
probity and reliability. He had in fact more than once restored all that
he had taken, and he had come to trust himself in the course of these
transactions as fully as he was trusted by the men who were ignorant of
his irregularities. He was somehow flattered by the complete confidence
they reposed in him, though he really felt it to be no more than his
due; he had always merited and received the confidence of men associated
with him in business, and he had come to regard the funds of the
corporation as practically his own. In the early days of his connection
with the company, it largely owed its prosperity to his wise and careful
management; one might say that it was not until the last, when he got so
badly caught by that drop in railroads, that he had felt anything wrong
in his convertible use of its money. It was an informality; he would not
have denied that, but it was merely an informality. Then his losses
suddenly leaped beyond his ability to make them good; then, for the
first time, he began to practice that system in keeping the books which
the furious president called juggling with them. Even this measure he
considered a justifiable means of self-defence pending the difficulties
which beset him, and until he could make his losses good by other
operations. From time to time he was more fortunate; and whenever he
dramatized himself in an explanation to the directors, as he often did,
especially of late, he easily satisfied them as to the nature of his
motives and the propriety of his behavior, by calling their attention to
these successful deals, and to the probability, the entire probability,
that he could be at any moment in a position to repay all he had
borrowed of the company. He called it borrowing, and in his long habit
of making himself these loans and returning them, he had come to have a
sort of vague feeling that the company was privy to them; that it was
almost an understood thing. The president's violence was the first
intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness
that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose
discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning's
paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the
papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some
novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the
presence of the directors, he had refused to admit it to himself; but
after they adjourned, and he was left alone, he realized the truth. He
was like those fools, exactly like them, in what they had done, and in
the way of doing it; he was like them in motive and principle. All of
them had used others' money in speculation, expecting to replace it, and
then had not been able to replace it, and then had skipped, as the
newspapers said.

Whether he should complete the parallel, and skip, too, was a point
which he had not yet acknowledged to himself that he had decided. He
never had believed that it need come to that; but, for an instant, when
the president said he could wish him nothing better on his way home than
a good railroad accident, it flashed upon him that one of the three
alternatives before him was to skip. He had the choice to kill himself,
which was supposed to be the gentlemanly way out of his difficulties,
and would leave his family unstained by his crime; that matter had
sometimes been discussed in his presence, and every one had agreed that
it was the only thing for a gentleman to do after he had pilfered people
of money he could not pay back. There was something else that a man of
other instincts and weaker fibre might do, and that was to stand his
trial for embezzlement, and take his punishment. Or a man, if he was
that kind of a man, could skip. The question with Northwick was whether
he was that kind of man, or whether, if he skipped, he would be that
kind of man; whether the skipping would make him that kind of man.

The question was a cruel one for the self-respect which he had so
curiously kept intact. He had been respectable ever since he was born;
if he was born with any instinct it was the instinct of respectability,
the wish to be honored for what he seemed. It was all the stronger in
him, because his father had never had it; perhaps an hereditary trait
found expression in him after passing over one generation; perhaps an
antenatal influence formed him to that type. His mother was always
striving to keep the man she had married worthy of her choice in the
eyes of her neighbors; but he had never seconded her efforts. He had
been educated a doctor, but never practised medicine; in carrying on the
drug and book business of the village, he cared much more for the
literary than the pharmaceutical side of it; he liked to have a circle
of cronies about the wood-stove in his store till midnight, and discuss
morals and religion with them; and one night, when denying the plenary
inspiration of the Scriptures, he went to the wrong jar for an
ingredient of the prescription he was making up; the patient died of his
mistake. The disgrace and the disaster broke his wife's heart; but he
lived on to a vague and colorless old age, supported by his son in a
total disoccupation. The elder Northwick used sometimes to speak of his
son and his success in the world; not boastfully, but with a certain
sarcasm for the source of his bounty, as a boy who had always
disappointed him by a narrowness of ambition. He called him Milt, and he
said he supposed now Milt was the most self-satisfied man in
Massachusetts; he implied that there were better things than material
success. He did not say what they were, and he could have found very few
people in that village to agree with him; or to admit that the treasurer
of the Ponkwasset Mills had come in anywise short of the destiny of a
man whose father had started him in life with the name of John Milton.
They called him Milt, too, among themselves, and perhaps here and there
a bolder spirit might have called him so to his face if he had ever come
back to the village. But he had not. He had, as they had all heard, that
splendid summer place at Hatboro', where he spent his time when he was
not at his house in Boston; and when they verified the fact of his
immense prosperity by inquiry of some of the summer-folks who knew him
or knew about him, they were obscurely flattered by the fact; just as
many of us are proud of belonging to a nation in which we are enriched
by the fellow-citizenship of many manifold millionnaires. They did not
blame Northwick for never coming to see his father, or for never having
him home on a visit; they daily saw what old Northwick was, and how
little he was fitted for the society of a man whose respectability, even
as it was reflected upon them, was so dazzling. Old Northwick had never
done anything for Milt; he had never even got along with him; the fellow
had left him, and made his own way; and the old man had no right to
talk; if Milt was ever of a mind to cut off his rations, the old man
would soon see.




III.


The local opinion scarcely did justice to old Northwick's imperfect
discharge of a father's duties; his critics could not have realized how
much some capacities, if not tastes, which Northwick had inherited,
contributed to that very effect of respectability which they revered.
The early range of books, the familiarity with the mere exterior of
literature, restricted as it was, helped Northwick later to pass for a
man of education, if not of reading, with men who were themselves less
read than educated. The people whom his ability threw him with in Boston
were all Harvard men, and they could not well conceive of an
acquaintance, so gentlemanly and quiet as Northwick, who was not college
bred, too. By unmistakable signs, which we carry through life, they knew
he was from the country, and they attributed him to a freshwater
college. They said, "You're a Dartmouth man, Northwick, I believe," or,
"I think you're from Williams," and when Northwick said no, they forgot
it, and thought that he was a Bowdoin man; the impression gradually
fixed itself that he was from one or other of those colleges. It was
believed in like manner, partly on account of his name, that he was from
one of those old ministerial families that you find up in the hills,
where the whole brood study Greek while they are sugaring off in the
spring; and that his own mother had fitted him for college. There was,
in fact, something clerical in Northwick's bearing; and it was felt by
some that he had studied for the ministry, but had gone into business to
help his family. The literary phase of the superstition concerning him
was humored by the library which formed such a striking feature of his
house in Boston, as well as his house in Hatboro'; at Hatboro' it was
really vast, and was so charming and so luxurious that it gave the idea
of a cultivated family; they preferred to live in it, and rarely used
the drawing-room, which was much smaller, and was a gold and white
sanctuary on the north side of the house, only opened when there was a
large party of guests, for dancing. Most people came and went without
seeing it, and it remained shut up, as much a conjecture as the memory
of Northwick's wife. She was supposed to have been taken from him early,
to save him and his children from the mortifying consequences of one of
those romantic love-affairs in which a conscientious man had sacrificed
himself to a girl he was certain to outgrow. None of his world knew that
his fortunes had been founded upon the dowry she brought him, and upon
the stay her belief in him had always been. She was a church-member, as
such women usually are, but Northwick was really her religion; and as
there is nothing that does so much to sanctify a deity as the blind
devotion of its worshippers, Northwick was rendered at times worthy of
her faith by the intensity of it. In his sort he returned her love; he
was not the kind of man whose affections are apt to wander, perhaps
because they were few and easily kept together; perhaps because he was
really principled against letting them go astray. He was not merely true
in a passive way, but he was constant in the more positive fashion. When
they began to get on in the world, and his business talent brought him
into relations with people much above them socially, he yielded to her
shrinking from the opportunities of social advancement that opened to
them, and held aloof with her. This kept him a country person in his
experiences much longer than he need have remained; and tended to that
sort of defensive secretiveness which grew more and more upon him, and
qualified his conduct in matters where there was no question of his
knowledge of the polite world. It was not until after his wife's death,
and until his daughters began to grow up into the circles where his
money and his business associations authorized them to move, that he
began to see a little of that world. Even then he left it chiefly to his
children; for himself he continued quite simply loyal to his wife's
memory, and apparently never imagined such a thing as marrying again.

He rose from the chair where he had sat looking up into her pictured
face, and went to open the safe near the window. But he stopped in
stooping over to work the combination, and glanced out across his
shoulder into the night. The familiar beauty of the scene tempted him to
the window for what, all at once, he felt might be his last look, though
the next instant he was able to argue the feeling down, and make his
meditated act work into his schemes of early retrieval and honorable
return. He must have been thinking there before the fire a long time,
for now the moon had risen, and shone upon the black bulk of firs to the
southward, and on the group of outbuildings. These were in a sort the
mechanism that transacted the life of his house, ministering to all its
necessities and pleasures. Under the conservatories, with their long
stretches of glass, catching the moon's rays like levels of water, was
the steam furnace that imparted their summer climate, through heavy
mains carried below the basement, to every chamber of the mansion; a
ragged plume of vapor escaped from the tall chimney above them, and
dishevelled itself in diaphanous silver on the night-breeze. Beyond the
hot-houses lay the cold graperies; and off to the left rose the stables;
in a cosy nook of this low mass Northwick saw the lights of the
coachman's family-rooms; beyond the stables were the cow-barn and the
dairy, with the farmer's cottage; it was a sort of joke with Northwick's
business friends that you could buy butter of him sometimes at less than
half it cost him, and the joke flattered Northwick's sense of baronial
consequence with regard to his place. It was really a farm in extent,
and it was mostly a grazing farm; his cattle were in the herd-books, and
he raised horses, which he would sell now and then to a friend; they
were so distinctly varied from the original stock as to form almost a
breed of themselves; they numbered scores in his stalls and pastures.
The whole group of the buildings was so great that it was like a sort of
communal village. In the silent moonlight Northwick looked at it as if
it were an expansion or extension of himself, so personally did it seem
to represent his tastes, and so historical was it of the ambitions of
his whole life; he realized that it would be like literally tearing
himself from it, when he should leave it. That would be the real pang;
his children could come to him, but not his home. But he reminded
himself that he was going only for a time, until he could rehabilitate
himself, and come back upon the terms he could easily make when once he
was on his feet again. He thought how fortunate it was that in the
meanwhile this property could not be alienated; how fortunate it was
that he had originally deeded it to his wife in the days when he had the
full right to do so, and she had willed it to their children by a
perfect entail. The horses and the cattle might go, and probably must
go; and he winced to think of it, but the land, and the house,--all but
the furniture and pictures,--were the children's and could not be
touched. The pictures were his, and would have to go with the horses and
cattle; but ten or twelve thousand dollars would replace them, and he
must add that sum to his other losses, and bear it as well as he could.

After all, when everything was said and done, he was the chief loser. If
he was a thief, as that man said, he could show that he had robbed
himself of two dollars for every dollar that he had robbed anybody else
of; if now he was going to add to his theft by carrying off the
forty-three thousand dollars of the company's which he found himself
possessed of, it was certainly not solely in his own interest. It was to
be the means of recovering all that had gone before it, and that the
very men whom it would enable him to repay finally in full, supposed it
to have gone with.

Northwick felt almost a glow of pride in clarifying this point to his
reason. The additional theft presented itself almost in the light of a
duty; it really was his duty to make reparation to those he had injured,
if he had injured any one, and it was his first duty to secure the means
of doing it. If that money, which it might almost be said was left
providentially in his hands, were simply restored now to the company, it
would do comparatively no good at all, and would strip him of every hope
of restoring the whole sum he had borrowed. He arrived at that word
again, and reinforced by it, he stooped again to work the combination of
his safe, and make sure of the money, which he now felt an insane
necessity of laying his hands on; but he turned suddenly sick, with a
sickness at the heart or at the stomach, and he lifted himself, and took
a turn about the room.

He perceived that in spite of the outward calm which it had surprised
him to find in himself, he was laboring under some strong inward stress,
and he must have relief from it if he was to carry this business
through. He threw up the window and stood with his hand on the sash,
quivering in the strong in-rush of the freezing air. But it strengthened
him, and when he put down the window after a few moments, his faintness
passed altogether. Still, he thought he would not go through that
business at once; there was time enough; he would see his girls and tell
them that he was obliged to leave by an early train in the morning.

He took off his shoes, and put on his slippers and his house-coat, and
went to the stair-landing outside, and listened to the voices in the
library below. He could hear only women's voices, and he inferred that
the young man who had been dining with his daughters was gone. He went
back into his bedroom, and looked at the face of an unmasked thief in
his glass. It was not to get that aspect of himself, though, that he
looked; it was to see if he was pale or would seem ill to his children.




IV.


Northwick was fond of both his daughters; if he was more demonstrative
in meeting the younger, it was because she had the more modern and more
urban habit of caressing her father; the elder, who was very much the
elder, followed an earlier country fashion of self-possession, and
remained silent and seated when he came into the room, though she
watched with a pleased interest the exchange of endearments between him
and her sister. Her name was Adeline, which was her mother's name, too;
and she had the effect of being the aunt of the young girl. She was thin
and tall, and she had a New England indigestion which kept her looking
frailer than she really was. She conformed to the change of
circumstances which she had grown into almost as consciously as her
parents, and dressed richly in sufficiently fashionable gowns, which she
preferred to have of silk, cinnamon or brown in color; on her slight,
bony fingers she wore a good many rings.

Suzette was the name of the other daughter; her mother had fancied that
name; but the single monosyllable it had been shortened into somehow
suited the proud-looking girl better than the whole name, with its
suggestion of coquettishness.

She asked, "Why didn't you come down, papa? Mr. Wade was calling, and he
stayed to dinner." She smiled, and it gave him a pang to see that she
seemed unusually happy; he could have borne better, he perceived, to
leave her miserable; at least, then, he would not have wholly made her
so.

"I had some matters to look after," he said. "I thought I might get down
before he went." A deep leathern arm-chair stood before the hearth where
the young rector had been sitting, with the ladies at either corner of
the mantel; Northwick let himself sink into it, and with a glance at the
face of the faintly ticking clock on the black marble shelf before him,
he added casually, "I must get an early train for Ponkwasset in the
morning, and I still have some things to put in shape."

"Is there any trouble there?" the girl asked from the place she had
resumed. She held by one hand from the corner of the mantel, and let her
head droop over on her arm. Her father had a sense of her extraordinary
beauty, as a stranger might have had.

"Trouble?" he echoed.

"With the hands."

"Oh, no; nothing of that sort. What made you think so?" asked Northwick,
rapidly exploring the perspective opened up in his mind by her question,
to see if it contained any suggestion of advantage to him. He found an
instant's relief in figuring himself called to the mills by a labor
trouble.

"That tiresome little wretch of a Putney is going about circulating all
sorts of reports."

"There is no reason as yet, to suppose the strike will affect us," said
Northwick. "But I think I had better be on the ground."

"I should think you could leave it to the Superintendent," said the
girl, "without wearing your own life out about it."

"I suppose I might," said Northwick, with an effect of refusing to
acquire merit by his behavior, "but the older hands all know me so well,
that--"

He stopped as if it were unnecessary to go on, and the elder daughter
said: "He is on one of his sprees again. I should think something ought
to be done about him, for his family's sake, if nothing else. Elbridge
told James that you almost drove over him, coming up."

"Yes," said Northwick. "I didn't see him until he started up under the
horses' feet."

"He will get killed, some of these days," said Adeline, with the sort of
awful satisfaction in realizing a catastrophe, which delicate women
often feel.

"It would be the best thing for him," said her sister, "and for his
family, too. When a man is nothing but a burden and a disgrace to
himself and everybody belonging to him, he had better die as soon as
possible."

Northwick sat looking into his daughter's beautiful face, but he saw the
inflamed and heated visage of the president of the board, and he heard
him saying, "The best thing that could happen to you on your way home
would be a good railroad accident."

He sighed faintly, and said, "We can't always tell. I presume it isn't
for us to say." He went on, with that leniency for the shortcomings of
others which we feel when we long for mercy to our own: "Putney is a
very able man; one of the ablest lawyers in the State, and very honest.
He could be almost anything if he would let liquor alone. I don't wish
to judge him. He may have"--Northwick sighed again, and ended
vaguely--"his reasons."

Suzette laughed. "How moderate you always are, papa! And how tolerant!"

"I guess Mr. Putney knows pretty well whom he's got to deal with, and
that he's safe in abusing you all he likes," said Adeline. "But I don't
see how such respectable people as Dr. Morrell and Mrs. Morrell can
tolerate him. I've no patience with Dr. Morrell, or his wife, either. To
be sure, they tolerate Mrs. Wilmington, too."

Suzette went over to her father to kiss him. "Well, I'm going to bed,
papa. If you'd wanted more of my society you ought to have come down
sooner. I suppose I sha'n't see you in the morning; so it's good-bye as
well as good-night. When will you be home?"

"Not for some days, perhaps," said the unhappy man.

"How doleful! Are you always so homesick when you go away?"

"Not always; no."

"Well, try to cheer up, this time, then. And if you have to be gone a
great while, send for me, won't you?"

"Yes, yes; I will," said Northwick. The girl gave his head a hug, and
then glided out of the room. She stopped to throw him a kiss from the
door.

"There!" said Adeline. "I didn't mean to let Mrs. Wilmington slip out;
she can't bear the name, and I _know_ it drove her away. But you mustn't
let it worry you, father. I guess it's all going well, now."

"What's going well?" Northwick asked, vaguely.

"The Jack Wilmington business. I know she's really given him up at last;
and we can't be too thankful for that much, if it's no more. I don't
believe he's bad, for all the talk about him, but he's been weak, and
that's a thing she couldn't forgive in a man; she's so strong herself."

Northwick did not think of Wilmington; he thought of himself, and in the
depths of his guilty soul, in those secret places underneath all his
pretences, where he really knew himself a thief, he wondered if his
child's strength would be against her forgiving his weakness. What we
greatly dread we most unquestioningly believe; and it did not occur to
him to ask whether impatience with weakness was a necessary inference
from strength. He only knew himself to be miserably weak.

He rose and stood a moment by the mantel, with his impassive, handsome
face turned toward his daughter as if he were going to speak to her. He
was a tall man, rather thin; he was clean shaven, except for the grayish
whiskers just forward of his ears and on a line with them; he had a
regular profile, which was more attractive than the expression of his
direct regard. He took up a crystal ball that lay on the marble, and
looked into it as if he were reading his future in its lucid depths, and
then put it down again, with an effect of helplessness. When he spoke,
it was not in connection with what his daughter had been talking about.
He said almost dryly, "I think I will go up and look over some papers I
have to take with me, and then try to get a little sleep before I
start."

"And when shall we expect you back?" asked his daughter, submissively
accepting his silence concerning her sister's love affairs. She knew
that it meant acquiescence in anything that Sue and she thought best.

"I don't know, exactly; I can't say, now. Good-night."

To her surprise he came up and kissed her; his caresses were for Sue,
and she expected them no more than she invited them. "Why, father!" she
said in a pleased voice.

"Let James pack the small bag for me, and send Elbridge to me in about
an hour," he said, as he went out into the hall.




V.


Northwick was now fifty-nine years old, but long before he reached this
age he had seen many things to make him doubt the moral government of
the universe. His earliest instruction had been such as we all receive.
He had been taught to believe that there was an overruling power which
would punish him if he did wrong, and reward him if he did right; or
would, at least, be displeased in one case, and pleased in the other.
The precept took primarily the monitory form, and first enforced the
fact of the punishment or the displeasure; there were times when the
reward or the pleasure might not sensibly follow upon good behavior, but
evil behavior never escaped the just consequences. This was the doctrine
which framed the man's intention if not his conduct of life, and
continued to shape it years after experience of the world, and
especially of the business world, had gainsaid it. He had seen a great
many cases in which not only good behavior had apparently failed of its
reward but bad behavior had failed of its punishment. In the case of bad
behavior, his observation had been that no unhappiness, not even any
discomfort, came from it unless it was found out; for the most part, it
was not found out. This did not shake Northwick's principles; he still
intended to do right, so as to be on the safe side, even in a remote and
improbable contingency; but it enabled him to compromise with his
principles and to do wrong provisionally and then repair the wrong
before he was found out, or before the overruling power noticed him.

But now there were things that made him think, in the surprising misery
of being found out, that this power might have had its eye upon him all
the time, and was not sleeping, or gone upon a journey, as he had
tacitly flattered himself. It seemed to him that there was even a
dramatic contrivance in the circumstances to render his anguish
exquisite. He had not read many books; but sometimes his daughters made
him go to the theatre, and once he had seen the play of Macbeth. The
people round him were talking about the actor who played the part of
Macbeth, but Northwick kept his mind critically upon the play, and it
seemed to him false to what he had seen of life in having all those
things happen just so, to fret the conscience and torment the soul of
the guilty man; he thought that in reality they would not have been
quite so pat; it gave him rather a low opinion of Shakespeare, lower
than he would have dared to have if he had been a more cultivated man.
Now that play came back into his mind, and he owned with a pang that it
was all true. He was being quite as aptly visited for his transgression;
his heart was being wrung, too, by the very things that could hurt it
most. He had not been very well of late, and was not feeling physically
strong; his anxieties had preyed upon him, and he had never felt the
need of the comfort and quiet of his home so much as now when he was
forced to leave it. Never had it all been so precious; never had the
beauty and luxury of it seemed so great. All that was nothing, though,
to the thought of his children, especially of that youngest child, whom
his heart was so wrapt up in, and whom he was going to leave to shame
and ruin. The words she had spoken from her pride in him, her ignorant
censure of that drunkard, as a man who had better die since he had
become nothing but a burden and disgrace to his family, stung on as if
by incessant repetition. He had crazy thoughts, impulses, fantasies, in
which he swiftly dreamed renunciation of escape. Then he knew that it
would not avail anything to remain; it would not avail anything even to
die; nothing could avail anything at once, but in the end, his going
would avail most. He must go; it would break the child's heart to face
his shame, and she must face it. He did not think of his eldest
daughter, except to think that the impending disaster could not affect
her so ruinously.

"My God, my God!" he groaned, as he went up stairs. Adeline called from
the room he had left, "Did you speak, father?"

He had a conscience, that mechanical conscience which becomes so active
in times of great moral obliquity, against telling a little lie, and
saying he had not spoken. He went on up stairs without answering
anything. He indulged the self pity, a little longer, of feeling himself
an old man forced from his home, and he had a blind reasonless
resentment of the behavior of the men who were driving him away, and
whose interests, even at that moment, he was mindful of. But he threw
off this mood when he entered his room, and settled himself to business.
There was a good deal to be done in the arrangement of papers for his
indefinite absence, and he used the same care in providing for some
minor contingencies in the company's affairs as in leaving instructions
to his children for their action until they should hear from him again.
Afterwards this curious scrupulosity became a matter of comment among
those privy to it; some held it another proof of the ingrained rascality
of the man, a trick to suggest lenient construction of his general
conduct in the management of the company's finances, others saw in it an
interesting example of the involuntary operation of business instincts
which persisted at a juncture when the man might be supposed to have
been actuated only by the most intensely selfish motives.

The question was not settled even in the final retrospect, when it
appeared that at the very moment that Northwick showed himself mindful
of the company's interests on those minor points, he was defrauding it
further in the line of his defalcations, and keeping back a large sum of
money that belonged to it. But at that moment Northwick did not consider
that this money necessarily belonged to the company, any more than his
daughters' house and farm belonged to it. To be sure it was the fruit of
money he had borrowed or taken from the company and had used in an
enormously successful deal; but the company had not earned it, and in
driving him into a corner, in forcing him to make instant restitution of
all its involuntary loans, it was justifying him in withholding this
part of them. Northwick was a man of too much sense to reason explicitly
to this effect, but there was a sophistry, tacitly at work in him to
this effect, which made it possible for him to go on and steal more
where he had already stolen so much. In fact it presented the further
theft as a sort of duty. This sum, large as it was, really amounted to
nothing in comparison with the sum he owed the company; but it formed
his only means of restitution, and if he did not take it and use it to
that end, he might be held recreant to his moral obligations. He
contended, from that vestibule of his soul where he was not a thief,
with that self of his inmost where he was a thief, that it was all most
fortunate, if not providential, as it had fallen out. Not only had his
broker sent him that large check for his winnings in stocks the day
before, but Northwick had, contrary to his custom, cashed the check, and
put the money in his safe instead of banking it. Now he could perceive a
leading in the whole matter, though at the time it seemed a flagrant
defiance of chance, and a sort of invitation to burglars. He seemed to
himself like a burglar, when he had locked the doors and pulled down the
curtains, and stood before the safe working the combination. He
trembled, and when at last the mechanism announced its effect, with a
slight click of the withdrawing bolt, he gave a violent start. At the
same time there came a rough knock at the door, and Northwick called out
in the choking, incoherent voice of one suddenly roused from sleep:
"Hello! Who's there? What is it?"

"It's me," said Elbridge.

"Oh, yes! Well! All right! Hold on, a minute! Ah--you can come back in
ten or fifteen minutes. I'm not quite ready for you, yet." Northwick
spoke the first broken sentences from the safe, where he stood in a
frenzy of dismay; the more collected words were uttered from his desk,
where he ran to get his pistol. He did not know why he thought Elbridge
might try to force his way in; perhaps it was because any presence on
the outside of the door would have terrified him. He had time to
recognize that he was not afraid for the money, but that he was afraid
for himself in the act of taking it.

Elbridge gave a cough on the other side of the door, and said with a
little hesitation, "All right," and Northwick heard him tramp away, and
go down stairs.

He went back to the safe and pulled open the heavy door, whose
resistance helped him shake off his nervousness. Then he took the money
from the drawer where he had laid it, counted it, slipped it into the
inner pocket of his waistcoat, and buttoned it in there. He shut the
safe and locked it. The succession of these habitual acts calmed him
more and more, and after he had struck a match and kindled the fire on
his hearth, which he had hitherto forgotten, he was able to settle again
to his preparations in writing.




VI.


When Elbridge came back, Northwick called out, "Come in!" and then went
and unlocked the door for him. "I forgot it was locked," he said,
carelessly. "Do you think the colt's going to be lame?"

"Well, I don't like the way she behaves, very well. Them shoes have got
to come off." Elbridge stood at the corner of the desk, and diffused a
strong smell of stable through the hot room.

"You'll see to it, of course," said Northwick. "I'm going away in the
morning, and I don't know just how long I shall be gone." Northwick
satisfied his mechanical scruple against telling a lie by this formula;
and in its shelter he went on to give Elbridge instructions about the
management of the place in his absence. He took some money from his
pocket-book and handed it to him for certain expenses, and then he said,
"I want to take the five o'clock train, that reaches Ponkwasset at nine.
You can drive me up with the black mare."

"All right," said Elbridge; but his tone expressed a shadow of
reluctance that did not escape Northwick.

"Anything the matter?" he asked.

"I dunno. Our little boy don't seem to be very well."

"What ails him?" asked Northwick, with the sympathy it was a relief for
him to feel.

"Well, Dr. Morrell's just been there, and he's afraid it's the
membranous crou--" The last letter stuck in Elbridge's throat; he gulped
it down.

"Oh, I _hope_ not," said Northwick.

"He's comin' back again--he had to go off to another place--but I could
see 'twa'n't no use," said Elbridge with patient despair; he had got
himself in hand again, and spoke clearly.

Northwick shrank back from the shadow sweeping so near him; a shadow
thrown from the skies, no doubt, but terrible in its blackness on the
earth. "Why, of course, you mustn't think of leaving your wife. You must
telephone Simpson to come for me."

"All right." Elbridge took himself away.

Northwick watched him across the icy stable-yard, going to the
coachman's quarters in that cosy corner of the spreading barn; the
windows were still as cheerily bright with lamplight as when they struck
a pang of dumb envy to Northwick's heart. The child's sickness must have
been very sudden for his daughters not to have known of it. He thought
he ought to call Adeline, and send her in there to those poor people;
but he reflected that she could do no good, and he spared her the
useless pain; she would soon need all her strength for herself. His
thought returned to his own cares, from which the trouble of another had
lured it for a moment. But when he heard the doctor's sleigh-bells clash
into the stable-yard, he decided to go himself and show the interest his
family ought to feel in the matter.

No one answered his knock at Elbridge's door, and he opened it and found
his way into the room, where Elbridge and his wife were with the doctor.
The little boy had started up in his crib, and was struggling, with his
arms thrown wildly about.

"There! There, he's got another of them chokin' spells!" screamed the
mother. "Elbridge Newton, ain't you goin' to do anything? Oh help him,
save him, Dr. Morrell! Oh, I should think you'd be ashamed to let him
suffer so!" She sprang upon the child, and caught him from the doctor's
hands, and turned him this way and that trying to ease him; he was
suddenly quiet, and she said, "There, I just knew I could do it! What
are you big, strong men good for, any--" She looked down at the child's
face in her arms, and then up at the doctor's, and she gave a wild
screech, like the cry of one in piercing torment.

It turned Northwick heart-sick. He felt himself worse than helpless
there; but he went to the farmer's house, and told the farmer's wife to
go over to the Newtons'; their little boy had just died. He heard her
coming before he reached his own door, and when he reached his room, he
heard the bells of the doctor's sleigh clashing out of the avenue.

The voice and the look of that childless mother haunted him. She had
been one of the hat-shop hands, a flighty, nervous thing, madly in love
with Elbridge, whom she ruled with a sort of frantic devotion since
their marriage, compensating his cool quiet with a perpetual flutter of
exaggerated sensibilities in every direction. But somehow she had put
Northwick in mind of his own mother, and he thought of the chance or the
will that had bereaved one and spared the other, and he envied the
little boy who had just died.

He considered the case of the parents who would want to make full
outward show of their grief, and he wrote Elbridge a note, to be given
him in the morning, and enclosed one of the bills he was taking from the
company; he hoped Elbridge would accept it from him towards the expenses
he must meet at such a time.

Then he wheeled his chair about to the fire and stretched his legs out
to get what rest he could before the hour of starting. He would have
liked to go to bed, but he was afraid of oversleeping himself in case
Elbridge had neglected to telephone Simpson. But he did not believe this
possible, and he had smoothly confided himself to his experience of
Elbridge's infallibility, when he started awake at the sound of bells
before the front door, and then the titter of the electric bell over his
bed in the next room. He thought it was an officer come to arrest him,
but he remembered that only his household was acquainted with the use of
that bell, and then he wondered that Simpson should have found it out.
He put on his overcoat and arctics and caught up his bag, and hurried
down stairs and out of doors. It was Elbridge who was waiting for him on
the threshold, and took his bag from him.

"Why! Where's Simpson?" he asked. "Couldn't you get him?"

"It's all right," said Elbridge, opening the door of the booby, and
gently bundling Northwick into it. "I could come just's easy as not. I
thought you'd ride better in the booby; it's a little mite chilly for
the cutter." The stars seemed points of ice in the freezing sky; the
broken snow clinked like charcoal around Elbridge's feet. He shut the
booby door and then came back and opened it slightly. "I wa'n't agoin'
to let no Simpson carry you to no train, noway."

The tears came into Northwick's eyes, and he tried to say, "Why, thank
you, Elbridge," but the door shut upon his failure, and Elbridge mounted
to his place and drove away. Northwick had been able to get out of his
house only upon condition that he should behave as if he were going to
be gone on an ordinary journey. He had to keep the same terms with
himself on the way to the station. When he got out there he said to
Elbridge, "I've left a note for you on my desk. I'm sorry to be leaving
home--at such a time--when you've--"

"You'll telegraph when to meet you?" Elbridge suggested.

"Yes," said Northwick. He went inside the station, which was deliciously
warm from the large register in the centre of the room, and brilliantly
lighted in readiness for the train now almost due. The closing of the
door behind Northwick roused a little black figure drooping forward on
the benching in one corner. It was the drunken lawyer. There had been
some displeasures, general and personal, between the two men, and they
did not speak; but now, at sight of Northwick, Putney came forward, and
fixed him severely with his eye.

"Northwick! Do you know who you tried to drive over, last evening?"

Northwick returned his regard with the half-ironical, half-patronizing
look a dull man puts on with a person of less fortune but more brain. "I
didn't see you, Mr. Putney, until I was quite upon you. The horses--"

"It was the LAW you tried to drive over!" thundered the little man with
a voice out of keeping with his slender body. "Don't try it too often!
You can't drive over the Law, _yet_--you haven't quite millions enough
for that. Heigh? That so?" he queried, sensible of the anti-climax of
asking such a question in that way, but tipsily helpless in it.

Northwick did not answer; he walked to the other end of the station set
off for ladies, and Putney did not follow him. The train came in, and
Northwick went out and got aboard.




VII.


The president of the Board, who had called Northwick a thief, and yet
had got him a chance to make himself an honest man, was awake at the
hour the defaulter absconded, after passing quite as sleepless a night.
He had kept a dinner engagement, hoping to forget Northwick, but he
seemed to be eating and drinking him at every course. When he came home
toward eleven o'clock, he went to his library and sat down before the
fire. His wife had gone to bed, and his son and daughter were at a ball;
and he sat there alone, smoking impatiently.

He told the man who looked in to see if he wanted anything that he might
go to bed; he need not sit up for the young people. Hilary had that kind
of consideration for servants, and he liked to practise it; he liked to
realize that he was practising it now, in a moment when every habit of
his life might very well yield to the great and varying anxieties which
beset him.

He had an ideal of conduct, of what was due from him to himself, as a
gentleman and a citizen, and he could not conceal from himself that he
had been mainly instrumental in the escape of a rogue from justice, when
he got the Board to give Northwick a chance. His ideals had not hitherto
stood in the way of his comfort, his entire repose of mind, any more
than they had impaired his prosperity, though they were of a kind far
above those which commercial honor permits a man to be content with. He
held himself bound, as a man of a certain origin and social tradition,
to have public spirit, and he had a great deal of it. He believed that
he owed it to the community to do nothing to lower its standards of
personal integrity and responsibility; and he distinguished himself by a
gratified consciousness from those people of chromo-morality, who held
all sorts of loose notions on such points. His name stood not merely for
so much money; many names stood for far more; but it meant reliability,
it meant honesty, it meant good faith. He really loved these things,
though, no doubt, he loved them less for their own sake than because
they were spiritual properties of Eben Hilary. He did not expect
everybody else to have them, but his theory of life exacted that they
should be held the chief virtues. He was so conscious of their value
that he ignored all those minor qualities in himself which rendered him
not only bearable but even lovable; he was not aware of having any sort
of foibles, so that any error of conduct in himself surprised him even
more than it pained him. It was not easy to recognize it; but when he
once saw it, he was not only willing but eager to repair it.

The error that he had committed in Northwick's case, if it was an error,
was one that presented peculiar difficulties, as every error in life
does; the errors love an infinite complexity of disguise, and masquerade
as all sorts of things. There were moments when Hilary saw his mistake
so clearly that it seemed to him nothing less than the repayment of
Northwick's thefts from his own pocket would satisfy the claims of
justice to his fellow-losers if Northwick ran away; and then again, it
looked like the act of wise mercy which it had appeared to him when he
was urging the Board to give the man a chance as the only thing which
they could hopefully do in the circumstances, as common sense, as
business. But it was now so obvious that a man like Northwick could and
would do nothing but run away if he were given the chance, that he
seemed to have been his accomplice when he used the force of his
personal character with them in Northwick's behalf. He was in a
ridiculous position, there was no doubt of that, and he was not going to
get out of it without much painful wear and tear of pride, of
self-respect.

After a long time he looked at the clock, and found it still early for
the return of his young people. He was impatient to see his son, and to
get the situation in the light of his mind, and see how it looked there.
He had already told him of the defalcation, and of what the Board had
decided to do with Northwick; but this was while he was still in the
glow of action, and he had spoken very hurriedly with Matt who came in
just as he was going out to dinner; it was before his cold fit came on.

He had reached that time of life when a man likes to lay his troubles
before his son; and in the view his son usually took of his troubles,
Hilary seemed to find another mood of his own. It was a fresher,
different self dealing with them; for the fellow was not only younger
and more vigorous; he was another temperament with the same interests,
and often the same principles. He had disappointed Hilary in some ways,
but he had gratified his pride in the very ways he had disappointed him.
The father had expected the son to go into business, and Matt did go
into the mills at Ponkwasset, where he was to be superintendent in the
natural course. But one day he came home and told his father that he had
begun to have his doubts of the existing relations of labor and capital;
and until he could see his way clearer he would rather give up his
chance with the company. It was a keen disappointment to Hilary; he made
no concealment of that; but he did not quarrel with his son about it. He
robustly tolerated Matt's queer notions, not only because he was a
father who blindly doted on his children and behaved as if everything
they did was right, no matter if it put him in the wrong, but because he
chose to respect the fellow's principles, if those were his principles.
He had his own principles, and Matt should have his if he liked. He bore
entirely well the purpose of going abroad that Matt expressed, and he
wished to give him much more money than the fellow would take, to carry
on those researches which he made in his travels. When he came back and
published his monograph on work and wages in Europe, Hilary paid the
expense, and took as unselfish an interest in the slow and meagre sale
of the little book as if it had cost him nothing.

Eben Hilary had been a crank, too, in his day, so far as to have gone
counter to the most respectable feeling of business in Boston, when he
came out an abolitionist. His individual impulse to radicalism had
exhausted itself in that direction; we are each of us good for only a
certain degree of advance in opinion; few men are indefinitely
progressive; and Hilary had not caught on to the movement that was
carrying his son with it. But he understood how his son should be what
he was, and he loved him so much that he almost honored him for what he
called his balderdash about industrial slavery. His heart lifted when at
last he heard the scratching of the night-latch at the door below, and
he made lumbering haste down stairs to open and let the young people in.
He reached the door as they opened it, and in the momentary lightness of
his soul at sight of his children, he gave them a gay welcome, and took
his daughter, all a fluff of soft silken and furry wraps, into his arms.

"Oh, don't kiss my nose!" she called out. "It'll freeze you to death,
papa! What in the world are you up, for? Anything the matter with
mamma?"

"No. She was in bed when I came home; I thought I would sit up and ask
what sort of a time you'd had."

"Did you ever know me to have a bad one? I had the best time in the
world. I danced every dance, and I enjoyed it just as much as if I had
'shut and been a Bud again.' But don't you know it's very bad for old
gentlemen to be up so late?"

They were mounting the stairs, and when they reached the library, she
went in and poked her long-gloved hands well in over the fire on the
hearth while she lifted her eyes to the clock. "Oh, it isn't so very
late. Only five."

"No, it's early," said her father with the security in a feeble joke
which none but fathers can feel with none but their grown-up daughters.
"It's full an hour yet before Matt would be getting up to feed his
cattle, if he were in Vardley." Hilary had given Matt the old family
place there; and he always liked to make a joke of his getting an honest
living by farming it.

"Don't speak of that agricultural angel!" said the girl, putting her
draperies back with one hand and confining them with her elbow, so as to
give her other hand greater comfort of the fire. To do better yet she
dropped on both knees before it.

"Was he nice?" asked the father, with confidence.

"Nice! Ask all the plain girls he danced with, all the dull girls he
talked with! When I think what a good time I should have with him as a
plain girl, if I were not his sister, I lose all patience." She glanced
up in her father's face, with all the strange charm of features that had
no regular beauty; and then, as she had to do whenever she remembered
them, she asserted the grace which governed every movement and gesture
in her, and got as lightly to her feet as if she were a wind-bowed
flower tilting back to its perpendicular. Her father looked at her with
as fond a delight as a lover could have felt in her fascination. She
was, in fact, a youthful, feminine version of himself in her plainness;
though the grace was all her own. Her complexion was not the leathery
red of her father's, but a smooth and even white from cheek to throat.
She let her loose cloak fall to the chair behind her, and showed herself
tall and slim, with that odd visage of hers drooping from a perfect
neck. "Why," she said, "if we had all been horned cattle, he couldn't
have treated us better."

"Do you hear that, Matt?" asked the father, as his son came in, after a
methodical and deliberate bestowal of his outer garments below; his
method and his deliberation were part of the joke of him in the family.

"Complaining of me for making her walk home?" he asked in turn, with the
quiet which was another part of the joke. "I didn't suppose you'd give
me away, Louise."

"I didn't; I knew I only had to wait and you would give yourself away,"
said the girl.

"Did he make you walk home?" said the father. "That's the reason your
hands are so cold."

"They're not very cold--now; and if they were, I shouldn't mind it in
such a cause."

"What cause?"

"Oh the general shamefulness of disusing the feet God had given me. But
it was only three blocks, and I had my arctics." She moved a little away
toward the fire again and showed the arctics on the floor where she must
have been scuffling them off under her skirts. "Ugh! But it's cold!" She
now stretched a satin slipper in toward the fire.

"Yes, it's a cold night; but you seem to have got home alive, and I
don't think you'll be the worse for it now, if you go to bed at once,"
said her father.

"Is that a hint?" she asked, with a dreamy appreciation of the warmth
through the toe of her slipper.

"Not at all; we should be glad to have you sit up the whole night with
us."

"Ah, now I know you're hinting. Is it business?"

"Yes, it's business."

"Well, I'm just in the humor for business; I've had enough pleasure."

"I don't see why Louise shouldn't stay and talk business with us, if she
likes. I think it's a pity to keep women out of it, as if it didn't
concern them," said the son. "Nine-tenths of the time it concerns them
more than it does men." He had a bright, friendly, philosophical smile
in saying this, and he stood waiting for his sister to be gone, with a
patience which their father did not share. He stood something over six
feet in his low shoes, and his powerful frame seemed starting out of the
dress-suit, which it appeared so little related to. His whole face was
handsome and regular, and his full beard did not wholly hide a mouth of
singular sweetness.

"Yes; I think so too, in the abstract," said the father. "If the
business were mine, or were business in the ordinary sense of the
term--"

"Why, why did you say it was business at all, then?" The girl put her
arms round her father's neck and let her head-scarf fall on the rug a
little way from her cloak and her arctics. "If you hadn't said it was
business, I should have been in bed long ago." Then, as if feeling her
father's eagerness to have her gone, she said, "Good night," and gave
him a kiss, and a hug or two more, and said "Good night, Matt," and got
herself away, letting a long glove trail somewhere out of her dress, and
stretch its weak length upon the floor after her, as if it were trying
to follow her.




VIII.


Louise's father, in turning to look from her toward his son, felt
himself slightly pricked in the cheek by the pin that had transferred
itself from her neck-gear to his coat collar, and Matt went about
picking up the cloak, the arctics, the scarf and the glove. He laid the
cloak smoothly on the leathern lounge, and arranged the scarf and glove
on it, and set the arctics on the floor in a sort of normal relation to
it, and then came forward in time to relieve his father of the pin that
was pricking him, and that he was rolling his eyes out of his head to
get sight of.

"What in the devil is that?" he roared.

"Louise's pin," said Matt, as placidly as if that were quite the place
for it, and its function were to prick her father in the cheek. He went
and pinned it into her scarf, and then he said, "It's about Northwick, I
suppose."

"Yes," said his father, still furious from the pinprick. "I'm afraid the
miserable scoundrel is going to run away."

"Did you expect there was a chance of that?" asked Matt, quietly.

"Expect!" his father blustered. "I don't know what I expected. I might
have expected anything of him but common honesty. The position I took at
the meeting was that our only hope was to give him a chance. He made all
sorts of professions of ability to meet the loss. I didn't believe him,
but I thought that he might partially meet it, and that nothing was to
be gained by proceeding against him. You can't get blood out of a
turnip, even by crushing the turnip."

"That seems sound," said the son, with his reasonable smile.

"I didn't spare him, but I got the others to spare him. I told him he
was a thief."

"Oh!" said Matt.

"Why, wasn't he?" returned his father, angrily.

"Yes, yes. I suppose he might be called so." Matt admitted it with an
air of having his reservations, which vexed his father still more.

"Very well, sir!" he roared. "Then I called him so; and I think that it
will do him good to know it." Hilary did not repeat all of the violent
things he had said to Northwick, though he had meant to do so, being
rather proud of them; the tone of his son's voice somehow stopped him
for the moment. "I brought them round to my position, and we gave him
the chance he asked for."

"It was really the only thing you could do."

"Of course it was! It was the only business-like thing, though it won't
seem so when it comes out that he's gone to Canada. I told him I thought
the best thing for him would be a good, thorough, railroad accident on
his way home; and that if it were not for his family, for his daughter
who's been in and out here so much with Louise, I would like to see him
handcuffed, and going down the street with a couple of constables."

Matt made no comment upon this, perhaps because he saw no use in
criticising his father, and perhaps because his mind was more upon the
point he mentioned. "It will be hard for that pretty creature."

"It will be hard for a number of creatures, pretty and plain," said his
father. "It won't break any of us; but it will shake some of us up
abominably. I don't know but it may send one or two people to the wall,
for the time being."

"Ah, but that isn't the same thing at all. That's suffering; it isn't
shame. It isn't the misery that the sin of your father has brought on
you."

"Well, of course not!" said Hilary, impatiently granting it. "But Miss
Northwick always seemed to me a tolerably tough kind of young person. I
never quite saw what Louise found to like in her."

"They were at school together," said the son. "She's a sufficiently
offensive person, I fancy; or might be. But she sometimes struck me as a
person that one might be easily unjust to, for that very reason; I
suppose she has the fascination that a proud girl has for a girl like
Louise."

Hilary asked, with a divergence more apparent than real, "How is that
affair of hers with Jack Wilmington?"

"I don't know. It seems to have that quality of mystery that belongs to
all affairs of the kind when they hang fire. We expect people to get
married, and be done with it, though that may not really be the way to
be done with it."

"Wasn't there some scandal about him, of some kind?"

"Yes; but I never believed in it."

"He always struck me as something of a cub, but somehow he doesn't seem
the sort of a fellow to give the girl up because--"

"Because her father is a fraud?" Matt suggested. "No, I don't think he
is, quite. But there are always a great many things that enter into the
matter besides a man's feelings, or his principles, even. I can't say
what I think Wilmington would do. What steps do you propose to take next
in the matter?"

"I promised him he shouldn't be followed up, while he was trying to
right himself. If we find he's gone, we must give the case into the
hands of the detectives, I suppose." The disgust showed itself in
Hilary's face, which was an index to all his emotions, and his son said,
with a smile of sympathy:

"The apparatus of justice isn't exactly attractive, even when one isn't
a criminal. But I don't know that it's any more repulsive than the
apparatus of commerce, or business, as we call it. Some dirt seems to
get on everybody's bread by the time he's earned it, or on his money
even when he's made it in large sums as our class do."

The last words gave the father a chance to vent his vexation with
himself upon his son. "I wish you wouldn't talk that walking-delegate's
rant with me, Matt. If I let you alone in your nonsense, I think you may
fitly take it as a sign that I wish to be let alone myself."

"I beg your pardon," said the young man. "I didn't wish to annoy you."

"Don't do it, then." After a moment, Hilary added with a return to his
own sense of deficiency, "The whole thing's as thoroughly distasteful to
me as it can be. But I can't see how I could have acted otherwise than
I've done. I know I've made myself responsible, in a way, for
Northwick's getting off; but there was really nothing to do but to give
him the chance he asked for. His having abused it won't change that fact
at all; but I can't conceal from myself that I half-expected him to
abuse it."

He put this tentatively, and his son responded, "I suppose that
naturally inclines you to suppose he'll run away."

"Yes."

"But your supposition doesn't establish the fact."

"No. But the question is whether it doesn't oblige me to act as if it
had; whether I oughtn't, if I've got this suspicion, to take some steps
at once to find out whether Northwick's really gone or not, and to mix
myself actively up in the catchpole business of his pursuit, after I
promised him he shouldn't be shadowed in any way till his three days
were over."

"It's a nice question," said Matt, "or rather, it's a nasty one. Still,
you've only got your fears for evidence, and you must all have had your
fears before. I don't think that even a bad conscience ought to hurry
one into the catchpole business." Matt laughed again with that fondness
he had for his father. "Though as for any peculiar disgrace in
catchpoles as catchpoles, I don't see it. They're a necessary part of
the administration of justice, as we understand it, and have it; and I
don't see how a detective who arrests, say, a murderer, is not as
respectably employed as the judge who sentences him, or the hangman who
puts the rope round his neck. The distinction we make between them is
one of those tricks for shirking responsibility which are practised in
every part of the system. Not that I want you to turn catchpole. It's
all so sorrowful and sickening that I wish you hadn't any duty at all in
the matter. I suppose you feel at least that you ought to let the Board
know that you have your misgivings?"

"Yes," said Hilary, ruefully, with his double chin on his breast, "I
felt like doing it at once; but there was my word to _him_! And I wanted
to talk with you."

"It was just as well to let them have their night's rest. There isn't
really anything to be done." Matt rose from the low chair where he had
been sprawling, and stretched his stalwart arms abroad. "If the man was
going he's gone past recall by this time; and if he isn't gone, there's
no immediate cause for anxiety."

"Then you wouldn't do anything at present?"

"I certainly shouldn't. What could you do?"

"Yes, it might as well all go till morning, I suppose."

"Good night," the son said, suggestively, "I suppose there isn't really
anything more?"

"No, what could there be? You had better go to bed."

"And you, too, I hope, father."

"Oh, I shall go to bed--as a matter of form."

The son laughed. "I wish you could carry your formality so far as to go
to sleep, too. I shall."

"I sha'n't sleep," said the father, bitterly. "When things like this
happen, someone has to lie awake and think about them."

"Well, I dare say Northwick's doing that."

"I doubt it," said Hilary. "I suspect Northwick is enjoying a refreshing
slumber on the Montreal express somewhere near St. Albans about this
time."

"I doubt if his dreams are pleasant. After all, he's only going to a
larger prison if he's going into exile. He may be on the Montreal
express, but I guess he isn't sleeping," said Matt.

"Yes," his father admitted. "Poor devil! He'd much better be dead."




IX.


The groom who drove Miss Sue Northwick down to the station at noon that
day, came back without her an hour later. He brought word to her sister
that she had not found the friend she expected to meet at the station,
but had got a telegram from her there, and had gone into town to lunch
with her. The man was to return and fetch her from the six o'clock
train.

She briefly explained at dinner that her friend had been up at four
balls during the week, and wished to beg off from the visit she had
promised until after the fifth, which was to be that night.

"I don't see how she lives through it," said Adeline. "And at her age,
it seems very odd to be just as fond of dancing as if she were a bud."

"Louise is only twenty-three," said Suzette. "If she were married, she
would be just in the heart of her gayeties at that age, or even older."

"But she isn't married, and that makes all the difference."

"Her brother is spending the month at home, and she makes the most of
his being with them."

"Has he given up his farming? It's about time."

"No; not at all, I believe. She says he's in Boston merely as a matter
of duty, to chaperon her at parties, and save her mother from having to
go with her."

"Well," said Adeline, "I should think he would want to be of _some_ use
in the world; and if he won't help his father in business, he had better
help his mother in society."

Suzette sat fallen back in her chair for the moment, and she said as if
she had not heeded, "I think I will give a little dance here, next week.
Louise can come up for a couple of days, and we can have it Thursday. We
made out the list--just a few people. She went out with me after lunch,
and we saw most of the girls, and I ordered the supper. Mrs. Lambert
will matronize them; it'll be an old dance, rather, as far as the girls
are concerned, but I've asked two or three buds; and some of the young
married people. It will be very pleasant, don't you think?"

"Very. Do you think Mr. Wade would like to come?"

Suzette smiled. "I dare say he would. I wasn't thinking of him in making
it, but I don't see why he shouldn't look in."

"He might come to the supper," Adeline mused aloud, "if it isn't one of
his church days. I never can keep the run of them."

"We were talking about that and we decided that Thursday would be
perfectly safe. Louise and I looked it up together; but we knew we could
make everything sure by asking Mrs. Lambert first of all; she would have
been certain to object if we had made any mistake."

"I'm very glad," said Adeline. "I know father will be glad to have Mr.
Wade here. He's taken a great fancy to him."

"Mr. Wade's very nice," said Suzette, coolly. "I shouldn't have liked to
have it without him."

They left the table and went into the library, to talk the dance over at
larger leisure. Suzette was somewhat sleepy from the fatigues of her
escapade to Boston, and an afternoon spent mostly in the cold air, and
from time to time she yawned, and said she must really go to bed, and
then went on talking.

"Shall you have any of the South Hatboro' people?" her sister asked.

"Mrs. Munger and her tribe?" said Suzette, with a contemptuous little
smile. "I don't think she would contribute much. Why not the Morrells;
or the Putneys, at once?" She added abruptly, "I think I shall ask Jack
Wilmington." Adeline gave a start, and looked keenly at her; but she
went on quite imperviously. "The Hilarys know him. Matt Hilary and he
were quite friends at one time. Besides," she said, as if choosing now
to recognize the quality of Adeline's gaze, "I don't care to have Louise
suppose there's the shadow of anything between us any more, not even a
quarrel."

Adeline gave a little sigh of relief. "I'm glad that's it. I'm always
afraid you'll get--"

"To thinking about him again? You needn't be. All that's as thoroughly
dead and gone as anything can be in this world. No," she continued, in
the tone that is more than half for one's self in such dealings,
"whatever there was of that, or might have been, Mr. Wilmington has put
an end to, long ago. It never was anything but a fancy, and I don't
believe it could have been anything else if it had ever come to the
point."

"I'm glad it seems so to you now, Sue," said her sister, "but you
needn't tell me that you weren't very much taken with him at one time;
and if it's going to begin again, I'd much rather you wouldn't have him
here."

Suzette laughed at the old-maidish anxiety. "Do you think you shall see
me at his feet before the evening is over? But I should like to see him
at mine for a moment, and to have the chance of hearing his
explanations."

"I don't believe he's ever been bad!" cried Adeline. "He's just weak."

"Very well. I should like to hear what a man has to say for his
weakness, and then tell him that I had a little weakness of my own, and
didn't think I had strength to endure a husband that had to be
explained."

"Ah, you're in love with him, yet! You shall never have him here in the
world, after the way he's treated you!"

"Don't be silly, Adeline! Don't be romantic! If you had ever been in
love yourself, you would know that people outlive that as well as other
things. Let's see how the drawing-room will do for the dance?"

She jumped from her chair and touched the electric button at the
chimney. "You think that nothing but death can kill a fancy, and yet
nobody marries their first love, and lots of women have second
husbands." The man showed himself at the door, and she said to him in a
rapid aside: "Turn up the lights in the drawing-room, James," and
returned to her sister. "No, Adeline! The only really enduring and
undying thing is a slight. That lasts--with _me_!"

Adeline was moved to say, in the perverse honesty of her soul, and from
the inborn New England love of justice, "I don't believe he ever meant
it, Sue. I don't believe but what he was influenced--"

Suzette laughed, not at all bitterly. "Oh, _you're_ in love with him!
Well, you may have him if ever he offers himself to me. Let's look at
the drawing-room." She caught Adeline round her bony waist, where each
rib defined itself to her hand, and danced her out of the library,
across the hall into the white and gold saloon beyond. "Yes," she said,
with a critical look at the room, "it will do splendidly. We shall have
to put down linen, of course; but then the dancing will be superb--as
good as a bare floor. Yes, it will be a grand success. Ugh! Come out,
come out, come out! How deathly cold it is!"

She ran back into the warm library, and her sister followed more slowly.
"You shouldn't think," she said, as if something in Sue's words had
reminded her of it, "that coming so soon after Mrs. Newton's little
boy--"

"Well, that's _like_ you, Adeline! To bring _that_ up! _No_, indeed!
It'll be a whole week, nearly; and besides he _isn't_ quite one of the
family. What an idea!"

"Of course," her sister assented, abashed by Sue's scornful surprise.

"It's too bad it should have happened just at this time," said the girl,
with some relenting. "When is it to be?"

"To-morrow, at eleven," said Adeline. She perceived that Sue's
selfishness was more a selfishness of words, perhaps, than of thoughts
or feelings. "You needn't have anything to do with it. I can tell them
you were not very well, and didn't feel exactly like coming. They will
understand." She was used to making excuses for Suzette, and a motherly
fib like this seemed no harm to her.




X.


In the morning before her sister was astir, Adeline went out to the
coachman's quarters in the stabling, and met the mother of the dead
child at the door. "Come right in!" she said, fiercely, as she set it
wide. "I presume you want to know if there's anything you can do for me;
that's what they all ask. Well, there ain't, unless you can bring him
back to life. I've been up and doin', as usual, this mornin'," she said,
and a sound of frying came from the kitchen where she had left her work
to let her visitor in. "We got to eat; we got to live."

The farmer's wife came in from the next chamber, where the little one
lay; she had her bonnet and shawl on as if going home after a night's
watching. She said, "I tell her he's better off where he's gone; but she
can't seem to sense the comfort of it."

"How do you know he's better off?" demanded the mother, turning upon
her. "It makes me tired to hear such stuff. Who's goin' to take more
care of the child where he's gone, than what his mother could? Don't you
talk nonsense, Mrs. Saunders! You don't know anything about it, and
nobody does. I can bear it; yes, I've got the stren'th to stand up
against death, but I don't want any _comfort_. You want to see Elbridge,
Miss Northwick? He's in the harness room, I guess. He's got to keep
about, too, if he don't want to go clear crazy. One thing, he don't have
to stand any comfortin'. I guess men don't say such things to each other
as women do, big fools as they be!"

Mrs. Saunders gave Miss Northwick a wink of pity for Mrs. Newton and
expressed that she was hardly accountable for what she was saying.

"He used to complain of me for lettin' Arty get out into the stable
among the horses; but I guess he won't be troubled that way _much_
more," said the mother; and then something in Miss Northwick's face
seemed to stay her in her wild talk; and she asked, "Want I should call
him for you?"

"No, no," said Adeline, "I'll go right through to him, myself." She knew
the way from the coachman's dwelling into the stable, and she found
Elbridge oiling one of the harnesses, with a sort of dogged attention to
the work, which he hardly turned from to look at her. "Elbridge," she
asked, "did you drive father to the depot yesterday morning?"

"Yes, ma'am, I did."

"When did he say he would be back?"

"Well, he said he couldn't say, exactly. But I understood in a day or
two."

"Did he expect to be anywhere but Ponkwasset?"

"No, ma'am, I didn't hear him say as he did."

"Then it's a mistake; and of course I knew it was a mistake. There's
more than one Northwick in the world, I presume." She laughed a little
hysterically; she had a newspaper in her hand, and it shook with the
nervous tremor that passed over her.

"Why, what is it, Miss Northwick?" said Elbridge with a perception of
the trouble in her voice through the trouble in his own heart. He
stopped pulling the greasy sponge over the trace in his hand, and turned
towards her.

"Oh, nothing. There's been an accident on the Union and Dominion
Railroad; and of course it's a mistake."

She handed him the paper, folded to the column which she wished to show,
and he took it between two finger-tips, so as to soil it as little as
possible, and stood reading it. She went on saying, "He wouldn't be on
the train if he was at Ponkwasset; I got the paper when I first came
down stairs, but I didn't happen to read the account till just now; and
then I thought I'd run out and see what father said to you about where
he was going. He told us he was going to the Mills, too, and--" Her
voice growing more and more wistful, died away in the fascination of
watching the fascination of Elbridge as he first took in the half-column
of scare-heads, and then followed down to the meagre details of the
dispatch eked out with double-leading to cover space.

It appeared that the Northern express had reached Wellwater Junction, on
the Union and Dominion line, several hours behind time, and after the
usual stop there for supper, had joined the Boston train, on the United
States and Canada, for Montreal, and had, just after leaving the
Junction, run off the track. "The deadly car stove got in its work" on
the wreck, and many lives had been lost by the fire, especially in the
parlor car. It was impossible to give a complete list of the killed and
wounded, but several bodies were identified, and among the names of
passengers in the Pullman that of T. W. Northwick was reported, from a
telegram received by the conductor at Wellwater asking to have a seat
reserved from that point to Montreal.

"It ain't him, I know it ain't, Miss Northwick," said Elbridge. He
offered to give her the paper, but took another look at it before he
finally yielded it. "There's lots of folks of the same name, I don't
care what it is, and the initials ain't the ones."

"No," she said, doubtfully, "but I didn't like the last name being the
same."

"Well, you can't help that; and as long as it ain't the initials, and
you know your father is safe and sound at the Mills, you don't want to
worry."

"No," said Adeline. "You're sure he told you he was going to the Mills?"

"Why, didn't he tell _you_ he was? I don't recollect just what he said.
But he told me about that note he left for me, and that had the money in
it for the fun'al--" Elbridge stopped for a moment before he added, "He
said he'd telegraph just which train he wanted me to meet him when he
was comin' back.... Why, dumn it! I guess I _must_ be crazy. We can
settle it in half an hour's time--or an hour or two at the outside--and
no need to worry about it. Telegraph to the Mills and find out whether
he's there or not."

He dropped his harness, and went to the telephone and called up the
Western Union operator at the station. He had the usual telephonic
contention with her as to who he was, and what he wanted, but he got her
at last to take his dispatch to Ponkwasset Falls, asking whether
Northwick was at the Mills.

"There!" he said, "I don't believe but what that'll fix it all right.
And I'll bring you in the answer myself, when it comes, Miss Northwick."

"I do hate to trouble you with my foolishness, when--"

"I guess you needn't mind about that," said Elbridge. "I guess it
wouldn't make much difference to me, if the whole world was burnt up. Be
a kind of a relief." He did not mean just the sense the words conveyed,
and she, in her preoccupation with her own anxiety, and her pity for
him, interpreted them aright.

She stayed to add, "I don't know what he could have been on that train
for, any way, do you?"

"No, and he wa'n't on it; you'll find that out."

"It'll be very provoking," she said, forecasting the minor trouble of
the greater trouble's failure. "Everybody will wonder if it isn't
father, and we shall have to tell them it isn't."

"Well, that won't be so bad as havin' to tell 'em it is," said Elbridge,
getting back for the moment to his native dryness.

"That's true," Adeline admitted. "Don't speak to anybody about it till
you hear." She knew from his making no answer that he would obey her,
and she hid the paper in her pocket, as if she would hide the
intelligence it bore from all the rest of the world.

She let Suzette sleep late, after the fatigues of her day in Boston and
the excitement of their talk at night, which she suspected had prevented
the girl from sleeping early. Elbridge's sympathetic incredulity had
comforted her, if it had not convinced her, and she possessed herself in
such patience as she could till the answer should come from the mills.
If her father were there, then it would be all right; and in the
meantime she found some excuses for not believing the worst she feared.
There was no reason in the world why he should be on that train; there
was no reason why she should identify him with that T. W. Northwick in
the burnt-up car; that was not his name, and that was not the place
where he would have been.




XI.


There was trouble with the telegraph and telephone connections between
Hatboro' and Ponkwasset, and Adeline had to go to the funeral without an
answer to Elbridge's message. Below her surface interest in the ceremony
and the behavior of the mourners and the friends, which nothing could
have alienated but the actual presence of calamity, she had a nether
misery of alternating hope and fear, of anxieties continually reasoned
down, and of security lost the instant it was found. The double strain
told so upon her nerves, that when the rites at the grave were ended,
she sent word to the clergyman and piteously begged him to drive home
with her.

"Why, aren't you well, Miss Northwick?" he asked, with a glance at her
troubled face, as he got into the covered sleigh with her.

"Oh, yes," she said, and she flung herself back against the cushioning
and began to cry.

"Poor Mrs. Newton's grief has been very trying," he said, gently, and
with a certain serenity of smile he had, and he added, as if he thought
it well to lure Miss Northwick from the minor affliction that we feel
for others' sorrows to the sorrow itself, "It has been a terrible blow
to her--so sudden, and her only child."

"Oh, it isn't that," said Adeline, frankly. "Have--have you seen
the--paper this morning?"

"It came," said the clergyman. "But in view of the duty before me, I
thought I wouldn't read it. Is there anything particular in it?"

"No, nothing. Only--only--" Adeline had not been able to separate
herself from the dreadful thing, and she took it out of the carriage
pocket. "There has been an accident on the railroad," she began firmly,
but she broke down in the effort to go on. "And I wanted to have you
see--see--" She stopped, and handed him the paper.

He took it and ran over the account of the accident, and came at her
trouble with an instant intelligence that was in itself a sort of
reassurance. "But had you any reason to suppose your father was on the
train?"

"No," she said from the strength he gave her. "That is the strange part
about it. He went up to the Mills, yesterday morning, and he couldn't
have been on the train at all. Only the name--"

"It isn't quite the name," said Wade, with a gentle moderation, as if he
would not willingly make too much of the difference, and felt truth to
be too sacred to be tampered with even while it had merely the form of
possibility.

"No," said Adeline, eager to be comforted, "and I'm sure he's at the
Mills. Elbridge has sent a dispatch to find out if he's there, but there
must be something the matter with the telegraph. We hadn't heard before
the funeral; or, at least, he didn't bring the word; and I hated to keep
round after him when--"

"He probably hadn't heard," said the clergyman, soothingly, "and no news
is good news, you know. But hadn't we better drive round by the station,
and find out whether any answer has been--"

"O, no! I couldn't do that!" said Adeline, nervously. "They will
telephone the answer up to Elbridge. But come home with me, if you
haven't something to do, and stay with us till we--"

"Oh, very willingly." On the way the young clergyman talked of the
accident, guessing that her hysterical conjectures had heightened the
horror, and that he should make it less dreadful by exploring its facts
with her. He did not declare it impossible her father should have been
on the train, but he urged the extreme improbability.

Elbridge and his wife passed them, driving rapidly in Simpson's booby,
which Adeline had ordered for their use at the funeral; and when she got
into the house Elbridge was waiting there for her. He began at once;
"Miss Northwick, I don't believe but what your father's staid over at
Springfield for something. He was talkin' to me last week about some
hosses there--"

"Isn't he at the Mills?" she demanded sharply.

Elbridge gave his hat a turn on his hand, before he looked up. "Well,
no, he hain't been, yet--"

Adeline made no sound, but she sank down as a column of water sinks.

At the confusion of movements and voices that followed, Suzette came to
the door of the library, and looked wonderingly into the hall, where
this had happened, with a book clasped over her finger. "What in the
world is the matter?" she asked with a sort of sarcastic amaze, at sight
of Elbridge lifting something from the floor.

"Don't be alarmed, Miss Suzette," said Mr. Wade, "Your sister seems a
little faint, and--"

"It's this sickening heat!" cried the girl, running to the door, and
setting it wide. "It suffocates me when I come in from the outside. I'll
get some water." She vanished and was back again instantly, stooping
over Adeline to wet her forehead and temples. The rush of the cold air
began to revive her. She opened her eyes, and Suzette said, severely,
"What has come over you, Adeline? Aren't you well?" and as Adeline
answered nothing, she went on: "I don't believe she knows where she is.
Let us get her into the library on the lounge."

She put her strength with that of the young clergyman, and they carried
Adeline to the lounge; Suzette dispatched Elbridge, hanging helplessly
about, for some of the women. He sent the parlor-maid, and did not come
back.

Adeline kept looking at her sister as if she were afraid of her. When
she was recovered sufficiently to speak, she turned her eyes on the
clergyman, and said huskily, "Tell her."

"Your sister has had a little fright," he began; and with his gentle
eyes on the girl's he went on to deal the pain that priests and
physicians must give. "There's the report of a railroad accident in the
morning paper, and among the passengers--the missing--was one of the
name of Northwick--"

"But father is at the Mills!"

"Your sister had telegraphed before the funeral, to make sure--and word
has come that he--isn't there."

"Where is the paper?" demanded Suzette, with a kind of haughty
incredulity.

Wade found it in his pocket, where he must have put it instead of giving
it back to Adeline in the sleigh. Suzette took it and went with it to
one of the windows. She stood reading the account of the accident, while
her sister watched her with tremulous eagerness for the help that came
from her contemptuous rejection of the calamity.

"How absurd! It isn't father's name, and he couldn't have been on the
train. What in the world would he have been going to Montreal for, at
this time of year? It's ridiculous!" Suzette flung the paper down, and
came back to the other two.

"I felt," said Wade, "that it was extremely improbable--"

"But where," Adeline put in faintly, "could he have been if he wasn't at
the Mills?"

"Anywhere in the world except Wellwater Junction," returned Suzette,
scornfully. "He may have stopped over at Springfield, or--"

"Yes," Adeline admitted, "that's what Elbridge thought."

"Or he may have gone on to Willoughby Junction. He often goes there."

"That is true," said the other, suffering herself to take heart a
little. "And he's been talking of selling his interest in the quarries
there; and--"

"He's there, of course," said Suzette with finality. "If he'd been going
farther, he'd have telegraphed us. He's always very careful. I'm not in
the least alarmed, and I advise you not to be, Adeline. When did you see
the paper first?"

"When I came down to breakfast," said Adeline, quietly.

"And I suppose you didn't eat any breakfast?"

Adeline's silence made confession.

"What I think is, we'd better all have _lunch_," said Suzette, and she
went and touched the bell at the chimney. "You'll stay with us, won't
you, Mr. Wade? We want lunch at once, James," she said to the man who
answered her ring. "Of course, you must stay, Mr. Wade, and help see
Adeline back to her right mind." She touched the bell again, and when
the man appeared, "My sleigh at once, James," she commanded. "I will
drive you home, Mr. Wade, on my way to the station. Of course I shall
not leave anything in doubt about this silly scare. I fancy it will be
no great difficulty to find out where father is. Where is that railroad
guide? Probably my father took it up to his room." She ran upstairs and
came down with the book in her hand. "Now we will see. I don't believe
he could get any train at Springfield, where he would have to change for
the Mills, that would take him beyond the Junction at that hour last
night. The express has to come up from Boston--" She stopped and ran
over the time-table of the route. "Well, he _could_ get a connecting
train at the Junction; but that doesn't prove at all that he did."

She talked on, mocking the mere suggestion of such a notion, and then
suddenly rang the bell once more, to ask sharply, "Isn't lunch ready
yet? Then bring us tea, here. I shall telegraph to the Mills again, and
I shall telegraph to Mr. Hilary in Boston; he will know whether father
was going anywhere else. They had a meeting of the Board day before
yesterday, and father went to the Mills unexpectedly. I shall telegraph
to Ponkwasset Junction, too; and you may be sure I shall not come home,
Adeline, till I know something definite."

The tea came, and Suzette served the cups herself, with nerves that
betrayed no tremor in the clash of silver or china. But she made haste,
and at the sound of sleigh-bells without, she put down her own cup,
untasted.

"Oh, must you take Mr. Wade away?" Adeline feebly pleaded. "Stay till
she comes back!" she entreated.

Suzette faltered a moment, and then with a look at Mr. Wade, she gave a
harsh laugh. "Very well!" she said.

She ran into the hall and up the stairs, and in another moment they
heard her coming down again; the outer door shut after her, and then
came the flutter of the sleigh-bells as she drove away.

Over the lunch the elder sister recovered herself a little, and ate as
one can in the suspense of a strong emotion.

"Your sister is a person of great courage," said the clergyman, as if he
were a little abashed by it.

"She would never show that she's troubled. But I know well enough that
she's troubled, by the way she kept talking and doing something every
minute; and now, if she hadn't gone to telegraph, she'd--I mustn't keep
you here, any longer, Mr. Wade," she broke off in the sense of physical
strength the food had given her. "Indeed, I mustn't. You needn't be
anxious. I shall do very well, now. Yes! I shall!"

She begged him to leave her, but he perceived that she did not really
wish him to go, and it was nearly an hour after Suzette drove away,
before he got out of the house. He would not let her send him home; and
he walked toward the village in the still, sunny cold of the early
winter afternoon, thinking of the sort of contempt with which that girl
had spurned the notion of calamity, as if it were something to be
resented, and even snubbed, in its approach to her. It was as if she had
now gone to trace it to its source, and defy it there; to stamp upon the
presumptuous rumor and destroy it.

Just before he reached the crest of the upland that shut out the village
from him, he heard the clash of sleigh-bells; a pair of horses leaped
into sight, and came bearing down upon him with that fine throw of their
feet, which you get only in such a direct encounter. He stepped into the
side track, and then he heard Miss Sue Northwick call to her horses and
saw her pulling them up. She had her father's fondness for horses, and
the pair of little grays were a gift from him with the picturesque
sledge they drew. The dasher swelled forward like a swan's breast, and
then curved deeply backward; from either corner of the band of iron
filagree at the top, dangled a red horsetail. The man who had driven her
to the station sat in a rumble behind; on the seat with Suzette was
another young lady, who put out her hand to Wade with a look of uncommon
liking, across the shining bearskin robe, and laughed at his
astonishment in seeing her. While they talked, the clipped grays
nervously lifted and set down their forefeet in the snow, as if
fingering it; they inhaled the cold air with squared nostrils, and blew
it out in blasts of white steam. Suzette said, in, explanation of her
friend's presence: "Louise had seen the account, and she made her
brother bring her up. They think just as I do, that there's nothing of
it; one of the papers had the name Nordeck; but we've left Mr. Hilary at
the station, fighting the telegraph and telephone in all directions, and
he isn't to stop till he gets something positive. He's trying Wellwater
now." She said all this very haughtily, but she added, "The only thing
is, I can't understand why my father hasn't been heard of at the Mills.
Some one was asking for him there yesterday."

"Probably he went on to Willoughby Junction, as you suggested."

"Of course he did," said Louise. "We haven't heard from there yet."

"Oh, I'm not in the least troubled," said Sue, "but it's certainly very
provoking." She lifted her reins. "I'm hurrying home to let Adeline
know."

"She'll be very glad," Wade returned, as if it were the certainty of
good news she was carrying. "I think I'll join Matt at the station," he
suggested to Louise.

"Do!" she answered. "You can certainly manage something between you.
Matt will be almost as glad of your coming as my going. I thought we
were coming up here to reassure Sue, but I seem strangely superfluous."

"You can reassure Adeline," said Sue. She added to Wade, "I keep
thinking what an annoyance it will be to my father, to have all this
fuss made over him. I sometimes feel vexed with Adeline. Good-bye!" she
called back to him as she drove away, and she stopped again to add,
"Won't you come up with Mr. Hilary when you've heard something
definite?"

Wade promised, and they repeated their good-byes all round with a
resolute cheerfulness.




XII.


The affair had been mixed up with tea and lunch, and there was now the
suggestion of a gay return to the Northwick place and an hour or two
more in that pleasant company of pretty and lively women, which Wade
loved almost as well as he loved righteousness. He knew that there was
such a thing as death in the world; he had often already seen its
strange, peaceful face; he had just stood by an open grave; but at the
moment, his youth denied it all, and he swung along over the hard-packed
roadway thinking of the superb beauty of Suzette Northwick, and the
witchery of Louise Hilary's face. It was like her, to come at once to
her friend in this anxiety; and he believed a strength in her to help
bear the worst, the worst that now seemed so remote and impossible.

He did not find Matt Hilary in the station; but he pushed through to the
platform outside and saw him at a little distance standing between two
of the tracks, and watching a group of men there who were replacing some
wornout rails with new ones.

"Matt!" he called to him, and Matt turned about and said, "Hello,
Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his
face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in
position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the
plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide,
free-handed rhythmical swing of his hammer.

"Beautiful! Isn't it?" said Matt. "I never see any sort of manual labor,
even the kinds that are brutified and demoralized by their association
with machinery, without thinking how far the arts still come short of
the trades. If any sculptor could feel it, what a magnificent bas-relief
just that thing would make!" He turned round to look at the men again:
in their different poses of self-forgetfulness and interest in their
work, they had a beauty and grace, in spite of their clumsy dress, which
ennobled the scene.

When Matt once more faced round, he smiled serenely on his friend. Wade,
who knew his temperament and his philosophy, was deceived for the
moment. "Then you don't share Miss Northwick's anxiety about her
father," he began, as if Matt had been dealing directly with that
matter, and had been giving his reasons for not being troubled about it.
"Have you heard any thing yet? But of course you haven't, or--"

Matt halted him, and looked down into his face from his greater height
with a sort of sobered cheerfulness. "How much do you know about Miss
Northwick's father?"

"Very little--nothing in fact but what she and her sister showed me in
the morning paper. I know they're in great distress about him; I just
met Miss Suzette and your sister, and they told me I should find you at
the station."

Matt began to walk on again. "I didn't know but you had heard some talk
from the outside. I came off to escape the pressure of inquiry at the
station; people had found out somehow that I had been put in charge of
the telegraphing when the young ladies left. I imagined they wouldn't
follow me if I went for a walk." He put his hand through Wade's arm, and
directed their course across the tracks toward the street away from the
station, where Elbridge had walked his horses up and down the evening he
met Northwick. "I told them to look out for me, if they got anything; I
should keep in sight somewhere. Isn't it a curious commentary on our
state of things," he went on, "that when any man in a position of trust
can't be accounted for twenty-four hours after he leaves home, the
business-like supposition is that he has run away with money that
doesn't belong to him?"

"What do you mean, Matt?"

"I mean that the popular belief in Hatboro' seems to be that Northwick
was on his way to Canada on the train that was wrecked."

"Shocking, shocking!" said Wade. "What makes you think they believe
that?"

"The conjecture and speculation began in the station the moment Miss
Northwick left it, and before it could be generally understood that I
was there to represent her. I suppose there wasn't a man among them that
wouldn't have trusted Northwick with all he had, or wouldn't have felt
that his fortune was made if Northwick had taken charge of his money. In
fact I heard some of them saying so before their deference for me shut
their mouths. Yet I haven't a doubt they all think he's an absconding
defaulter."

"It's shocking," said Wade, sadly, "but I'm afraid you're right. These
things are so common that people are subjected to suspicion on no kind
of--" But just at this juncture Matt lifted his head from the moment's
revery in which he seemed to have been far absent.

"Have you seen much of the family this winter?"

"Yes, a good deal," said Wade. "They're not communicants, but they've
been regular attendants at the services, and I've been a good deal at
their house. They seem rather lonely; they have very little to do with
the South Hatboro' people, and nothing at all with the villagers. I
don't know why they've spent the winter here. Of course one hears all
kinds of gossip. The gossips at South Hatboro' say that Miss Suzette was
willing to be on with young Wilmington again, and that _she_ kept the
family here. But I place no faith in such a conjecture."

"It has a rustic crudity," said Matt. "But if Jack Wilmington ever cared
anything for the girl, now's his chance to be a man and stand by her."

Something in Matt's tone made Wade stop and ask, "What do you mean,
Matt? Is there anything besides--"

"Yes." Matt took a fresh grip of his friend's arm, and walked him
steadily forward, and kept him walking in spite of his involuntary
tendency to come to a halt every few steps, and try to urge something
that he never quite got from his tongue, against the probability of what
Matt was saying. "I mean that these people are right in their
suspicions."

"Right?"

"My dear Caryl, there is no doubt whatever that Northwick is a defaulter
to the company in a very large amount. It came out at a meeting of the
directors on Monday. He confessed it, for he could not deny it in the
face of the proof against him, and he was given a number of days to make
up his shortage. He was released on parole: it was really the best
thing, the wisest as well as the mercifullest, and of course he broke
his word, and seized the first chance to run away. I knew all about the
defalcation from my father just after the meeting. There is simply no
question about it."

"Gracious powers!" said Wade, finally helpless to dispute the facts
which he still did not realize. "And you think it possible--do you
suppose--imagine--that it was really he who was in that burning car?
What an awful fate!"

"An awful fate?" asked Matt. "Do you think so? Yes, yours is the safe
ground in regard to a thing of that kind--the only ground."

"The only ground?"

"I was thinking of my poor father," said Matt.

"He said some sharp things to that wretched creature at the meeting of
the Board--called him a thief, and I dare say other hard names--and told
him that the best thing that could happen to him was a railroad accident
on his way home."

"Ah!"

"You see? When he read the account of that accident in the paper this
morning, and found a name so much like Northwick's among the victims, he
was fearfully broken up, of course. He felt somehow as if he had caused
his death--I could see that, though of course he wouldn't admit anything
of the kind."

"Of course," said Wade, compassionately.

"I suppose it isn't well to invoke death in any way. He is like the
devil, and only too apt to come, if you ask for him. I don't mean
anything superstitious, and I don't suppose my father really has any
superstitious feeling about the matter. But he's been rather a
friend--or a victim--of that damnable theory that the gentlemanly way
out of a difficulty like Northwick's is suicide, and I suppose he spoke
from association with it, or by an impulse from it. He has been
telegraphing right and left, to try to verify the reports, as it was his
business and duty to do, anyway; and he caught at the notion of my
coming up here with Louise to see if we could be of any use to those two
poor women."

"Poor women!" Wade echoed. "The worst must fall upon them, as the worst
always seems to do."

"Yes, wherever a cruel blow falls there seems to be a woman for it to
fall on. And you see what a refinement of cruelty this is going to be
when it reaches them? They have got to know that their father met that
awful death, and that he met it because he was a defaulter and was
running away. I suppose the papers will be full of it."

"That seems intolerable. Couldn't anything be done to stop them?"

"Why the thing has to come out. You can keep happiness a secret, but
sorrow and shame have to come out--I don't know why, but they do. Then,
when they come out, we feel as if the means of their publicity were the
cause of them. It's very unphilosophical." They walked slowly along in
silence for a few moments, and then Matt's revery broke out again in
words: "Well, it's to be seen now whether she has the strength that
bears, or the strength that breaks. The way she held her head, as she
took the reins and drove off, with poor Louise beside her palpitating
with sympathy for her trouble and anxiety about her horses, was, yes, it
was superb: there's no other word for it. Ah, poor girl!"

"Your sister's presence will be a great help to her," said Wade. "It was
very good of her to come."

"Ah, there wasn't anything else for it," said Matt, flinging his head
up. "Louise has my father's loyalty. I don't know much about her
friendship with Miss Northwick--she's so much younger than I, and they
came together when I was abroad--but I've fancied she wasn't much liked
among the girls, and Louise was her champion, in a way. When Louise read
that report, nothing would do but she must come."

"Of course."

"But our being here must have its embarrassments for my father. It was a
sacrifice for him to let us come."

"I don't understand."

"It was he who carried through the respite the directors gave Northwick;
and now he will have the appearance before some people of helping to
cover up the miserable facts, of putting a good face on things while a
rogue was getting away from justice. He might even be supposed to have
some interest in getting him out of the way."

"Oh, I don't think any such suspicion can attach itself to such a man as
Mr. Hilary," said Wade, with a certain resentment of the suggestion even
from the man's son.

"In a commercial civilization like ours any sort of suspicion can attach
to any sort of man in a case like this," said Matt.

Wade took off his hat and wiped his forehead. "I can't realize that the
case is what you say. I can't realize it at all. It seems like some poor
sort of play, of make-believe. I can't forgive myself for being so
little moved by it. We are in the presence of a horror that ought to
make us uncover our heads and fall to our knees and confess our own sins
to God!"

"Ah, I'm with you _there_!" said Matt, and he pushed his hand farther
through his friend's arm.

They were both still well under thirty, and they both had that zest for
mere experience, any experience, that hunger for the knowledge of life,
which youth feels. In their several ways they were already men who had
thought for themselves, or conjectured, rather; and they were eager to
verify their speculations through their emotions. They thought a good
deal alike in many things, though they started from such opposite points
in their thinking; and they both had finally the same ideal of life.
Their intimacy was of as old a date as their school days; at Harvard
they were in the same clubs as well as the same class. Wade's father was
not a Boston man, but his mother was a Bellingham, and he was nurtured
in the traditions of Hilary's social life. Both had broken with them:
Wade not so much when he became a ritualist as Hilary when he turned his
back on manufacturing.

They were now not without a kind of pride in standing so close to the
calamity they were fated witnesses of, and in the midst of their
sympathy they had a curiosity which concerned itself with one of the
victims because she was a young and beautiful girl. Their pity not so
much forgot as ignored Northwick's elder daughter, who was a plain, sick
old maid, and followed the younger with a kind of shrinking and dread of
her doom which Matt tried to put into words.

"I assure you if I couldn't manage to pull away from it at moments, I
don't see how I could stand it. I had a sense of personal disgrace, when
I met that poor girl, with what I had in my mind. I felt as if I were
taking some base advantage of her in knowing that about her father, and
I was so glad when she went off with Louise and left me to struggle with
my infamous information alone. I hurried Louise away with her in the
most cowardly haste. We don't any of us realize it, as you say. Why,
just imagine! It means sorrow, it means shame, it means poverty. They
will have to leave their house, their home; she will have to give up
everything to the company. It isn't merely friends and her place in the
world; it's money, it's something to eat and wear, it's a roof over her
head!"

Wade refused the extreme view portrayed by his friend's figures. "Of
course she won't be allowed to come to want."

"Of course. But there's really no measuring the sinuous reach of a
disaster like this. It strikes from a coil that seems to involve
everything."

"What are you going to do if you get bad news?" asked Wade.

"Ah, I don't know! I must tell her, somehow; unless you think that
you--" Wade gave a start which Matt interpreted aright; he laughed
nervously. "No, no! It's for me to do it. I know that; unless I can get
Louise. Ah! I wonder what that is."

They were walking back toward the station again, and Matt had seen a
head and arm projected from the office window, and a hand waving a sheet
of yellow paper. It seemed meant for them. They both began to run, and
then they checked themselves; and walked as fast as they could.

"We must refer the matter to your sister," said Wade, "and if she thinks
best, remember that I shall be quite ready to speak to Miss Northwick.
Or, if you think best, I will speak to her without troubling your
sister."

"Oh, you're all right, Wade. You needn't have any doubt of that. We'll
see. I wonder what there is in that dispatch."

The old station master had come out of the station and was hurrying to
meet them with the message, now duly enclosed in an envelope. He gave it
to Matt and promptly turned his back on him.

Matt tore it open, and read: "Impossible to identify parlor-car
passengers." The telegram was signed "Operator," and was dated at
Wellwater. It fell blankly on their tense feeling.

"Well," said Wade, after a long breath. "It isn't the worst."

Matt read it frowningly over several times; then he smiled. "Oh, no.
This isn't at all bad. It's nothing. But so far, it's rather comforting.
And it's something, even if it is nothing. Well, I suppose I'd better go
up to Miss Northwick with it. Wait a moment; I must tell them where to
send if anything else comes."

"I'll walk with you as far as St. Michael's," said Wade, when they left
the station. "I'm going to my study, there."

They set off together, up the middle of the street, which gave them more
elbow-room than the sidewalk narrowly blocked out of the snow.

From a large store as they were passing, a small, dry-looking, pompous
little man advanced to the middle of the street, and stopped them. "I
beg your pardon, Mr. Wade! I beg your pardon, sir!" he said, nimbly
transferring himself, after the quasi self-introduction, from Wade to
Matt. "May I ask whether you have received any further information?"

"No," said Matt, amiably, "the only answer we have got is that it is
impossible to identify the passengers in the parlor-car."

"Ah, thank you! Thank you very much, sir! I felt sure it couldn't be
_our_ Mr. Northwick. Er--good-morning, sir."

He bowed himself away, and went into his store again, and Matt asked
Wade, "Who in the world is that?"

"He's a Mr. Gerrish--keeps the large store, there. Rather an unpleasant
type."

Matt smiled. "He had the effect of refusing to believe that anything so
low as an accident could happen to a man of Northwick's business
standing."

"Something of that," Wade assented. "He worships Northwick on the altar
of material success."

Matt lifted his head and looked about. "I suppose the whole place is
simply seething with curiosity."

Just after they reached the side-street where Wade left him to go down
to his church, he met Sue Northwick driving in her sleigh. She was
alone, except for the groom impassive in the rumble.

"Have you heard anything?" she asked, sharply.

Matt repeated the dispatch from the operator at Wellwater.

"I knew it was a mistake," she said, with a kind of resolute scorn.
"It's perfectly ridiculous! _Why_ should he have been there? I think
there ought to be some way of punishing the newspapers for circulating
false reports. I've been talking with the man who drove my father to the
train yesterday morning, and he says he spoke lately of buying some
horses at Springfield. He got several from a farm near there once. I'm
going down to telegraph the farmer; I found his name among father's
bills. Of course he's there. I've got the dispatch all written out."

"Let me take it back to the station for you, Miss Northwick," said Matt.

"No; get in with me here, and we'll drive down, and then I'll carry you
back home. Or! Here, Dennis!" she said to the man in the rumble; and she
handed him the telegram. "Take this to the telegraph-office, and tell
them to send it up by Simpson the instant the answer comes."

The Irishman said, "Yes, ma'am," and dropped from his perch with the
paper in his hand.

"Get in, Mr. Hilary," she said, and after he had mounted she skilfully
backed the sleigh and turned the horses homeward. "If I hear nothing
from my dispatch, or if I hear wrong, I am going up to Wellwater
Junction myself, by the first train. I can't wait any longer. If it's
the worst, I want to know the worst."

Matt did not know what to say to her courage. So he said, "Alone?" to
gain time.

"Of course! At such a time, I would _rather_ be alone."

At the house Matt found Louise had gone to her room for a moment, and he
said he would like to speak with her there.

She was lying on the lounge, when he announced himself, and she said,
"Come in," and explained, "I just came off a moment, to give my
sympathies a little rest. And then, being up late so many nights this
week. What have you heard?"

"Nothing, practically. Louise, how long did you expect to stay?"

"I don't know. I hadn't thought. As long as I'm needed, I suppose. Why?
Must you go back?"

"No--not exactly."

"Not exactly? What are you driving at?"

"Why, there's nothing to be found out by telegraphing. Some one must go
up to the place where the accident happened. She sees that, and she
wants to go. She can't realize at all what it means to go there. Suppose
she could manage the journey, going alone, and all that; what could she
do after she got there? How could she go and look up the place of the
accident, and satisfy herself whether her father was--"

"Matt!" shrieked his sister. "If you go on, you will drive me wild. She
mustn't go; that's all there is of it. You mustn't think of letting her
go." She sat up on the lounge in expression of her resolution on this
point. "She must send somebody--some of their men. She mustn't go. It's
too hideous!"

"No," said Matt, thoughtfully. "I shall go."

"You!"

"Why not? I can be at the place by four or five in the morning, and I
can ascertain all the facts, and be able to relieve this terrible
suspense for her."

"For both of them," suggested Louise. "It must be quite as bad for that
poor, sick old maid."

"Why, of course," said Matt, and he felt so much ashamed of having left
her out of the account that he added, "I dare say it's even worse for
her. She's seen enough of life to realize it more."

"Sue was his favorite, though," Louise returned. "Of course you must go,
Matt. _You_ couldn't do _less_! It's magnificent of you. Have you told
her, yet, that you would go?"

"Not yet. I thought I would talk it over with you, first."

"Oh, _I_ approve of it. It's the only thing to do. And I had better stay
here till you come back--"

"Why, no; I'm not sure." He came a little nearer and dropped his voice.
"You'd better know the whole trouble, Louise. There's great trouble for
them whether he's dead or alive. There's something wrong in his accounts
with the company, and if he was on that train he was running away to
Canada to escape arrest."

He could see that only partial intelligence of the case reached her.

"Then if he's killed, it will all be hushed up. I see! It makes you hope
he's killed."

Matt gave a despairing groan. "If he's killed it makes it just so much
the worse. The defalcation has to come out, any way."

"When must it come out?"

"A good many people know of it; and such things are hard to keep. It may
come out--some rumor of it--in the morning papers. The question is
whether you want to stay till they know it here; whether it would be
wise, or useful."

"Certainly not! I should want to kill anybody that was by when such a
thing as that came out, and I should despise Sue Northwick if she let me
get away alive. I must go at once!"

She slid herself from the lounge, and ran to the glass, where she put up
a coil of hair in the knot it had escaped from.

"I had my doubts," Matt said, "about letting you come here, without
telling you just what the matter was; but mother thought you would
insist upon coming, any way, and that you would be embarrassed."

"Oh, _that_ was quite right," said Louise. "The great thing now is to
get away."

"I hope you won't let her suspect--"

"Well, I _think_ you can trust me for that, Matt," said Louise, turning
round upon him, with a hairpin in her mouth, long enough to give him as
sarcastic a glance as she could. If her present self-possession was a
warrant of future performance, Matt thought he could trust her; but he
was afraid Louise had not taken in the whole enormity of the fact; and
he was right in this. As a crime, she did not then, or ever afterwards,
fully imagine it. It may be doubted whether she conceived of it as other
than a great trouble, and as something that ought always to be kept from
her friend.

Matt went down stairs and found Sue Northwick in the library.

"I feel perfectly sure," she said, "that we shall hear of my father at
Springfield. One of the horses he got there has gone lame, and it would
be quite like him to stop and look up another in the place of it on the
same farm."

The logic of this theory did not strike Matt, but the girl held her head
in such a strong way, she drew her short breaths with such a smoothness,
she so visibly concealed her anxiety in the resolution to believe
herself what she said that he could not refuse it the tribute of an
apparent credence. "Yes, that certainly makes it seem probable."

"At any rate," she said, "if I hear nothing from him there, or we get no
news from Wellwater, I shall go there at once. I've made up my mind to
that."

"I shouldn't wish you to go alone, Sue," Adeline quavered. Her eyes were
red, and her lips swollen as if she had been crying; and now the tears
came with her words. "You could never get there alone in the world.
Don't you remember, it took us all day to get to Wellwater the last time
we went to Quebec?"

Sue gave her sister a severe look, as if to quell her open fears at
least, and Matt asked aimlessly, "Is it on the way to Quebec?"

Sue picked up the railroad guide from the desk where she had left it.
"Yes; it is, and it isn't." She opened the book and showed him the map
of the road. "The train divides at Wellwater, and part goes to Montreal
and part to Quebec. There are all sorts of stops and starts on the
Quebec branch, so that you don't arrive till next morning, but you get
to Montreal in five or six hours. But the whole thing seems perfectly
frantic. I don't see why we pay the slightest attention to it! Of
_course_, papa has stayed over in Springfield for something; only he's
usually so careful about telegraphing us if he changes his plans--"

She faltered, and let the book drop. Matt picked it up for her, and
began to look at the time-table, at first to hide the pain he felt at
the self-discouragement in which she ended, and then to see if he might
not somehow be useful to her. "I see that a train from Boston meets the
Springfield train at Wellwater."

"Does there?" She bent to look over the book with him, and he felt the
ungovernable thrill at being near the beauty of a woman's face which a
man never knows whether to be ashamed of or glad of, but which he cannot
help feeling. "Then perhaps I had better go by way of Boston. What time
does it start? Oh, I see! Seven, thirty. I could get that train--if I
don't hear from him at Springfield. But I know I shall hear."

A stir of drapery made them aware of Louise at the library door. Suzette
went toward her, "Are you going?" she asked, without apparently sharing
the surprise Matt felt at seeing his sister with her hat and gloves on,
and her jacket over her arm.

"Yes, I'm going, Sue. I just ran up to see you--I had to do that--but we
both know I'm of no use here; and so we won't make any pretences."
Louise spoke very steadily, almost coldly; her brother did not quite
know what to make of her; she was pale, and she looked down, while she
spoke. But when she finished buttoning the glove she was engaged with,
she went up and put both her hands in Suzette's. "I don't need to tell
you that I'm going just to get myself out of your way. It isn't a time
for ornamental friend-shipping, and you've got all the good you could
out of seeing me, and knowing that I'm anxious with you. That's about
all there is of it, and I guess we'd better not spin it out. But
remember, Sue, whenever you need me, when you really want me, you can
send for me, and if I don't come again till you do, you'll know that I'm
simply waiting. Will you remember that--_whatever_ happens?"

Matt gave a long tacit sigh of relief.

"Yes, I will, Louise," said Suzette. They kissed each other as if in
formal ratification of their compact, which meant so much more to one of
them than it could to the other.

"Come, Matt!" said Louise.

She added hastily, to prevent insistence against her plan, that they
would have time to walk to the station, and she wished to walk. Then
Matt said, "I will see you aboard the train, and then I'll come back and
wait till you hear from Springfield, Miss Suzette."

"That is a good idea," said Louise.

"But," Adeline urged tremulously, "sha'n't you be afraid to go to Boston
alone? It'll be dark by the time you get there!"

"The journey can't be very dangerous," said Louise, "and when I arrive,
I shall put myself in charge of a faithful Boston hackman, and tell him
I'm very valuable, and am to be taken the best of care of. Then I shall
be set down at our door in perfect safety."

They all had the relief of a little laugh; even Adeline joined
reluctantly in it.

When they were once free of the house, Matt said, "I wonder whether she
will remember, after the worst comes, what you said, and whether she
will trust you enough to turn to us?"

"I don't know. Probably she will be too proud at first. But I shall
come, whether she asks me or not. If they had relations or connections,
as everybody else has, it would be different. But as it is--"

"Yes, of course," said Matt.

"I wish I could realize that Sue is fond of him, as we are of papa. But
I can't. He always made me feel creepy; didn't he you?"

"He was a secret person. But as far as I had anything to do with him at
the Mills, when I was there, I found him square enough. He was a country
person."

"I suppose Sue's pride is countrified," said Louise.

Matt went on, "His secrecy may have been only a sort of shyness; Heaven
knows I don't want to judge him. I suppose that that slow deliberation
of his was an effort to maintain himself with dignity. Of course, we see
him now in the light of his rascality, poor man, and most of his traits
seem ugly."

They had a little time after they reached the station, and they walked
up and down the platform, talking, and Matt explained how his father
might be glad to have him go to Wellwater and settle the question
whether Northwick was in the accident or not. It would be a great relief
for him to know. He tried to make out that he was going from a divided
motive.

"Oh, you needn't be at the trouble to say all that to me, Matt," said
Louise. "I don't blame you for wanting to go, even out of kindness."

"No, I suppose there's no guilt attaching to a thing of that kind," Matt
answered.

There were a good many loungers about the station, young men and girls,
released from the shops for the day; in such towns they find the station
an agreeable resort, and enjoy a never-failing excitement in the coming
and going of the trains. They watched the Hilarys, as they walked, with
envy of that something distinguished which both of them had. They were
both tall and handsomely made, and they had the ease before their
fellow-beings which perhaps comes as much from the life-long habit of
good clothes as from anything else. Matt had a conscience against
whatever would separate him from his kind, but he could not help
carrying himself like a swell, for all that; and Louise did not try to
help it, for her part. She was an avowed worldling, and in this quality
she now wore a drab cloth costume, bordered with black fur down the
front of the jacket and around it at the hips; the skirt, which fell
plain to her feet, had a border of fur there, and it swirled and swayed
with her long, dashing stride in a way that filled all those poor girls
who saw it, with despair. It seemed to interest almost as painfully a
young man with a thin, delicate face, whom she noticed looking at her;
she took him at first for one of those educated or half-educated
operatives, who are complicating the labor problem more and more. He was
no better dressed than others in the crowd, and there was no reason why
he should not be a hat-shop or a shoe-shop hand, and yet, at a second
glance, she decided that he was not. He stood staring at her with a
studious frown, and with the faint suggestion of a sneer on his
clean-shaven, fine lips; but she knew that he was admiring her, however
he might be hating her, and she spoke to Matt about him as they turned
from him in their walk and promised to point him out. But when they came
up again to where he had been standing, he was gone. The train came in,
and Louise got aboard, and Matt made his way into the station, and went
to ask the operator in the telegraph office if she had got anything for
Miss Northwick.

She said, "Something just come. I was waiting for the hack to send it
up."

"Oh, I will take it, if you please. I am going back to Mr. Northwick's,"
said Matt.

"All right."

Matt took the dispatch, and hurried out to find some means of getting
quickly to Miss Northwick with it. There was no conveyance about the
station, and he started up the street at a gait which was little short
of a run, and which exposed him to the ridicule of such small boys as
observed his haste, in their intervals of punging. One, who dropped from
the runner of a sleigh which came up behind him, jeered him for the
awkwardness with which he floundered out of its way in the deep snow of
the roadside. The sleigh was abruptly halted, and Sue Northwick called
from it, "Mr. Hilary! I couldn't wait at home; and I've just been at the
depot by the lower road. You have a dispatch?"

"Yes, I have a telegram."

"Oh, give it to me!"

He withheld it a moment. "I don't know what it is, Miss Northwick. But
if isn't what you expected, will you let--will you allow me--"

As if she did not know what she was doing, she caught the dispatch from
his hand, and tore it open. "Well," she said, "I knew it. He hasn't been
there; now I shall go to Wellwater." She crumpled the telegram nervously
in her hand, and made a motion to lift the reins.

Matt put his hand on her wrist. "You couldn't. You--you must let me go."

"You?"

"Me. I can get into Boston in time for that half-past-seven train, and I
can do all the things when I get to Wellwater that you couldn't do.
Come; be reasonable! You must see that what I propose is best. I
solemnly promise you that nothing shall be left undone, or omitted or
forgotten, that could set your mind at rest. Whatever you would wish
done, I will do. Go home; your sister needs you; you need yourself; if
you have a trial to meet greater than this suspense, which you've borne
with such courage, you want all your strength for it. I beg you to trust
me to do this for you. I know that it seems recreant to let another go
in your place on such an errand, but it really isn't so. You ought to
know that I wouldn't offer to go if I were not sure that I could do all
that you could do, and more. Come! Let me go for you!"

He poured out his reasons vehemently, and she sat like one without
strength to answer. When he stopped, she still waited before she
answered simply, almost dryly, "Well," and she gave no other sign of
assent in words. But she turned over the hand, on which he was keeping
his, and clutched his hand hard; the tears, the first she had shed that
day, gushed into her eyes. She lifted the reins and drove away, and he
stood in the road gazing after her, till her sleigh vanished over the
rise of ground to the southward.




XIII.


The pale light in which Matt Hilary watched the sleigh out of sight
thickened into early winter dusk before his train came and he got off to
Boston. In the meantime the electrics came out like sudden moons, and
shed a lunar ray over the region round about the station, where a young
man, who was in the habit of describing himself in print as "one of _The
Boston Events_' young men," found his way into an eating-house not far
from the track. It had a simple, domestic effect inside, and the young
man gave a sigh of comfort in the pleasant warmth and light. There was a
woman there who had a very conversable air, a sort of eventual
sociability, as the young man realized when she looked up from twitching
the white, clean cloths perfectly straight on the little tables set in
rows on either side of the room.

She finally reached the table where the young man had taken a chair for
his overcoat and hat, and was about taking another for himself.

"Well," he said, "let's see. No use asking if you've got coffee?" He
inhaled the odor of it coming from the open door of another room, with a
deep breath.

"Baked beans?"

"Yes."

"Well, I don't think there's anything much better than baked beans. Do
you?"

"Well, not when you git 'em _good_," the woman admitted. "_Ril_ good."

"And what's the matter with a piece of mince pie?"

"I don't see's there's any great deal. Hot?"

"Every time."

"I _thought_ so," said the woman. "We have it both ways, but I'd as soon
eat a piece of I don't know what as a piece o' _cold_ mince pie."

"We have mince pie right along at our house," said the young man. "But I
guess if I was to eat a piece of it cold, my wife would have the doctor
round inside of five minutes."

The woman laughed as if for joy in the hot mince-pie fellowship
established between herself and the young man. "Well, I guess she need
to. Nothin' else you want?" She brought the beans and coffee, with a hot
plate, and a Japanese paper napkin, and she said, as she arranged them
on the table before the young man, "Your pie's warmin' for you; I got
you some rolls; they're just right out the oven; and here's some the
best butter I ever put a knife to, if I _do_ say so. It's just as good
and sweet as butter can be, if it _didn't_ come from the Northwick place
at a dollar a pound."

"Well, now, I should have thought you'd have used the Northwick butter,"
said the young man with friendly irony.

"You know the Northwick butter?" said the woman, charmed at the
discovery of another tie.

"Well, my wife likes it for cooking," said the young man. "We have a
fancy brand for the table."

The woman laughed out her delight in his pleasantry. "Land! I'll bet you
grumble at it, too!" she said, with a precipitate advance in intimacy
which he did not disallow.

"Well, I'm pretty particular," said the young man. "But I _have_ to be,
to find anything to find fault with in the way _my_ wife manages. I
don't suppose I shall be able to get much more Northwick butter, now."

"Why not?"

"Why, if he was killed in that accident--"

"Oh, I guess there ain't anything to that," said the woman. "I guess it
was some other Northwick. Their coachman--Elbridge Newton--was tellin'
my husband that Mr. Northwick had stopped over at Springfield to look at
some hosses there. He's always buyin' more hosses. I guess he must have
as much as eighty or ninety hosses now. I don't place any dependence on
that report."

"That so?" said the young man. "Why, what did that fellow mean, over at
the drug store, just now, by his getting out for Canada?"

"What fellow?"

"Little slim chap, with a big black moustache, and blue eyes, blue and
blazing, as you may say."

"Oh,--Mr. Putney! That's just one of his jokes. He's always down on Mr.
Northwick."

"Then I suppose he's just gone up to Ponkwasset about the trouble
there."

"Labor trouble?"

"I guess so."

The woman called toward an open door at the end of the room, "William!"
and a man in his shirt sleeves showed himself. "You heard of any labor
trouble to Mr. Northwick's mills?"

"No, I don't believe there is any," said the man. He came forward
inquiringly to the table where his wife was standing by the _Events_'
young man.

"Well, I'm sorry," said the young man, "but it shows that I haven't lost
so much in missing Mr. Northwick, after all. I came up here from Boston
to interview him for our paper about the labor troubles."

"I want to know!" said the hostess. "You an editor?"

"Well, I'm a reporter--same thing," the young man answered. "Perhaps
you've got some troubles of your own here in your shops?"

"No," said the host, "I guess everybody's pretty well satisfied here in
Hatboro'." He was tempted to talk by the air of confidence which the
_Events_' young man somehow diffused about him, but his native Yankee
caution prevailed, and he did not take the lead offered him.

"Well," said the young man, "I noticed one of your citizens over at the
drug store that seemed to be pretty happy."

"Oh, yes; Mr. Putney. I heard you tellin' my wife."

"Who _is_ Mr. Putney, any way?" asked the _Events_' man.

"Mr. Putney?" the host repeated, with a glance at his wife, as if for
instruction or correction in case he should go wrong. "He's one of the
old Hatboro' Putneys, here."

"All of 'em preserved in liquor, the same way?"

"Well, no, I can't say as they are." The host laughed, but not with much
liking, apparently. His wife did not laugh at all, and the young man
perceived that he had struck a false note.

"Pity," he said, "to see a man like that, goin' that way. He said more
bright things in five minutes, drunk as he was, than I could say in a
month on a strict prohibition basis."

The good understanding was restored by this ready self-abasement. "Well,
I d' know as you can say that, exactly," said the hostess, "but he is
bright, there ain't any two ways about it. And he ain't always that way
you see him. It's just one of his times, now. He has 'em about once in
every four or five months, and the rest part he's just as straight as
anybody. It's like a disease, as I tell my husband."

"I guess if he was a mind to steady up, there ain't any lawyer could go
ahead of him, well, not in _this_ town," said the husband.

"Seems to be pretty popular as it is," said the young man. "What makes
him so down on Mr. Northwick?"

"Well, I dunno," said the host, "_what_ it is. He's always been so. I
presume it's more the kind of a man Mr. Northwick is, than what it is
anything else."

"Why, what kind of a man _is_ Mr. Northwick, any way?" the young man
asked, beginning to give his attention to the pie, which the woman had
now brought. "He don't seem to be so popular. What's the reason."

"Well, I don't know as I could say, exactly. I presume, one thing, he's
only been here summers till this year, since his wife died, and he never
did have much to do with the place, before."

"What's he living here for this winter? Economizing?"

"No; I guess he no need to do that," the host answered.

His wife looked knowing, and said with a laugh, "I guess Miss Sue
Northwick could tell you if she was a mind to."

"Oh, I see," said the reporter, with an irreverence that seemed to be
merely provisional and held subject to instant exchange for any more
available attitude. "Young man in the case. Friendless minister whose
slippers require constant attention?"

"I guess he ain't very friendless," said the hostess, "as far forth as
that goes. He's about the most popular minister, especially with the
workin' folks, since Mr. Peck."

"Who was Mr. Peck?"

"Well, he was the one that was run over by the cars at the depot here
two or three years back. Why, this house was started on his idea. Sort
of co-operation at first; we run it for the Social Union."

"And the co-operation petered out," said the reporter making a note.
"Always does; and then you took it, and began to make money. Standard
history of co-operation."

"I guess we ain't gettin' rich any too fast," said the hostess, dryly.

"Well, you will if you use the Northwick butter. What's the reason he
isn't popular here when he is here? Must spend a good deal of money on
that big place of his; and give work."

"Mr. Putney says it's corruptin' to have such a rich man in the
neighborhood; and he does more harm than good with his money." The
hostess threw out the notion as if it were something she had never been
quite able to accept herself, and would like to see its effect upon a
man of the reporter's wide observation. "_He_ thinks Hatboro' was better
off before there was a single hat-shop or shoe-shop in the place."

"And the law offices had it all to themselves," said the young man; and
he laughed. "Well, it was a halcyon period. What sort of a man is Mr.
Northwick, personally?"

The woman referred the question to her husband, who pondered it a
moment. "Well, he's a kind of a close-mouthed man. He's never had
anything to do with the Hatboro' folks much. But I never heard anything
against him. I guess he's a pretty good man."

"Wouldn't be likely to mention it round a great deal if he _was_ going
to Canada. Heigh? Well, I'm sorry I can't see Mr. Northwick, after all.
With these strikes in the mills everywhere, he must have some light to
throw on the labor question generally. Poor boy, himself, I believe?"

"I don't believe his daughters could remember when," said the hostess,
sarcastically.

"That's so? Well, we are apt to lose our memory for dates as we get on
in the world, especially the ladies. Ponkwasset isn't on the direct line
of this road, is it?" He asked this of the host, as if it followed.

"No, you got to change at Springfield, and take the Union and Dominion
road there. Then it's on a branch."

"Well, I guess I shall have to run up and see Mr. Northwick, there.
_What_ did you say the young man's name was that's keeping the Northwick
family here this winter?" He turned suddenly to the hostess, putting up
his note-book, and throwing a silver dollar on the table to be changed.
"Married man myself, you know."

"I guess I hain't mentioned any names," said the woman in high glee. Her
husband went back to the kitchen, and she took the dollar away to a desk
in the corner of the room, and brought back the change.

"Who'd be a good person to talk with about the labor situation here?"
the young man asked, in pocketing his money.

"I d' know as I could hardly tell," said the hostess thoughtfully.
"There's Colonel Marvin, he's got the largest shoe-shop; and some the
hat-shop folks, most any of 'em would do. And then there's Mr.
Wilmington that owns the stocking mills; him or Mr. Jack Wilmington,
either one'd be good. Mr. Jack'd be the best, I guess. Or I don't
suppose there's anybuddy in the place 'd know more, if they'd a mind to
talk, than Mrs. Wilmington; unless it was Mis' Docter Morrell."

"Is Mr. Jack their son?" asked the reporter.

"Land! Why she ain't a day older, if she's that. He's their nephew."

"Oh, I see: second wife. Then _he's_ the young man, heigh!"

The hostess looked at the reporter with admiration. "Well, you do beat
the witch. If he hain't, I guess he might 'a' b'en."

The reporter said he guessed he would take another piece of that pie,
and some more coffee if she had it, and before he had finished them he
had been allowed to understand that if it was not for his being Mrs.
Wilmington's nephew Mr. Jack would have been Miss Northwick's husband
long ago; and that the love lost between the two ladies was not worth
crying for.

The reporter, who had fallen into his present calling by a series of
accidents not necessarily of final result in it, did not use arts so
much as instincts in its exercise. He liked to talk of himself and his
own surroundings, and he found that few men, and no women could resist
the lure thrown out by his sincere expansiveness. He now commended
himself to the hostess by the philosophical view he took of the popular
belief that Mrs. Wilmington was keeping her nephew from marrying any one
else so as to marry him herself when her husband died. He said that if
you were an old man and you married a young woman he guessed that was
what you had got to expect. This gave him occasion to enlarge upon the
happiness to be found only in the married state if you were fitly mated,
and on his own exceptional good fortune in it.

He was in the full flow of an animated confidence relating to the flat
he had just taken and furnished in Boston, when the door opened, and the
pale young man whom Louise Hilary had noticed at the station, came in.

The reporter broke off with a laugh of greeting. "Hello, Maxwell! You
onto it, too?"

"Onto what?" said the other, with none of the reporter's effusion.

"This labor-trouble business," said the reporter, with a wink for him
alone.

"Pshaw, Pinney! You'd grow a bush for the pleasure of beating about it."
Maxwell hung his hat on a hook above the table, but sat down fronting
Pinney with his overcoat on; it was a well-worn overcoat, irredeemably
shabby at the buttonholes. "I'd like some tea," he said to the hostess,
"some English breakfast tea, if you have it; and a little toast." He
rested his elbows on the table, and took his head between his hands, and
pressed his fingers against his temples.

"Headache?" asked Pinney, with the jocose sympathy men show one
another's sufferings, as if they could be joked away. "Better take
something substantial. Nothing like ham and eggs for a headache."

The other unfolded his paper napkin. "Have you got anything worth
while?"

"Lots of public opinion and local color," said Pinney. "Have you?"

"I've been half crazy with this headache. I suppose we brought most of
the news with us," he suggested.

"Well, I don't know about that," said Pinney.

"I do. You got your tip straight from headquarters. I know all about it,
Pinney, so you might as well save time, on that point, if time's an
object with you. They don't seem to know anything here; but the
consensus in Hatboro' is that he was running away."

"The what is?" asked Pinney.

"The consensus."

"Anything like the United States Census?"

"It isn't spelt like it."

Pinney made a note of it. "I'll get a head-line out of that. I take my
own wherever I find it, as George Washington said."

"Your own, you thief!" said Maxwell, with sardonic amusement. "You don't
know what the word means."

"I can make a pretty good guess, thank you," said Pinney, putting up his
book.

"Do you want to trade?" Maxwell asked, after his tea came, and he had
revived himself with a sip or two.

"Any scoops?" asked Pinney, warily. "Anything exclusive?"

"Oh, come!" said Maxwell. "No, I haven't; and neither have you. What do
you make mysteries for? I've been over the whole ground, and so have
you. There are no scoops in it."

"I think there's a scoop if you want to work it," said Pinney, darkly.

Maxwell received the vaunt with a sneer. "You ought to be a
detective--in a novel." He buttered his toast and ate a little of it,
like a man of small appetite and invalid digestion.

"I suppose you've interviewed the family?" suggested Pinney.

"No," said Maxwell, gloomily, "there are some things that even a
space-man can't do."

"You ought to go back on a salary," said Pinney, with compassion and
superiority. "You'll ruin yourself trying to fill space, if you stick at
trifles."

"Such as going and asking a man's family whether they think he was burnt
up in a railroad accident, and trying to make copy out of their
emotions? Thank you, I prefer ruin. If that's your scoop, you're welcome
to it."

"They're not obliged to see you," urged Pinney. "You send in your name
and--"

"They shut the door in your face, if they have the presence of mind."

"Well! What do you care if they do? It's all in the way of business,
anyhow. It's not a personal thing."

"A snub's a pretty personal thing, Pinney. The reporter doesn't mind it,
but it makes the man's face burn."

"Oh, very well! If you're going to let uncleanly scruples like that
stand in your way, you'd better retire to the poet's corner, and stay
there. You can fill that much space, any way; but you are not built for
a reporter. When are you going to Boston?"

"Six, fifteen. I've got a scoop of my own."

"What is it?" asked Pinney, incredulously.

"Come round in the morning, and I'll tell you."

"Perhaps I'll go in with you, after all. I'll just step out into the
cold air, and see if I can harden my cheek for that interview. Your
diffidence is infectious, Maxwell."




XIV.


Pinney was really somewhat dashed by Maxwell's attitude, both because it
appealed to the more delicate and generous self, which he was obliged to
pocket so often in the course of business, and because it made him
suspect that Maxwell had already interviewed Northwick's family. They
would be forewarned, in that case, and would, of course, refuse to see
him. But he felt that as a space-man, with the privilege of filling all
the space he chose with this defalcation, his duty to his family
required him to use every means for making copy.

He encouraged himself by thinking of his wife, and what she was probably
doing at that moment in their flat in Boston, and he was feeling fairly
well when he asked for Miss Northwick at the door of the great wooden
palace. He had time to take in its characteristics, before James, the
inside-man, opened the door and scanned him for a moment with a sort of
baffled intelligence. To the experience of the inside-man his appearance
gave no proof that he was or was not an agent, a peddler in disguise, or
a genteel mendicant of the sort he was used to detecting and deterring.

"I don't know, sir, I'll go and see." He let rather than invited Pinney
in, and in his absence, the representative of the _Events_ made note of
the interior, both of the hall which he had been allowed to enter, and
of the library, where he found himself upon his own responsibility. The
inside-man discovered him there with his back to the fire, when he
returned with his card still in his hand.

"Miss Northwick thinks it's her father you wish to see. He's not at
home."

"Yes, I knew that. I did wish to see Mr. Northwick, and I asked to see
Miss Northwick because I knew he wasn't at home."

"Oh!" The man disappeared, and after another interval Adeline came in.
She showed the trepidation she felt at finding herself in the presence
of an interviewer.

"Will you sit down?" she said, timidly, and she glanced at the card
which she had brought back this time. It bore the name of Lorenzo A.
Pinney, and in the left hand corner the words _Representing the Boston
Events_. Mr. Pinney made haste to reassure her by a very respectful and
business-like straightforwardness of manner; he did not forbid it a
certain shade of authority.

"I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Northwick. I hoped to have some
conversation with you in regard to this--this rumor--accident. Can you
tell me just when Mr. Northwick left home?"

"He went up to the Mills, yesterday morning, quite early," said Adeline.
She was in the rise of hope which she and Suzette both felt from the
mere fact that Matt Hilary was on the way to hunt the horrible rumor to
its source; it seemed to her that he must extinguish it there. She
wanted to tell this friendly-looking reporter so; but she would not do
this without Suzette's authority. Suzette had been scolding her for not
telling her what was in the paper as soon as she read it in the morning;
and they were both so far respited for the moment from their fear, as to
have had some words back and forth about the propriety of seeing this
reporter at all. Adeline was on her most prudent behavior.

"Did you expect him back soon when he left?" Pinney asked respectfully.

"Oh, no; he said he wouldn't be back for some days."

"It's several hours to Ponkwasset, I believe?" suggested Pinney.

"Yes, three or four. There _is_ one train, at half-past-twelve, I
think," said Miss Northwick, with a glance at the clock, "that takes you
there in three hours."

"The early train doesn't connect right through, then?"

"No; my father would have to wait over at Springfield. He doesn't often
take the early train; and so we thought, when we found he wasn't at the
Mills, that he had stopped over a day at Springfield to buy some horses
from a farmer there. But we've just heard that he didn't. He may have
run down to New York; he often has business there. We don't place any
reliance on that story"--she gasped the rest out--"about--that
accident."

"Of course not," said Pinney with real sympathy. "It's just one of those
flying rumors--they get the names all mixed up, those country
operators."

"They spelled the name two ways in different papers," said Adeline.
"Father had no earthly business up that way; and he always telegraphs."

"I believe the Mills are on the line of the Union and Dominion Road, are
they not?" Pinney fell into the formal style of his printed
questionings.

"Yes, they are. Father could get the Northern express at Springfield,
and drive over from Ponkwasset Junction; the express doesn't stop at the
Falls."

"I see. Well, I won't trouble you any farther, Miss Northwick. I hope
you'll find out it's all a mistake about--"

"Oh, I know it is!" said Adeline. "A gentleman--a friend of ours--has
just gone up to Wellwater to see about it."

"Oh, well, that's good," said Pinney. "Then you'll soon have good news.
I suppose you've telegraphed?"

"We couldn't get anything by telegraph. That is the reason he went."

It seemed to Pinney that she wished to tell him who went; but she did
not tell him; and after waiting for a moment in vain, he rose and said,
"Well, I must be getting back to Boston. I should have been up here to
see your father about these labor troubles night before last, if I'd
taken my wife's advice. I always miss it when I don't," he said,
smiling.

There is no reason why a man should acquire merit with other women by
seeming subject to his wife or dependent upon her; but he does. They
take it as a sort of tribute to themselves, or to the abstract woman;
their respect for that man rises; they begin to honor him; their hearts
warm to him. Pinney's devotion to his wife had already been of great use
to him, on several occasions, in creating an atmosphere of trust about
him. He really could not keep her out of his talk for more than five
minutes at a time; all topics led up to her sooner or later.

When he now rose to go, Miss Northwick said, "I'm sorry my father isn't
at home, and I'm sorry I can't give you any information about the
troubles."

"Oh, I shall go to the Mills, to-morrow," he interrupted cheerily. Her
relenting emboldened him to say, "You must have a beautiful place, here,
in summer, Miss Northwick."

"I like it all times of the year," she answered. "We've all been
enjoying the winter so much; it's the first we've spent here for a long
time." She felt a strange pleasure in saying this; her reference to
their family life seemed to reassure her of its unbroken continuity, and
to warrant her father's safety.

"Yes," said Pinney, "I knew you had let your house in town. I think my
wife would feel about it just as you do; she's a great person for the
country, and if it wasn't for my work on the paper, I guess I sh'd have
to live there."

Miss Northwick took a mass of heavy-headed jacqueminot roses from the
vase where they drooped above the mantel, and wrapping them in a paper
from the desk, stiffly offered them to Pinney. "Won't you carry these to
your wife?" she said. This was not only a recognition of Pinney's worth
in being so fond of his wife, but a vague attempt at propitiation. She
thought it might somehow soften the heart of the interviewer in him, and
keep him from putting anything in the paper about her. She was afraid to
ask him not to do so.

"Oh, thank you," said Pinney. "I didn't mean to--it's very kind of
you--I assure you." He felt very queer to be remanded to the purely
human basis in relation to these people, and he made haste to get away
from that interview. He had nothing to blame himself for, and yet he now
suddenly somehow felt to blame. In the light of the defaulter's home
life, Northwick appeared his victim. Pinney was not going to punish him,
he was merely going to publish him: but all the same, for that moment,
it seemed to him that he was Northwick's persecutor, and was hunting him
down, running him to earth. He wished that poor old girl had not given
him those flowers; he did not feel that he could take them to his wife;
on the way back to the station he stepped aside from the road and
dropped them into the deep snow.

His wife met him at the door of their flat, eager to know what success
he had; and at sight of her his spirits rose again, and he gave her an
enthusiastic synopsis of what he had done.

She flung herself on his knees, where he sat, and embraced him. "Ren,
you've done splendidly! And I know you'll beat the _Abstract_ clear out
of sight. Oh, Ren, Ren!" She threw her arms round his neck again, and
the happy tears started to her eyes. "This will give you any place on
the paper you choose to ask for! Oh, I'm the happiest girl in the
world."

Pinney gave her a joyful hug. "Yes, it's all right. There are
ninety-nine chances to one that he was going to Canada. There's a big
default, running up into the hundred thousands, and they gave him a
chance to make up his shortage--it's the old story. I've got just the
setting I wanted for my facts, and now, as soon as Manton gives us the
word to go ahead--"

"Wait till Manton gives the word!" cried Mrs. Pinney. "Well, you shall
do no such thing, Ren. We won't wait a minute."

Pinney broke out into a laugh, and gave her another hug for her
enthusiasm, and explained, between laughing at her and kissing her, why
he had to wait; that if he used the matter before the detective
authorized him, it would be the last tip he would ever get from Manton.
"We shan't lose anything. I'm going to commence writing it out, now. I'm
going to make it a work of art. Now, you go and get me some coffee, Hat.
There isn't going to be any let up on this till it's all blocked out,
any way; and I'm going to leave mighty few places to fill in, I can tell
you." He pulled off his coat, and sat down at his desk.

His wife stopped him. "You'd better come out into the kitchen, and work
on the table there. It's bigger than this desk."

"Don't know but I had," said Pinney. He gathered up his work and
followed her out into the cosy little kitchen, where she cooked their
simple meals, and they ate them. "Been living on tea since I been gone?"
He pulled open the refrigerator built into the wall, and glanced into
it. "Last night's dinner all there yet!"

"You know I don't care to eat when you're away, Ren," she said, with a
pathetic little mouth.

Pinney kissed her and then he sat down to his work again; and when he
was tired with writing, his wife took the pen and wrote from his
dictation. As they wrought on, they lost the sense, if they ever had it,
of a fellow creature inside of the figure of a spectacular defaulter
which grew from their hands; and they enjoyed the impersonality which
enables us to judge and sentence one another in this world, and to do
justice, as we say. It is true that Pinney, having seen Northwick's
home, and faced his elderly, invalid daughter, was moved to use him with
a leniency which he would not otherwise have felt. He recognized a merit
in this forbearance of his, and once, towards the end of his work, when
he was taking a little rest, he said: "Reporters get as much abuse as
plumbers; but if people only knew what we kept back, perhaps they would
sing a different tune. Of course, it's a temptation to describe his
daughter, poor old thing, and give the interview in full, but I don't
quite like to. I've got to cut it down to the fact that she evidently
hadn't the least idea of the defalcation, or why he was on the way to
Canada. Might work a little pathos in with that, but I guess I mustn't!"

His wife pushed the manuscript away from her, and flung down the pen.
"Well, Ren, if you go on talking in that way, you'll take the pleasure
out of it for _me_; I can tell you that much. If I get to thinking of
his family, I can't help you any more."

"Pshaw!" said Pinney. "The facts have got to come out, any way, and I
guess they won't be handled half as mercifully anywhere else as I shall
handle 'em." He put his arms round her, and pulled her tight up to him.
"Your tender-heartedness is going to be the ruin of me yet, Hat. If it
hadn't been for thinking how you'd have felt, I should gone right up to
Wellwater, and looked up that accident, myself, on the ground. But I
knew you'd go all to pieces, if I wasn't back at the time I said, and so
I didn't go."

"Oh, what a story!" said the young wife, fondly, with her adoring eyes
upon him. "I shouldn't have cared, I guess, if you'd never come back."

"Shouldn't you? How many per cent of that am I going to believe?" he
asked, and he drew her to him again in a rapture with her pretty looks,
and the love he saw in them.

Pinney was a handsome little fellow himself, with a gay give-and-take
air that had always served him well with women, and that, as his wife
often told him, had made her determine to have him the first time she
saw him.

This was at the opening of the Promontory House, two summers before,
when Pinney was assigned to write the affair up for the _Events_. She
had got her first place as operator in the new hotel; and he brought in
a despatch for her to send to Boston just as she was going to shut up
the office for the night, and go in to see the dancing in the main
dining-room, and perhaps be asked to dance herself by some of the
clerks.

At the sound of a pencil tapping on the ledge of the little window in
the cast-iron filagree wall of her den, she turned quickly round ready
to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes,
and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under
his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more
like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He
wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they
began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged before the
summer was over. They had never yet tired of talking about that first
meeting, or of talking about themselves and each other in any aspect.
They found out, as soon as they were engaged, and that sort of social
splendor which young people wear to each other's eyes had passed, that
they were both rather simple and harmless folks, and they began to value
each other as being good. This tendency only grew upon them with the
greater intimacy of marriage. The chief reason for thinking that they
were good was that they loved each other so much; she knew that he was
good because he loved her; and he believed that he must have a great
deal of good in him, if such a girl loved him so much. They thought it a
virtue to exist solely for one another as they did; their mutual
devotion seemed to them a form of unselfishness. They felt it a great
merit to be frugal and industrious that they might prosper; they
prospered solely to their own advantage, but the advantage of persons so
deserving through their frugality and industry seemed a kind of
altruism; it kept them in constant good humor with themselves, and
content with each other. They had risked a great deal in getting married
on Pinney's small salary, but apparently their courage had been
rewarded, and they were not finally without the sense that their
happiness had been achieved somehow in the public interest.




XV.


Maxwell's headache went off after his cup of tea, but when he reached
the house in Clover Street, where he had a room in the boarding-house
his mother kept, he was so tired that he wanted to go to bed. He told
her he was not tired; only disappointed with his afternoon's work.

"I didn't get very much. Why, of course, there was a lot of stuff lying
round in the gutters that I can work up, if I have the stomach for it.
You'll see it in Pinney's report, whether I do it or not. Pinney thinks
it's all valuable material. I left him there interviewing the
defaulter's family, and making material out of their misery. I couldn't
_do_ that."

"I shouldn't want you to, Brice," said his mother. "I couldn't bear to
have you."

"Well, we're wrong, both of us, from one point of view," said the young
fellow. "As Pinney says, it's business to do these things, and a
business motive ought to purify and ennoble any performance. Pinney is
getting to be a first-class reporter; he'll be a managing editor and an
owner, and be refusing my work in less than ten years."

"I hope you'll be out of such work long before that," said the mother.

"I'm likely to be out of all kinds of work before that, if I keep on at
this gait. Pinney hasn't got the slightest literary instinct: he's a
wood-chopper, a stable-boy by nature; but he knows how to make copy, and
he's sure to get on."

"Well, you don't want to get on in his way," the mother urged
soothingly.

"Yes; but I've got to get on in his way while I'm trying to get on in my
own. I've got to work eight hours at reporting for the privilege of
working two at literature. That's how the world is built. The first
thing is to earn your bread."

"Well, you _do_ earn yours, my son--and no one works harder to earn
it."

"Ah, but it's so damned dirty when I've earned it."

"Oh, my son!"

"Well, I won't swear at it. That's stupid, too; as stupid as all the
rest." He rose from the chair he had dropped into, and went toward the
door of the next room. "I must beautify my person with a clean collar
and cuffs. I'm going down to make a call on the Back Bay, and I wish to
leave a good impression with the fellow that shows me the door when he
finds out who I am and what I want. I'm going to interview Mr. Hilary on
the company's feelings towards their absconding treasurer. What a dose!
He'll never know I hate it ten times as bad as he does. But it's my only
chance for a scoop."

"I'm sure he'll receive you well, Brice. He must see that you're a
gentleman."

"No, I'm not a gentleman, mother," the son interrupted harshly from the
room where he was modifying his linen. "I'm not in that line of
business. But I'm like most people in most other lines of business: I
intend to be a gentleman as soon as I can afford it. I shall have to
pocket myself as usual, when I interview Mr. Hilary. Perhaps _he_ isn't
a gentleman, either. There's some consolation in that. I should like to
write an article some day on business methods and their compatibility
with self-respect. But Mr. Ricker wouldn't print it."

"He's very kind to you, Brice."

"Yes, he's as kind as he dares to be. He's the oasis in the desert of my
life; but the counting-room simoom comes along and dries him up, every
now and then. Suppose I began my article by a study of the counting-room
in independent journalism?"

Mrs. Maxwell had nothing to say to this suggestion, but much concerning
the necessity of wearing the neck-muffler, which she found her son had
not had on all day. She put it on for him now, and made him promise to
put it on for himself when he left the house where he was going to call.

The man who came to the door told him that Mr. Hilary was not at home,
but was expected shortly, and consented to let him come in and wait. He
tried to classify Maxwell in deciding where to let him wait; his coat
and hat looked like a chair in the hall; his pale, refined, rather
haughty face, like the drawing-room. The man compromised on the library,
and led him in there.

Louise rose upright on the lounge, where she had thrown herself, after
dinner, to rest, in the dim light, and think over the day's strange
experience, and stared at him helplessly. For her greater ease and
comfort, she had pushed off her shoes, and they had gone over
the foot of the lounge. She found herself confronted with the
contumacious-looking workman she had noticed at the station in Hatboro',
with those thin, mocking lips, and the large, dreamy eyes that she
remembered.

The serving-man said, "Oh, I didn't know you were here, Miss," and stood
irresolute. "The gentleman wishes to see your father."

"Will you sit down?" she said to Maxwell. "My father will be in very
soon, I think." She began to wonder whether she could edge along
unobserved to where her shoes lay, and slip her feet into them. But for
the present she remained where she was, and not merely because her shoes
were off and she could not well get away, but because it was not in her
nature not to wish every one to be happy and comfortable. She was as far
as any woman can be from coquetry, but she could not see any manner of
man without trying to please him. "I'm sorry he's isn't here," she said,
and then, as there seemed nothing for him to answer, she ventured, "It's
very cold out, isn't it?"

"It's grown colder since nightfall," said Maxwell.

He remembered her and she saw that he did, and this somehow promoted an
illogical sense of acquaintance with him.

"It seems," she ventured farther, "very unusual weather for the
beginning of February."

"Why, I don't know," said Maxwell, with rather more self-possession than
she wished him to have, so soon. "I think we're apt to have very cold
weather after the January thaw."

"That's true," said Louise, with inward wonder that she had not thought
of it. His self-possession did not comport with his threadbare clothes
any more than his neat accent and quiet tone comported with the
proletarian character she had assigned him. She decided that he must be
a walking-delegate, and that he had probably come on mischief from some
of the workpeople in her father's employ; she had never seen a
walking-delegate before, but she had heard much dispute between her
father and brother as to his usefulness in society; and her decision
gave Maxwell fresh interest in her mind. Before he knew who Louise was,
he had made her represent the millionnaire's purse-pride, because he
found her in Hilary's house, and because he had hated her for a swell,
as much as a young man can hate a pretty woman, when he saw her walking
up and down the platform at Hatboro'. He looked about the rich man's
library with a scornful recognition of its luxury. His disdain, which
was purely dramatic, and had no personal direction, began to scare
Louise; she wanted to go away, but even if she could get to her shoes
without his noticing, she could not get them on without making a
scraping noise on the hard-wood floor. She did not know what to say
next, and her heart warmed with gratitude to Maxwell when he said, with
no great relevancy to what they had been saying, but with much to what
he had in mind, "I don't think one realizes the winter, except in the
country."

"Yes," she said, "one forgets how lovely it is out of town."

"And how dreary," he added.

"Oh, do you feel that?" she asked, and she said to herself, "We shall be
debating whether summer is pleasanter than winter, if we keep on at this
rate."

"Yes, I think so," said Maxwell. He looked at a picture over the mantel,
to put himself at greater ease, and began to speak of it, of the color
and drawing. She saw that he knew nothing of art, and felt only the
literary quality of the picture, and she was trying compassionately to
get the talk away from it, when she heard her father's step in the hall
below.

Hilary gave a start of question, when he looked into the library, that
brought Maxwell to his feet. "Mr. Hilary, I'm connected with the _Daily
Abstract_, and I've come to see if you are willing to talk with me about
this rumored accident to Mr. Northwick."

"No, sir! No, sir!" Hilary stormed back. "I don't know any more about
the accident, than you do! I haven't a word to say about it. Not a word!
Not a syllable! I hope that's enough?"

"Quite," said Maxwell, and with a slight bow to Louise, he went out.

"Oh, papa!" Louise moaned out, "how _could_ you treat him so?"

"Treat him so? Why shouldn't I treat him so? Confound his impudence!
What does he mean by thrusting himself in here and taking possession of
my library? Why didn't he wait in the hall?"

"Patrick showed him in here. He saw that he was a gentleman!"

"Saw that he was a gentleman?"

"Yes, certainly. He is very cultivated. He's not--not a common reporter
at _all_!" Louise's voice trembled with mortification for her father,
and pity for Maxwell, as she adventured this assertion from no previous
experience of reporters. It was shocking to feel that it was her father
who had not been the gentleman. "You--you might have been a little
kinder, papa; he wasn't at all obtrusive; and he only asked you whether
you would say anything. He didn't persist."

"I didn't intend he should persist," said Hilary. His fire of straw
always burnt itself out in the first blaze; it was uncomfortable to find
himself at variance with his daughter, who was usually his fond and
admiring ally; but he could not give up at once. "If you didn't like the
way I treated him, why did you stay?" he demanded. "Was it necessary for
you to entertain him till I came in? Did he ask for the family? What
does it all mean?"

The tears came into her eyes, and she said with indignant resentment:
"Patrick didn't know I was here when he brought him in; I'm sure I
should have been glad to go, when you began raging at him, papa, if I
_could_. It wasn't very pleasant to hear you. I won't come any more, if
you don't want me to. I thought you liked me to be here. You said you
did."

Her father blustered back: "Don't talk nonsense. You'll come, just as
you always have. I suppose," he added, after a moment, in which Louise
gathered up her shoes, and stood with them in one hand behind her, a
tall figure of hurt affection and wounded pride, "I suppose I might have
been a little smoother with the fellow, but I've had twenty reporters
after me to-day, and between them, and you, and Matt, in all this
bother, I hardly know what I'm about. Didn't Matt see that his going to
Wellwater in behalf of Northwick's family must involve me more and
more?"

"I don't see how he could help offering to go, when he found Suzette was
going alone. He couldn't do less."

"Oh, do less!" said Hilary, with imperfectly sustained passion. He
turned, to avoid looking at Louise, and his eyes fell on a
strange-looking note-book on the table where Maxwell had sat. "What's
this?"

He took it up, and Louise said, "He must have left it." And she thought,
"Of course he will come back for it."

"Well, I must send it to him. And I'll--I'll write him a note," Hilary
groaned.

Louise smiled eager forgiveness. "He seemed very intelligent, poor
fellow, in some ways. Didn't you notice what a cultivated tone he had?
It's shocking to think of his having to go about and interview people,
and meet all kinds of rebuffs."

"I guess you'd better not waste too much sympathy on him," said Hilary,
with some return to his grudge.

"Oh, I didn't mean _you_, papa," said Louise, sweetly.

The door-bell rang, and after some parley at the threshold, Patrick came
up to say, "The gentleman that was just here thinks he left his
note-book, he--"

Hilary did not let him get the words out; "Oh, yes, show him up! Here it
is." He ran half down the stairs himself to meet Maxwell.




XVI.


Louise stole a glance at herself across the room in the little triptych
mirror against one of the shelves. Her hair was not tumbled, and she
completed her toilet to the eye by dropping her shoes and extending the
edge of her skirt over them where she stood.

Her father brought Maxwell in by the door, and she smiled a fresh
greeting to him. "We--I had just picked your note-book up. I--I'm glad
you came back, I--was a little short with you a moment ago. I--I--Mayn't
I offer you a cigar?"

"No, thanks. I don't smoke," said Maxwell.

"Then a glass of--It's pretty cold out!"

"Thank you; I never drink."

"Well, that's good! That's--sit down; sit down!--that's a very good
thing. I assure you, I don't think it's the least use, though I do both.
My boy doesn't, he's a pattern to his father."

In spite of Hilary's invitation Maxwell remained on foot, with the
effect of merely hearing him out as he went on.

"I--I'm sorry I haven't anything to tell about that accident. I've been
telegraphing all day, without finding out anything beyond the fact as
first reported; and now my son's gone up to Wellwater, to look it up on
the ground. It may have been our Mr. Northwick, or it may not. May I ask
how much you know?"

"I don't know that I'm quite free to say," answered Maxwell.

"Oh!"

"And I didn't expect you to say anything unless you wished to make
something known. It's a matter of business."

"Exactly," said Hilary. "But I think I might been a little civiller in
saying what I did. The rumor's been a great annoyance to me; and I like
to share my annoyances with other people. I suppose your business often
brings you in contact with men of that friendly disposition? Heigh?"
Hilary rolled the cigar he was about to light between his lips.

"We see the average man," said Maxwell, not at all flattered from his
poise by Hilary's apologies. "It's a bore to be interviewed; I know that
from the bore it is to interview."

"I dare say that's often the worst part of it," said Hilary, lighting
his cigar, and puffing out the first great clouds. "Well, then, I may
congratulate myself on sparing you an unpleasant duty. I didn't know I
should come off so handsomely."

There seemed nothing more to say, and Maxwell did not attempt to make
conversation. Hilary offered him his hand, and he said, as if to relieve
the parting of abruptness, "If you care to look in on me again, later
on, perhaps--"

"Thank you," said Maxwell, and he turned to go. Then he turned back, and
after a moment's hesitation, bowed to Louise, and said very stiffly,
"Good-evening!" and went out.

Louise fetched a deep breath. "Why didn't you keep him longer, papa, and
find out all about him?"

"I think we know all that's necessary," said her father, dryly. "At
least he isn't on my conscience any longer; and now I hope you're
satisfied."

"Yes--yes," she hesitated. "You don't think you were too patronizing in
your reparation, papa?"

"Patronizing?" Hilary's crest began to rise.

"Oh, I don't mean that; but I wish you hadn't let him see that you
expected him to leap for joy when you stooped to excuse yourself."

Hilary delayed, for want of adequate terms, the violence he was about to
permit himself. "The next time, if you don't like my manner with people,
don't stay, Louise."

"I knew you wanted me to stay, papa, to see how beautifully you could do
it; and you _did_ do it beautifully. It was magnificent--perhaps _too_
magnificent." She began to laugh and to kiss away the vexation from her
father's face, keeping her hands behind her with her shoes she had
picked up again, in them, as she came and leaned over him, where he sat.

"And did I want you to stay and entertain him here till I came in?" he
demanded, to keep from being mollified too soon.

"No," she faltered. "_That_ was a work of necessity. He looked so sick
and sad, that he appealed to my sympathy, and besides--Do you think I
could trust you with a secret, papa?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Why, you see I thought he was a walking-delegate at first."

"And was that the reason you stayed?"

"No. That was what frightened me, and then interested me. I wanted to
find out what they were like. But that isn't the secret."

"It's probably quite as important," Hilary growled.

"Well, you see it's such a good lesson to me! I had slipped off my shoes
when I was lying down, and I couldn't get away, he came in so suddenly."

"And do you mean to tell me, Louise, that you were talking to that
reporter all the time in--"

"How should he know it? You didn't know it yourself, papa. I couldn't
get my shoes on after he came, of course!" She brought them round before
her in evidence.

"Well, it's scandalous, Louise, simply scandalous! I never come in after
you've been here without finding some part of your gear lying
round--hair-pins, or gloves, or ribbons, or belts, or handkerchiefs, or
something--and I won't have it. I want you to understand that I think
it's disgraceful. I'm ashamed of you."

"Oh, no! Not _ashamed_, papa!"

"Yes, I am!" said her father; but he had to relent under her look of
meek imploring, and say, "or I ought to be. I don't see how you could
hold up your head."

"I held it very _high_ up. When you haven't got your shoes on--in
company--it gives you a sort of--internal majesty; and I behaved very
loftily. But it's been a fearful lesson to me, papa!" She made her
father laugh, and then she flung herself upon him, and kissed him for
his amiability.

She said at the end of this rite, "He didn't seem much impressed even
after you had apologized, do you think, papa?"

"No, he didn't," Hilary grumbled. "He's as stiff-necked as need be."

"Yes," said Louise, thoughtfully. "He must be proud. How funny proud
people are, papa! I can't understand them. That was what always
fascinated me with Suzette."

Hilary's face saddened as it softened. "Ah, poor thing! She'll have need
of all her pride, now."

"You mean about her father," said Louise, sobered too. "Don't you hope
he's got away?"

"What do you mean, child? That would be a very rascally wish in me."

"Well, you'd rather he had got away than been killed?"

"Why, of course, of course," Hilary ruefully assented. "But if Matt
finds he wasn't--in the accident, it's my business to do all I can to
bring him to justice. The man's a thief."

"Well, then, _I_ hope he's got away."

"You mustn't say such things, Louise."

"Oh, _no_, papa! Only _think_ them."




XVII.


Hilary had to yield to the pressure on him and send detectives to look
into the question of Northwick's fate at the scene of the accident. It
was a formal violation of his promise to Northwick that he should have
three days unmolested; but perhaps the circumstances would have
justified Hilary to any business man, and it could really matter nothing
to the defaulter dead or alive. In either case he was out of harm's way.
Matt, all the same, felt the ghastliness of being there on the same
errand with these agents of his father, and reaching the same facts with
them. At moments it seemed to him as if he were tacitly working in
agreement with them, for the same purpose as well as to the same end;
but he would not let this illusion fasten upon him; and he kept faith
with Suzette in the last degree. He left nothing undone which she could
have asked if he had done; he invented some quite useless things to do,
and did them, to give his conscience no cause against him afterwards.
The fire had left nothing but a few charred fragments of the wreck.
There had been no means of stopping it, and it had almost completely
swept away the cars in which it had broken out. Certain of the cars to
the windward were not burnt; these lay capsized beside the track, bent
and twisted, and burst athwart, fantastically like the pictures of
derailed cars as Matt had seen them in the illustrated papers; the
locomotive, pitched into a heavy drift, was like some dead monster that
had struggled hard for its life. Where the fire had raged, there was a
wide black patch in the whiteness glistening everywhere else; there were
ashes, and writhen iron-work; and bits of charred wood-work; but nothing
to tell who or how many had died there. It was certain that the porter
and the parlor-car conductor were among the lost; and his list of
passengers had perished with the conductor; there was only left with the
operator the original of that telegram, asking to have a chair reserved
in the Pullman from Wellwater, and signed with Northwick's name, but
those different initials, which had given rise to the report of his
death.

This was the definite fact which Matt could carry back with him to
Northwick's family, and this they knew already. It settled nothing; it
left the question of his death just where it was before. But Matt
struggled with it as if it were some quite new thing, and spent himself
in trying to determine how he should present it to them. In his own mind
he had very great doubt whether Northwick was in the accident, and
whether that dispatch was not a trick, a ruse to cover up the real
course of his flight. But then there was no sense in his trying to hide
his track, for he must have known that as yet there was no pursuit. If
the telegram was a ruse, it was a ruse to conceal the fact that
Northwick was still in the country, and had not gone to Canada at all.
But Matt could not imagine any reason for such a ruse; the motive must
be one of those illogical impulses which sometimes govern criminals. In
any case, Matt could not impart his conjectures to the poor women who
must be awaiting his return with such cruel anxiety. If the man were
really dead, it would simplify the matter beyond the power of any other
fact; Matt perceived how it would mitigate the situation for his family;
he could understand how people should hold that suicide was the only
thing left for a man in Northwick's strait. He blamed himself for coming
a moment to that ground, and owned the shame of his interested motive;
but it was, nevertheless, a relief which he did not know how to refuse
when Suzette Northwick took what he had to tell as final proof that her
father was dead.

She said that she had been talking it all over with her sister, and they
were sure of it; they were prepared for it; they expected him to tell
them so.

Matt tried to have her realize that he had not told her so; and he
urged, as far as he could, the grounds for hoping that her father was
not in the accident.

She put them all aside. The difference in the initials was really no
difference; and besides, and above all, there was the fact that if her
father were anywhere alive, he must have seen the report of his death by
this time, and sent some word, made some sign for their relief. She was
doubly sure of this, because he was so anxiously thoughtful of them when
they were separated. He expected them to notify him of every slight
change in their plans when they were away, and always telegraphed as to
his own. The only mystery was his going to Canada without letting them
know his plans before or afterwards. It must have been upon some very
suddenly urgent business that took his mind off everything else.

Matt silently hung his head, dreading lest she should ask him what he
thought, and wondering how he must answer if she did. He perceived that
he had no choice but to lie, if she asked him; but when he volunteered
nothing, she did not ask him.

It was the second morning after he had left her; but he could see that
she had lived long since their parting. He thought, "That is the way she
will look as she grows old." The delicate outline of her cheeks showed a
slight straightening of its curve; her lips were pinched; the aquiline
jut of her nose was sharpened. There was no sign of tears in her eyes;
but Adeline wept, and constantly dried her tears with her handkerchief.
She accepted her affliction meekly, as Suzette accepted it proudly, and
she seemed to leave all the conjectures and conclusions to her sister.

Suzette was in the exaltation which death first brings to the bereaved,
when people say that they do not realize it yet, and that they will feel
it later. Then they go about, especially if they are women, in a sort of
hysterical strength; they speak calmly of what has happened; they help
those beyond the immediate circle of their loss to bear up against it;
these look to see them break suddenly under the stress of their
bereavement, and wonder at their impassioned fortitude.

Matt knew neither how to stay nor to get away; it seemed intrusive to
linger, and inhuman to go when he had told the little he had to tell.
Suzette had been so still, so cold, in receiving him, that he was
astonished at her intensity when he rose to leave her at last.

"I shall never forget what you have done for us, Mr. Hilary. Never!
Don't belittle it, or try to make it seem nothing! It was everything! I
wonder you could do it!"

"Yes!" Adeline put in, as if they had been talking his kindness over, as
well as their loss, and were of one mind about it.

"Oh, indeed!" he began. "Any one would have done it--"

"Don't say so!" cried Suzette. "You think that because _you_ would have
done it for any one! But you have done it for _us_; and as long as I
live I shall remember that! Oh"--She broke off; and dropped her face
with a pathetic, childlike helplessness on her lifted arm; and now he
was less than ever able to leave her. They all sat down again, after
they had risen to part; Matt felt the imperative necessity of
encouraging them; of rescuing her from the conjecture which she had
accepted as certainty. He was one of those men in whom passion can be
born only of some form of unselfish kindness; and who alone can make
women happy. If it was love that was now stirring so strangely at his
heart, he did not know it was love; he thought it was still the pity
that he had felt for the girl's immense calamity. He knew that from
every phase of it he could not save her, but he tried to save her from
that which now confronted them, and from which he saw her suffering. He
went over all the facts again with the hapless creatures, and reasoned
from them the probability that their father was still alive. It was
respite from sorrow which misery must follow; it was insane, it was
foolish, it was even guilty, but he could not help trying to win it for
them; and when he left them at last, they were bright with the hope he
had

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