With Pinney these statements led to others until he had possessed Northwick of his whole autobiography. He was in high content with himself, and his joy overflowed in all manner of affectionate services to Northwick, which Northwick accepted as the mourner entrusts his helplessness to the ghastly kindness of the undertaker, and finds in it a sort of human sympathy. If Northwick had been his own father, Pinney could not have looked after him with tenderer care, in putting his things together for him, and getting on board the boat, and making interest with the clerk for the best stateroom. He did not hesitate to describe him as an American financier; he enjoyed saying that he was in Canada for his health; and that he must have an extra room. The clerk gave up the captain’s, as all the others were taken, and Pinney occupied it with Northwick. It was larger and pleasanter than the other rooms, and after Pinney got Northwick to bed, he sat beside him and talked. Northwick said that he slept badly, and liked to have Pinney talk; Pinney could see that he was uneasy when he left the room, and glad when he got back; he made up his mind that Northwick was somehow a very sick man. He lay quite motionless in the lower berth, where Pinney made him comfortable; his hands were folded on his breast, and his eyes were closed. Sometimes Pinney, as he talked on, thought the man was dead; and there were times when he invented questions that Northwick had to answer yes or no, before he felt sure that he was still alive; his breath went and came so softly Pinney could not hear it.
Pinney told him all about his courtship and married life, and what a prize he had drawn in Mrs. Pinney. He said she had been the making of him, and if he ever did amount to anything, he should owe it to her. They had their eye on a little place out of town, out Wollaston way, and Pinney was going to try to get hold of it. He was tired of being mewed up in a flat, and he wanted the baby to get its feet on the ground, when it began to walk. He wanted to make his rent pay part of his purchase. He considered that it was every man’s duty to provide a permanent home for his family, as soon as he began to have a family; and he asked Northwick if he did not think a permanent home was the thing.
Northwick said he thought it was, and after he said that, he sighed so deeply that Pinney said, “Oh, I beg your pardon.” He had, in fact, lost the sense of Northwick’s situation, and now he recurred to it with a fresh impulse of compassion. If his compassion was mixed with interest, with business, as he would have said, it was none the less a genuine emotion, and Pinney was sincere enough in saying he wished it could be fixed so that Northwick could get back to his home; at his time of life he needed it.
“And I don’t believe but what it could be fixed,” he said. “I don’t know much about the points of the case; but I should say that with the friends you’ve got, you wouldn’t have a great deal of trouble. I presume there are some legal forms you would have to go through with; but those things can always be appealed and continued and nolle prossed, and all that, till there isn’t anything of them, in the end. Of course, it would have been different if they could have got hold of you in the beginning. But now,” said Pinney, forgetting what he had already said of it, “the whole thing has blown over, so that that letter of yours from Rimouski hardly started a ripple in Boston; I can’t say how it was in Hatboro’. No, sir, I don’t believe that if you went back now, and your friends stood by you as they ought to, — I don’t believe you’d get more than a mere nominal sentence, if you got that.”
Northwick made no reply, but Pinney fancied that his words were having weight with him, and he went on: “I don’t know whether you’ve ever kept the run of these kind of things; but a friend of mine has, and he says there isn’t one case in ten where the law carries straight. You see, public feeling has got a good deal to do with it, and when the people get to feeling that a man has suffered enough, the courts are not going to be hard on him. No, sir. I’ve seen it time and again, in my newspaper experience. The public respects a man’s sufferings, and if public opinion can’t work the courts, it can work the Governor’s council. Fact is, I looked into that business of yours a little, after you left, Mr. Northwick, and I couldn’t see, exactly, why you didn’t stay, and try to fix it up with the company. I believe you could have done it, and that was the impression of a good many other newspaper men; and they’re pretty good judges; they’ve seen a lot of life. It’s exciting, and it’s pleasant, newspaper work is,” said Pinney, straying back again into the paths of autobiography, “but I’ve got about enough of it, myself. The worst of it is, there ain’t any outcome to it. The chances of promotion are about as good as they are in the U. S. Army when the Reservations are quiet. So I’m going into something else. I’d like to tell you about it, if you ain’t too sleepy?”
“I am rather tired,” said Northwick, with affecting patience.
“Oh, well, then, I guess we’ll postpone it till to-morrow. It’ll keep. My! It don’t seem as I was going back to my wife and baby. It seems too good to be true. Every time I leave ‘em, I just bet myself I sha’n’t get back alive; or if I do that I sha’n’t find ’em safe and sound; and I’m just as sure I’ll win every time, as if I’d never lost the bet yet.”
Pinney undressed rapidly, and before he climbed into the berth over Northwick’s, he locked the door, and put the key under his pillow. Northwick did not seem to notice him, but a feeling of compunction made him put the key back in the door. “I guess I’d better leave it there, after all,” he said. “It’ll stop a key from the outside. Well, sir, good-night,” he added to Northwick, and climbed to his berth with a light heart. Toward morning he was wakened by a groaning from the lower berth, and he found Northwick in great pain. He wished to call for help; but Northwick said the pain would pass, and asked him to get him some medicine he had in his hand-bag; and when he had taken that he was easier. But he held fast to Pinney’s hand, which he had gripped in one of his spasms, and he did not loose it till Pinney heard him drawing his breath in the long respirations of sleep. Then Pinney got back to his berth, and fell heavily asleep.
He knew it was late when he woke. The boat was at rest, and must be lying at her landing in Quebec. He heard the passengers outside hurrying down the cabin to go ashore. When he had collected himself, and recalled the events of the night, he was almost afraid to look down at Northwick lest he should find him lying dead in his berth; when he summoned courage to look, he found the berth empty.
He leaped out upon the floor, and began to throw himself into his clothes. He was reassured, for a moment, by seeing Northwick’s travelling-bag in the corner with his own; but the hand-bag was gone. He rushed out, as soon as he could make himself decent, and searched every part of the boat where Northwick might probably be; but he was not to be seen.
He asked a steward how long the boat had been in; and the steward said since six o’clock. It was then eight.
Northwick was not waiting for Pinney on the wharf, and he climbed disconsolately to his hotel in the Upper Town. He bet, as a last resource, that Northwick would not be waiting there for him, to give him a pleasant surprise, and he won his disastrous wager.
It did not take his wife so long to understand what had happened, as Pinney thought it would. She went straight to the heart of the mystery.
“Did you say anything about his going back?”
“Why — in a general way,” Pinney admitted, ruefully.
“Then, of course, that made him afraid of you. You broke your word, Ren, and it’s served you right.”
His wife was walking to and fro with the baby in her arms; and she said it was sick, and she had been up all night with it. She told Pinney he had better go out and get a doctor.
It was all as different from the return Pinney had planned as it could be.
“I believe the old fool is crazy,” he said, and he felt that this was putting the mildest possible construction upon Northwick’s behavior.
“He seems to have known what he was about, anyway,” said Mrs. Pinney, coldly. The baby began to cry. “Oh, do go for the doctor!”
V.
The day wa
s still far from dawning when Northwick crept up the silent avenue, in the dark of its firs, toward his empty house, and stealthily began to seek for that home in it which had haunted his sleeping and waking dreams so long. He had a kind of ecstacy in the risk he ran; a wild pleasure mixed with the terror he felt in being what and where he was. He wanted to laugh when he thought of the perfect ease and safety of his return. At the same time a thrilling anxiety pierced him through and through, and made him take all the precautions of a thief in the night.
A thief in the night: that was the phrase which kept repeating itself to him, till he said it over under his breath, as he put off his shoes, and stole up the piazza-steps, and began to peer into the long windows, at the blackness within. He did not at once notice that the shutters were open, with an effect of reckless security or indifference, which struck a pang to his heart when he realized it. He felt the evil omen of this faltering in the vigilance which had once guarded his home, and which he had been the first to break down, and lay it open to spoil and waste. He tried the windows; he must get in, somehow, and he did not dare to ring at the door, or to call out. He must steal into his house, as he had stolen out of it.
One of the windows yielded; the long glass door gave inward, and he stepped on the carpetless floor of the library. Then the fact of the change that must have passed upon the whole house enforced itself, and he felt a passionate desire to face and appropriate the change in every detail. He lit one of the little taper matches that he had with him, and, hollowing his hands around it, let its glimmer show him the desolation of the dismantled and abandoned rooms. He passed through the doors set wide between library and drawing-room and dining-room and hall; and then from his dying taper he lit another, and mounted the stairs. He had no need to seek his daughter’s rooms to satisfy himself that the whole place was empty; they were gone; but he had a fantastic expectation that in his own room he might find himself. There was nothing there, either; it was as if he were a ghost come back in search of the body it had left behind; any one that met him, he thought, might well be more frightened than he; and yet he did not lose the sense of risk to himself.
He had an expectation, born of long custom, and persisting in spite of the nakedness of the place otherwise, that he should see the pictured face of his wife, where it had looked so mercifully at him that last night from the portrait above the mantel. He sighed lightly to find it gone; her chair was gone from the bay-window, where he had stood to gaze his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman’s quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the window, and then vanished.
Northwick knew from this that the place was inhabited; unless some homeless tramp like himself was haunting it, and it went through his confusion that he must speak to Newton, and caution him about tramps sleeping in the barns anywhere; they might set them on fire. His mind reverted to his actual condition, and he wondered how long he could come and go as a vagrant without being detected. If it were not for the action against vagrants which he had urged upon the selectmen the summer before, he might now come and go indefinitely. But he was not to blame; it was because Mrs. Morrell had encouraged the tramps by her reckless charity that something had to be done; and now it was working against him. It was hard: he remembered reading of a man who had left his family one day, and taken a room across the street, and lived there in sight of them unknown till he died: and now he could not have passed his own door without danger of arrest as a vagrant. He struck another match, and looked at himself in the mirror framed as a window at one side of the bay; he believed that with the long white beard he wore, and his hair which he had let grow, his own children would not have known him.
It was bitter; but his mind suddenly turned from the thought, with a lightness it had, and he remembered that now he did not know where his children lived. He must find out, somehow; he had come to see them; and he could not go back without. He must hurry to find them, and be gone again before daylight. He crept out to the stairs, and struck a match to light himself down, and he carried it still burning, toward the window he had left open behind him in the library. As soon as he stepped out on the piazza he found himself gripped fast in the arms of a man.
“I’ve got you! What you doing in here, I’d like to know? Who are you, anyway, you thief? Just hold that lantern up to his face, a minute, ‘Lectra.”
Northwick had not tried to resist; he had not struggled; he had known Elbridge Newton’s voice at the first word. He saw the figure of a woman beside him, stooping over the lantern, and he knew that it was Mrs. Newton; but he made no sort of appeal to either. He did not make the least sound or movement. The habit of his whole life was reticence, especially in emergencies; and this habit had been strengthened and deepened by the solitude in which he had passed the last half-year. If a knife had been put to his throat, he would not have uttered a cry for mercy; but his silence was so involuntary that it seemed to him he did not breathe while Mrs. Newton was turning up the wick of the lantern for a good look at him. When the light was lifted to his face, Northwick felt that they both knew him through the disguise of his white beard. Elbridge’s grip fell from him and let him stand free. “Well, I’ll be dumned,” said Elbridge.
His wife remained holding the lantern to Northwick’s face. “What are you going to do with him?” she asked at last, as if Northwick were not present; he stood so dumb and impassive.
“I d’ know as I know,” said Newton, overpowered by the peculiar complications of the case. He escaped from them for the moment in the probable inference: “I presume he was lookin’ for his daughters. Didn’t you know,” he turned to Northwick, with a sort of apologetic reproach, “lightin’ matches that way in the house, here, you might set it on fire, and you’d be sure to make people think there was somebody there, anyhow?”
Northwick made no answer to this question, and Newton looked him carefully over in the light of the lantern. “I swear, he’s in his stockin’ feet. You look round and see if you can find his shoes, anywhere, ‘Lectra. You got the light.” Newton seemed to insist upon this because it relieved him to delegate any step in this difficult matter to another.
His wife cast the light of her lantern about, and found the shoes by the piazza-steps, and as Northwick appeared no more able to move than to speak, Elbridge stooped down, and put on his shoes for him where he stood. When he lifted himself, he stared again at Northwick, as if to make perfectly sure of him, and then he said, with a sigh of perplexity, “You go ahead, a little ways, ‘Lectra, with the lantern. I presume we’ve got to take him to ‘em,” and his wife, usually voluble and wilful, silently obeyed.
“Want to see your daughters?” he asked Northwick, and at the silence which was his only response, Newton said, “Well, I don’t know as I blame him any, for not wantin’ to commit himself. You don’t want to be afraid,” he added, to Northwick, “that anybody’s goin’ to keep you against your will, you know.”
“Well, I guess not,” said Mrs. Newton, finding her tongue, at last. “If they was to double and treble the reward, I’d slap ’em in the face first. Bring him along, Elbridge.”
As Northwick no more moved than spoke, Newton took him by the arm, and helped him down the piazza-steps and into the dark of the avenue, tunnelled about their feet by the light of the lantern, as they led and pushed their helpless capture toward the lodge at the avenue gate.
Northwick had heard and understood them; he did not know what secret purpose their pretence of taking him to his children might not cover; but he was not capable of offering any resistance, and when he reached the cottage he sank passively on the steps. He shook in every nerve, while Elbridge pounded on the door, till a window above was lifted, and Adeline’s frightened voice quavered out, “Who is it? What is it?”
Mrs. Newton
took the words out of her husband’s mouth. “It’s us, Miss Northwick. If you’re sure you’re awake—”
“Oh, yes. I haven’t been asleep!”
“Then listen!” said Mr. Newton, in a lowered tone. “And don’t be scared. Don’t call out — don’t speak loud. There’s somebody here — Come down, and let him in.”
Northwick stood up. He heard the fluttered rush of steps on the stairs inside. The door opened, and Adeline caught him in her arms, with choking, joyful sobs. “Oh, father! Oh, father! Oh, I knew it! I knew it! Oh, oh, oh! Where was he? How did you find him?”
She did not heed their answers. She did not realize that she was shutting them out when she shut herself in with her father; but they understood.
VI.
Northwick stared round him in the light of the lamp which Adeline turned up. He held fast by one of her hands. “What’s he going to do? Has he gone for the officer? Is he going to give me up?”
“Who? Elbridge Newton? Well, I guess his wife hasn’t forgot what you did for them when their little boy died, if he has, and I guess he hasn’t gone for any officer! Where did you see him?”
“In the house. I was there.”
“But how did he know it?”
“I had to have a light to see by.”
“Oh, my goodness! If anybody else had caught you I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t see how you could be so venturesome!”
“I thought you were there. I had to come back. I couldn’t stand it any longer, when that fellow came with your letter.”
“Oh, he found you,” she cried, joyfully. “I knew he would find you, and I said so — Sit down, father; do.” She pushed him gently into a cushioned rocking-chair. “It’s mother’s chair; don’t you remember, it always stood in the bay-window in your room, where she put it? Louise Hilary bought it at the sale — I know she bought it — and gave it to me. It was because the place was mother’s that I wouldn’t let Suzette give it up to the company.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 495