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.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 466