When they were once out under the stars, Bartley, who still, felt his brain clear, said that he would not take his friend home at once, but would show him where he visited when he first came to Boston. The other agreed to the indulgence of this sentiment, and they set out to find Rumford Street together.
“You've heard of old man Halleck,—Lestor Neather Interest? Tha's place,—there's where I stayed. His son's my frien',—damn stuck-up, supercilious beast he is, too!Ido' care f'r him! I'll show you place, so's't you'll know it when you come to it,—'f I can ever find it.”
They walked up and down the street, looking, while Bartley poured his sorrows into the ear of his friend, who grew less and less responsive, and at last ceased from his side altogether. Bartley then dimly perceived that he was himself sitting on a door-step, and that his head was hanging far down between his knees, as if he had been sleeping in that posture.
“Locked out,—locked out of my own door, and by my own wife!” He shed tears, and fell asleep again. From time to time he woke, and bewailed himself to Ricker as a poor boy who had fought his own way; he owned that he had made mistakes, as who had not? Again he was trying to convince Squire Gaylord that they ought to issue a daily edition of the Equity Free Press, and at the same time persuading Mr. Halleck to buy the Events for him, and let him put it on a paying basis. He shivered, sighed, hiccupped, and was dozing off again, when Henry Bird knocked him down, and he fell with a cry, which at last brought to the door the uneasy sleeper, who had been listening to him within, and trying to realize his presence, catching his voice in waking intervals, doubting it, drowsing when it ceased, and then catching it and losing it again.
“Hello, here! What do you want? Hubbard! Is it you? What in the world are you doing here?”
“Halleck,” said Bartley, who was unsteadily straightening himself upon his feet, “glad to find you at home. Been looking for your house all night. Want to introduce you to partic-ic-ular friend of mine. Mr. Halleck, Mr. ——. Curse me if I know your name—”
“Hold on a minute,” said Halleck.
He ran into the house for his hat and coat, and came out again, closing the door softly after him. He found Bartley in the grip of a policeman, whom he was asking his name, that he might introduce him to his friend Halleck.
“Do you know this man, Mr. Halleck?” asked the policeman.
“Yes,—yes, I know him,” said Ben, in a low voice. “Let's get him away quietly, please. He's all right. It's the first time I ever saw him so. Will you help me with him up to Johnson's stable? I'll get a carriage there and take him home.”
They had begun walking Bartley along between them; he dozed, and paid no attention to their talk.
The policeman laughed. “I was just going to run him in, when you came out. You didn't come a minute too soon.”
They got Bartley to the stable, and he slept heavily in one of the chairs in the office, while the ostlers were putting the horses to the carriage. The policeman remained at the office-door, looking in at Bartley, and philosophizing the situation to Halleck. “Your speakin' about its bein' the first time you ever saw him so made me think 't I rather help take home a regular habitual drunk to his family, any day, than a case like this. They always seem to take it so much harder the first time. Boards with his mother, I presume?”
“He's married,” said Halleck? sadly. “He has a house of his own.”
“Well!” said the policeman.
Bartley slept all the way to Clover Street, and when the carriage stopped at his door, they had difficulty in waking him sufficiently to get him out.
“Don't come in, please,” said Halleck to the policeman, when this was done. “The man will carry you back to your beat. Thank you, ever so much!”
“All right, Mr. Halleck. Don't mention it,” said the policeman, and leaned back in the hack with an air of luxury, as it rumbled softly away.
Halleck remained on the pavement with Bartley falling limply against him in the dim light of the dawn. “What you want? What you doing with me?” he demanded with sullen stupidity.
“I've got you home, Hubbard. Here we are at your house.” He pulled him across the pavement to the threshold, and put his hand on the bell, but the door was thrown open before he could ring, and Marcia stood there, with her face white, and her eyes red with watching and crying.
“Oh, Bartley! oh, Bartley!” she sobbed. “Oh, Mr. Halleck! what is it? Is he hurt? I did it,—yes, I did it! It's my fault! Oh! will he die? Is he sick?”
“He isn't very well. He'd better go to bed,” said Halleck.
“Yes, yes! I will help you upstairs with him.”
“Do' need any help,” said Bartley, sulkily. “Go upstairs myself.”
He actually did so, with the help of the hand-rail, Marcia running before, to open the door, and smooth the pillows which her head had not touched, and Halleck following him to catch him if he should fall. She unlaced his shoes and got them off, while Halleck removed his coat.
“Oh, Bartley! where do you feel badly, dear? Oh I what shall I do?” she moaned, as he tumbled himself on the bed, and lapsed into a drunken stupor.
“Better—better come out, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Halleck. “Better let him alone, now. You only make him worse, talking to him.”
Quelled by the mystery of his manner, she followed him out and down the stairs. “Oh,dotell me what it is,” she implored, in a low voice, “or I shall go wild! But tell me, and I can bear it! I can bear anything if I know what it is!” She came close to him in her entreaty, and fixed her eyes beseechingly on his, while she caught his hand in both of hers. “Is he—is he insane?”
“He isn't quite in his right mind, Mrs. Hubbard,” Halleck began, softly releasing himself, and retreating a little from her; but she pursued him, and put her hand on his arm.
“Oh, then go for the doctor,—go instantly! Don't lose a minute! I shall not be afraid to stay alone. Or if you think I'd better not, I will go for the doctor myself.”
“No, no,” said Halleck, smiling sadly: the case certainly had its ludicrous side. “He doesn't need a doctor. You mustn't think of calling a doctor. Indeed you mustn't. He'll come out all right of himself. If you sent for a doctor, it would make him very angry.”
She burst into tears. “Well, I will do what you say,” she cried. “It would never have happened, if it hadn't been for me. I want to tell you what I did,” she went on wildly. “I want to tell—”
“Please don't tell me anything, Mrs. Hubbard! It will all come right—and very soon. It isn't anything to be alarmed about. He'll be well in a few hours. I—ah—Good by.” He had found his cane, and he made a limp toward the door, but she swiftly interposed herself.
“Why,” she panted, in mixed reproach and terror, “you're not going away? You're not going to leave me before Bartley is well? He may get worse,—he may die! You mustn't go, Mr. Halleck!”
“Yes, I must,—I can't stay,—I oughtn't to stay,—it won't do! He won't get worse, he won't die.” The perspiration broke out on Halleck's face, which he lifted to hers with a distress as great as her own.
She only answered, “I can't let you go; it would kill me. I wonder at your wanting to go.”
There was something ghastly comical in it all, and Halleck stood in fear of its absurdity hardly less than of its tragedy. He rapidly revolved in his mind the possibilities of the case. He thought at first that it might be well to call a doctor, and, having explained the situation to him, pay him to remain in charge; but he reflected that it would be insulting to ask a doctor to see a man in Hubbard's condition. He took out his watch, and saw that it was six o'clock; and he said, desperately, “You can send for me, if you get anxious—”
“I can't let you go!”
“I must really get my breakfast—”
“The girl will get something for you here! Oh,don'tgo away!” Her lip began to quiver again, and her bosom to rise.
He could not bear it. “Mrs. Hubbard, will you believe what I say?”
“Yes,” she faltered, reluctantly.
“Well, I tell you that Mr. Hubbard is in no sort of danger; and I know that it would be extremely offensive to him if I stayed.”
“Then you must go,” she answered promptly, and opened the door, which she had closed for fear he might escape. “I will send for a doctor.”
“No;don'tsend for a doctor, don't send for anybody don't speak of the matter to any one: it would be very mortifying to him. It's merely a—a—kind of—seizure, that a great many people—men—are subject to; but he wouldn't like to have it known.” He saw that his words were making an impression upon her; perhaps her innocence was beginning to divine the truth. “Will you do what I say?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
Her head began to droop, and her face to turn away in a dawning shame too cruel for him to see.
“I—I will come back as soon as I get my breakfast, to make sure that everything is right.”
She let him find his own way out, and Halleck issued upon the street, as miserable as if the disgrace were his own. It was easy enough for him to get back into his own room without alarming the family. He ate his breakfast absently, and then went out while the others were still at table.
“I don't think Ben seems very well,” said his mother, anxiously, and she looked to her husband for the denial he always gave.
“Oh, I guess he's all right. What's the matter with him?”
“It's nothing but his ridiculous, romantic way of taking the world to heart,” Olive interposed. “You may be sure he's troubled about something that doesn't concern him in the least. It's what comes of the life-long conscientiousness of his parents. If Ben doesn't turn out a philanthropist of the deepest dye yet, you'll have me to thank for it. I see more and more every day that I was providentially born wicked, so as to keep this besottedly righteous family's head above water.”
She feigned an angry impatience with the condition of things; but when her father went out, she joined her mother in earnest conjectures as to what Ben had on his mind.
Halleck wandered about till nearly ten o'clock, and then he went to the little house on Clover Street. The servant-girl answered his ring, and when he asked for Mrs. Hubbard, she said that Mr. Hubbard wished to see him, and please would he step upstairs.
He found Bartley seated at the window, with a wet towel round his head, and his face pale with headache.
“Well, old man,” he said, with an assumption of comradery that was nauseous to Halleck, “you've done the handsome thing by me. I know all about it. I knew something about it all the time.” He held out his hand, without rising, and Halleck forced himself to touch it. “I appreciate your delicacy in not telling my wife. Of course youcouldn'ttell,” he said, with depraved enjoyment of what he conceived of Halleck's embarrassment. “But I guess she must have smelt a rat. As the fellow says,” he added, seeing the disgust that Halleck could not keep out of his face, “I shall make a clean breast of it, as soon as she can bear it. She's pretty high-strung. Lying down, now,” he explained. “You see, I went out to get something to make me sleep, and the first thing I knew I had got too much. Good thing I turned up on your doorstep; might have been waltzing into the police court about now. How did you happen to hear me?”
Halleck briefly explained, with an air of abhorrence for the facts.
“Yes, I remember most of it,” said Bartley. “Well, I want to thank you, Halleck. You've saved me from disgrace,—from ruin, for all I know. Whew! how my head aches!” he said, making an appeal to Halleck's pity, with closed eyes. “Halleck,” he murmured, feebly, “I wish you would do me a favor.”
“Yes? What is it?” asked Halleck, dryly.
“Go round to the Events office and tell old Witherby that I sha'n't be able to put in an appearance to-day. I'm not up to writing a note, even; and he'd feel flattered at your coming personally. It would make it all right for me.”
“Of course I will go,” said Halleck.
“Thanks,” returned Bartley, plaintively, with his eyes closed.
Bartley would willingly have passed this affair over with Marcia, like some of their quarrels, and allowed a reconciliation to effect itself through mere lapse of time and daily custom. But there were difficulties in the way to such an end; his shameful escapade had given the quarrel a character of its own, which could not be ignored. He must keep his word about making a clean breast of it to Marcia, whether he liked or not; but she facilitated his confession by the meek and dependent fashion in which she hovered about, anxious to do something or anything for him. If, as he suggested to Halleck, she had divined the truth, she evidently did not hold him wholly to blame for what had happened, and he was not without a self-righteous sense of having given her a useful and necessary lesson. He was inclined to a severity to which his rasped and shaken nerves contributed, when he spoke to her that night, as they sat together after tea; she had some sewing in her lap, little mysteries of soft muslin for the baby, which she was edging with lace, and her head drooped over her work, as if she could not confront him with her swollen eyes.
“Look here, Marcia,” he said, “do you know what was the matter with me this morning?”
She did not answer in words; her hands quivered a moment; then she caught up the things out of her lap, and sobbed into them. The sight unmanned Bartley; he hated to see any one cry,—even his wife, to whose tears he was accustomed. He dropped down beside her on the sofa, and pulled her head over on his shoulder.
“It was my fault! it was my fault, Bartley!” she sobbed. “Oh, how can I ever get over it?”
“Well, don't cry, don't cry! It wasn't altogether your fault,” returned Bartley. “We were both to blame.”
“No! I began it. If I hadn't broken my promise about speaking of Hannah Morrison, it never would have happened.” This was so true that Bartley could not gainsay it. “But I couldn't seem to help it; and you were—you were—so quick with me; you didn't give me time to think; you—But I was the one to blame, I was to blame!”
“Oh, well, never mind about it; don't take on so,” coaxed Bartley. “It's all over now, and it can't be helped. And I can promise you,” he added, “that it shall never happen again, no matter what you do,” and in making this promise he felt the glow of virtuous performance. “I think we've both had a lesson. I suppose,” he continued sadly, as one might from impersonal reflection upon the temptations and depravity of large cities, “that it'scommonenough. I dare say it isn't the first time Ben Halleck has taken a fellow home in a hack.” Bartley got so much comfort from the conjecture he had thrown out for Marcia's advantage, that he felt a sort of self-approval in the fact with which he followed it up. “And there's this consolation about it, if there isn't any other: that it wouldn't have happened now, if it had ever happened before.”
Marcia lifted her head and looked into his face: “What—what do you mean, Bartley?”
“I mean that I never was overcome before in my life by—wine.” He delicately avoided saying whiskey.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Why, don't you see? If I'd had the habit of drinking, I shouldn't have been affected by it.”
“I don't understand,” she said, anxiously.
“Why, I knew I shouldn't be able to sleep, I was so mad at you—”
“Oh!”
“And I dropped into the hotel bar-room for a nightcap,—for something to make me sleep.”
“Yes, yes!” she urged eagerly.
“I took what wouldn't have touched a man that was in the habit of it.”
“Poor Bartley!”
“And the first thing I knew I had got too much. I was drunk,—wild drunk,” he said with magnanimous frankness.
She had been listening intensely, exculpating him at every point, and now his innocence all flashed upon her. “I see! I see!” she cried. “And it was because you had never tasted it before—”
“Well, I had tasted it once or twice,” interrupted Bartley, with heroic veracity.
“No matter! It was because you had never more than hardly tasted it that a very little overcame you in an instant. I see!” she repeated, contemplating him in her ecstasy, as the one habitually sober man in a Boston full of inebriates. “And now I shall never regret it; I shall never care for it; I never shall think about it again! Or, yes! I shall always remember it, because it shows—because itprovesthat you are always strictly temperance. It was worth happening for that. I amgladit happened!”
She rose from his side, and took her sewing nearer the lamp, and resumed her work upon it with shining eyes.
Bartley remained in his place on the sofa, feeling, and perhaps looking, rather sheepish. He had made a clean breast of it, and the confession had redounded only too much to his credit. To do him justice, he had not intended to bring the affair to quite such a triumphant conclusion; and perhaps something better than his sense of humor was also touched when he found himself not only exonerated, but transformed into an exemplar of abstinence.
“Well,” he said, “it isn't exactly a thing to be glad of, but it certainly isn't a thing to worry yourself about. You know the worst of it, and you know the best of it. It never happened before, and it never shall happen again; that's all. Don't lament over it, don't accuse yourself; just let it go, and we'll both see what we can do after this in the way of behaving better.”
He rose from the sofa, and began to walk about the room.
“Does your head still ache?” she asked, fondly. “IwishI could do something for it!”
“Oh, I shall sleep it off,” returned Bartley.
She followed him with her eyes. “Bartley!”
“Well?”
“Do you suppose—do you believe—that Mr. Halleck—that he was ever—”
“No, Marcia, I don't,” said Bartley, stopping. “Iknowhe never was. Ben Halleck is slow; but he's good. I couldn't imagine his being drunk any more than I could imagine your being so. I'd willingly sacrifice his reputation to console you,” added Bartley, with a comical sense of his own regret that Halleck was not, for the occasion, an habitual drunkard, “but I cannot tell a lie.” He looked at her with a smile, and broke into a sudden laugh. “No, my dear, the only person I think of just now as having suffered similarly with myself is the great and good Andrew Johnson. Did you ever hear of him?”
“Was he the one they impeached?” she faltered, not knowing what Bartley would be at, but smiling faintly in sympathy with his mirth.
“He was the one they impeached. He was the one who was overcome by wine on his inauguration day, because he had never been overcome before. It's a parallel case!” Bartley got a great deal more enjoyment out of the parallel case than Marcia. The smile faded from her face.
“Come, come,” he coaxed, “be satisfied with Andrew Johnson, and let Halleck go. Ah, Marcia!” he added, seriously, “Ben Halleck is the kind of man you ought to have married! Don't you suppose that I know I'm not good enough for you? I'm pretty good by fits and starts; but he would have been good right straight along. I should never have had to bringhimhome in a hack to you!”
His generous admission had the just effect. “Hush, Bartley! Don't talk so! You know that you're better for me than the best man in the world, dear, and even if you were not, I should love you the best. Don't talk, please, that way, of any one else, or it will make me hate you!”
He liked that; and after all he was not without an obscure pride in his last night's adventure as a somewhat hazardous but decided assertion of manly supremacy. It was not a thing to be repeated; but for once in a way it was not wholly to be regretted, especially as he was so well out of it.
He pulled up a chair in front of her, and began to joke about the things she had in her lap; and the shameful and sorrowful day ended in the bliss of a more perfect peace between them than they had known since the troubles of their married life began. “I tell you,” said Bartley to Marcia, “I shall stick to tivoli after this, religiously.”
It was several weeks later that Halleck limped into Atherton's lodgings, and dropped into one of his friend's easy-chairs. The room had a bachelor comfort of aspect, and the shaded lamp on the table shed a mellow light on the green leather-covered furniture, wrinkled and creased, and worn full of such hospitable hollows as that which welcomed Halleck. Some packages of law papers were scattered about on the table; but the hour of the night had come when a lawyer permits himself a novel. Atherton looked up from his as Halleck entered, and stretched out a hand, which the latter took on his way to the easy-chair across the table.
“How do you do?” said Atherton, after allowing him to sit for a certain time in the silence, which expressed better than words the familiarity that existed between them in spite of the lawyer's six or seven years of seniority.
Halleck leaned forward and tapped the floor with his stick; then he fell back again, and laid his cane across the arms of his chair, and drew a long breath. “Atherton,” he said, “if you had found a blackguard of your acquaintance drunk on your doorstep early one morning, and had taken him home to his wife, how would you have expected her to treat you the next time you saw her?”
The lawyer was too much used to the statement, direct and hypothetical, of all sorts of cases, to be startled at this. He smiled slightly, and said, “That would depend a good deal upon the lady.”
“Oh, but generalize! From what you know of women as Woman, what should you expect? Shouldn't you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn't there a theory that women forgive injuries, but never ignominies?”
“That's what the novelists teach, and we bachelors get most of our doctrine about women from them.” He closed his novel on the paper-cutter, and, laying the book upon the table, clasped his hands together at the back of his head. “We don't go to nature for our impressions; but neither do the novelists, for that matter. Now and then, however, in the way of business, I get a glimpse of realities that make me doubt my prophets. Who had this experience?”
“I did.”
“I'm sorry for that,” said Atherton.
“Yes,” returned Halleck, with whimsical melancholy; “I'm not particularly adapted for it. But I don't know that it would be a very pleasant experience for anybody.”
He paused drearily, and Atherton said, “And how did she actually treat you?”
“I hardly know. I hadn't been at the pains to look them up since the thing happened, and I had been carrying their squalid secret round for a fortnight, and suffering from it as if it were all my own.”
Atherton smiled at the touch of self-characterization.
“When I met her and her husband and her baby to-day,—a family party,—well, she made me ashamed of the melodramatic compassion I had been feeling for her. It seemed that I had been going about unnecessarily, not to say impertinently, haggard with the recollection of her face as I saw it when she opened the door for her blackguard and me that morning. She looked as if nothing unusual had happened at our last meeting. I couldn't brace up all at once: I behaved like a sneak, in view of her serenity.”
“Perhaps nothing unusualhadhappened,” suggested Atherton.
“No, that theory isn't tenable,” said Halleck. “It was the one fact in the blackguard's favor that she had evidently never seen him in that state before, and didn't know what was the matter. She was wild at first; she wanted to send for a doctor. I think towards the last she began to suspect. But I don't know how she lookedthen: I couldn't look at her.” He stopped as if still in the presence of the pathetic figure, with its sidelong, drooping head.
Atherton respected his silence a moment before he again suggested, as lightly as before, “Perhaps she is magnanimous.”
“No,” said Halleck, with the effect of having also given that theory consideration. “She's not magnanimous, poor soul. I fancy she is rather a narrow-minded person, with strict limitations in regard to people who think ill—or too well—of her husband.”
“Then perhaps,” said Atherton, with the air of having exhausted conjecture, “she's obtuse.”
“I have tried, to think that too,” replied Halleck, “but I can't manage it. No, there are only two ways out of it; the fellow has abused her innocence and made her believe it's a common and venial affair to be brought home in that state, or else she's playing a part. He's capable of telling her that neither you nor I, for example, ever go to bed sober. But she isn't obtuse: I fancy she's only too keen in all the sensibilities that women suffer through; and I'd rather think that he had deluded her in that way, than that she was masquerading about it, or she strikes me as an uncommonly truthful person. I suppose you know whom I'm talking about, Atherton?” he said, with a sudden look at his friend's face across the table.
“Yes, I know,” said the lawyer. “I'm sorry it's come to this already. Though I suppose you're not altogether surprised.”
“No; something of the kind was to be expected,” Halleck sighed, and rolled his cane up and down on the arms of his chair. “I hope we know the worst.”
“Perhaps we do. But I recollect a wise remark you made the first time we talked of these people,” said Atherton, replying to the mood rather than the speech of his friend. “You suggested that we rather liked to grieve over the pretty girls that other fellows marry, and that we never thought of the plain ones as suffering.”
“Oh, I hadn't any data for my pity in this case, then,” replied Halleck. “I'm willing to allow that a plain woman would suffer under the same circumstances; and I think I should be capable of pitying her. But I'll confess that the notion of a pretty woman's sorrow is more intolerable; there's no use denying a fact so universally recognized by the male consciousness. I take my share of shame for it. I wonder why it is? Pretty women always seem to appeal to us as more dependent and childlike. I dare say they're not.”
“Some of them are quite able to take care of themselves,” said Atherton. “I've known striking instances of the kind. How do you know but the object of your superfluous pity was cheerful because fate had delivered her husband, bound forever, into her hand, through this little escapade of his?”
“Isn't that rather a coarse suggestion?” asked Halleck.
“Very likely. I suggest it; I don't assert it. But I fancy that wives sometimes like a permanent grievance that is always at hand, no matter what the mere passing occasion of the particular disagreement is. It seems to me that I have detected obscure appeals to such a weapon in domestic interviews at which I've assisted in the way of business.”
“Don't, Atherton!” cried Halleck.
“Don't how? In this particular case, or in regard to wives generally. We can't do women a greater injustice than not to account for a vast deal of human nature in them. You may be sure that things haven't come to the present pass with those people without blame on both sides.”
“Oh, do you defend a man for such beastliness, by that stale old plea of blame on both sides?” demanded Halleck, indignantly.
“No; but I should like to know what she had said or done to provoke it, before I excused her altogether.”
“You would! Imagine the case reversed.”
“It isn't imaginable.”
“You think there is a special code of morals for women,—sins and shames for them that are no sins and shames for us!”
“No, I don't think that! I merely suggest that you don't idealize the victim in this instance. I dare say she hasn't suffered half as much as you have. Remember that she's a person of commonplace traditions, and probably took a simple view of the matter, and let it go as something that could not be helped.”
“No, that would not do, either,” said Halleck.
“You're hard to please. Suppose we imagine her proud enough to face you down on the fact, for his sake; too proud to revenge her disgrace on you—”
“Oh, you come back to your old plea of magnanimity! Atherton, it makes me sick at heart to think of that poor creature. That look of hers haunts me! I can't get rid of it!”
Atherton sat considering his friend with a curious smile. “Well, I'm sorry this has happened toyou, Halleck.”
“Oh, why do you say that to me?” demanded Halleck, impatiently. “Am I a nervous woman, that I must be kept from unpleasant sights and disagreeable experiences? If there's anything of the man about me, you insult it! Why not be a little sorry forher?”
“I'm sorry enough for her; but I suspect that, so far, you have been the principal sufferer. She's simply accepted the fact, and survived it.”
“So much the worse, so much the worse!” groaned Halleck. “She'd better have died!”
“Well, perhaps. I dare say she thinks it will never happen again, and has dismissed the subject; while you've had it happening ever since, whenever you've thought of her.”
Halleck struck the arms of his chair with his clinched hands. “Confound the fellow! What business has he to come back into my way, and make me think about his wife? Oh, very likely it's quite as you say! I dare say she's stupidly content with him; that she's forgiven it and forgotten all about it. Probably she's told him how I behaved, and they've laughed me over together. But does that make it any easier to bear?”
“It ought,” said Atherton. “What did the husband do when you met them?”
“Everything but tip me the wink,—everything but say, in so many words, 'You see I've made it all right with her: don't you wish you knew—how?'” Halleck dropped his head, with a wrathful groan.
“I fancy,” said Atherton, thoughtfully, “that, if we really knew how, it would surprise us. Married life is as much a mystery to us outsiders as the life to come, almost. The ordinary motives don't seem to count; it's the realm of unreason. If a man only makes his wife suffer enough, she finds out that she loves him so much shemustforgive him. And then there's a great deal in their being bound. They can't live together in enmity, and they must live together. I dare say the offence had merely worn itself out between them.”
“Oh, I dare say,” Halleck assented, wearily. “That isn't my idea of marriage, though.”
“It's not mine, either,” returned Atherton. “The question is whether it isn't often the fact in regard to such people's marriages.”
“Then they are so many hells,” cried Halleck, “where self-respect perishes with resentment, and the husband and wife are enslaved to each other. They ought to be broken up!”
“I don't think so,” said Atherton, soberly. “The sort of men and women that marriage enslaves would be vastly more wretched and mischievous if they were set free. I believe that the hell people make for themselves isn't at all a bad place for them. It's the best place for them.”
“Oh, I know your doctrine,” said Halleck, rising. “It's horrible! How a man with any kindness in his heart can harbor such a cold-blooded philosophyIdon't understand. I wish you joy of it. Good night,” he added, gloomily, taking his hat from the table. “It serves me right for coming to you with a matter that I ought to have been man enough to keep to myself.”
Atherton followed him toward the door. “It won't do you any harm to consider your perplexity in the light of my philosophy. An unhappy marriage isn't the only hell, nor the worst.”
Halleck turned. “What could be a worse hell than marriage without love?” he demanded, fiercely.
“Love without marriage,” said Atherton.
Halleck looked sharply at his friend. Then he shrugged his shoulders as he turned again and swung out of the door. “You're too esoteric for me. It's quite time I was gone.”
The way through Clover Street was not the shortest way home; but he climbed the hill and passed the little house. He wished to rehabilitate in its pathetic beauty the image which his friend's conjectures had jarred, distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could repudiate. The silence in which the house was wrapped was like another fold of the mystery which involved him. The night wind rose in a sudden gust, and made the neighboring lamp flare, and his shadow wavered across the pavement like the figure of a drunken man. This, and not that other, was the image which he saw.
“Of course,” said Marcia, when she and Bartley recurred to the subject of her visit to Equity, “I have always felt as if I should like to have you with me, so as to keep people from talking, and show that it's all right between you and father. But if you don't wish to go, I can't ask it.”
“I understand what you mean, and I should like to gratify you,” said Bartley. “Not that I care a rap what all the people in Equity think. I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll go down there with you and hang round a day or two; and then I'll come after you, when your time's up, and stay a day or two there. Icouldn'tstand three weeks in Equity.”
In the end, he behaved very handsomely. He dressed Flavia out to kill, as he said, in lace hoods and embroidered long-clothes, for which he tossed over half the ready-made stock of the great dry-goods stores; and he made Marcia get herself a new suit throughout, with a bonnet to match, which she thought she could not afford, but he said he should manage it somehow. In Equity he spared no pains to deepen the impression of his success in Boston, and he was affable with everybody. He hailed his friends across the street, waving his hand to them, and shouting out a jolly greeting. He visited the hotel office and the stores to meet the loungers there; he stepped into the printing-office, and congratulated Henry Bird on having stopped the Free Press and devoted himself to job-work. He said, “Hello, Marilla! Hello, Hannah!” and he stood a good while beside the latter at her case, joking and laughing. He had no resentments. He stopped old Morrison on the street and shook hands with him. “Well, Mr. Morrison, do you find it as easy to get Hannah's wages advanced nowadays as you used to?”
As for his relations with Squire Gaylord, he flattened public conjecture out like a pancake, as he told Marcia, by making the old gentleman walk arm-and-arm with him the whole length of the village street the morning after his arrival. “And I never saw your honored father look as if he enjoyed a thing less,” added Bartley. “Well, what's the use? He couldn't help himself.” They had arrived on Friday evening, and, after spending Saturday in this social way, Bartley magnanimously went with Marcia to church. He was in good spirits, and he shook hands, right and left, as he came out of church. In the afternoon he had up the best team from the hotel stable, and took Marcia the Long Drive, which they had taken the day of their engagement. He could not be contented without pushing the perambulator out after tea, and making Marcia walk beside it, to let people see them with the baby.
He went away the next morning on an early train, after a parting which he made very cheery, and a promise to come down again as soon as he could manage it. Marcia watched him drive off toward the station in the hotel barge, and then she went upstairs to their room, where she had been so long a young girl, and where now their child lay sleeping. The little one seemed the least part of all the change that had taken place. In this room she used to sit and think of him; she used to fly up thither when he came unexpectedly, and order her hair or change a ribbon of her dress, that she might please him better; at these windows she used to sit and watch, and long for his coming; from these she saw him go by that day when she thought she should see him no more, and took heart of her despair to risk the wild chance that made him hers. There was a deadly, unsympathetic stillness in the room which seemed to leave to her all the responsibility for what she had done.
The days began to go by in a sunny, still, midsummer monotony. She pushed the baby out in its carriage, and saw the summer boarders walking or driving through the streets; she returned the visits that the neighbors paid her; indoors she helped her mother about the housework. An image of her maiden life reinstated itself. At times it seemed almost as if she had dreamed her marriage. When she looked at her baby in these moods, she thought she was dreaming yet. A young wife suddenly parted for the first time from her husband, in whose intense possession she has lost her individual existence, and devolving upon her old separate personality, must have strong fancies, strange sensations. Marcia's marriage had been full of such shocks and storms as might well have left her dazed in their entire cessation.
“She seems to be pretty well satisfied here,” said her father, one evening when she had gone upstairs with her sleeping baby in her arms.
“She seems to be pretty quiet,” her mother noncommittally assented.
“M-yes,” snarled the Squire, and he fell into a long revery, while Mrs. Gaylord went on crocheting the baby a bib, and the smell of the petunia-bed under the window came in through the mosquito netting. “M-yes,” he resumed, “I guess you're right. I guess it's only quiet. I guess she ain't any more likely to be satisfied than the rest of us.”
“I don't see why she shouldn't be,” said Mrs. Gaylord, resenting the compassion in the Squire's tone with that curious jealousy a wife feels for her husband's indulgence of their daughter. “She's had her way.”
“She's had her way, poor girl,—yes. But I don't know as it satisfies people to have their way, always.”
Doubtless Mrs. Gaylord saw that her husband wished to talk about Marcia, and must be helped to do so by a little perverseness. “I don't know but what most of folks would say 't she'd made out pretty well. I guess she's got a good provider.”
“She didn't need any provider,” said the Squire haughtily.
“No; but so long as she would have something, it's well enough that she should have a provider.” Mrs. Gaylord felt that this was reasoning, and she smoothed out so much of the bib as she had crocheted across her knees with an air of self-content. “You can't have everything in a husband,” she added, “and Marcia ought to know that, by this time.”
“I've no doubt she knows it,” said the Squire.
“Why, what makes you think she's disappointed any?” Mrs. Gaylord came plump to the question at last.
“Nothing she ever said,” returned her husband promptly. “She'd die, first. When I was up there I thought she talked about him too much to be feeling just right about him. It was Bartley this and Bartley that, the whole while. She was always wanting me to say that I thought she had done right to marry him. Ididsort of say it, at last,—to please her. But I kept thinking that, if she felt sure of it, she wouldn't want to talk it into me so. Now, she never mentions him at all, if she can help it. She writes to him every day, and she hears from him often enough,—postals, mostly; but she don't talk about Bartley, Bartley!” The Squire stretched his lips back from his teeth, and inhaled a long breath, as he rubbed his chin.
“You don't suppose anything's happened since you was up there,” said Mrs. Gaylord.
“Nothing but what's happened from the start.He'shappened. He keeps happening right along, I guess.”
Mrs. Gaylord found herself upon the point of experiencing a painful emotion of sympathy, but she saved herself by saying: “Well, Mr. Gaylord, I don't know as you've got anybody but yourself to thank for it all. You got him here, in the firstplace.” She took one of the kerosene lamps from the table, and went upstairs, leaving him to follow at his will.
Marcia sometimes went out to the Squire's office in the morning, carrying her baby with her, and propping her with law-books on a newspaper in the middle of the floor, while she dusted the shelves, or sat down for one of the desultory talks in the satisfactory silences which she had with her father.
He usually found her there when he came up from the post-office, with the morning mail in the top of his hat: the last evening's Events,—which Bartley had said must pass for a letter from him when he did not write,—and a letter or a postal card from him. She read these, and gave her lather any news or message that Bartley sent; and then she sat down at his table to answer them. But one morning, after she had been at home nearly a month, she received a letter for which she postponed Bartley's postal. “It's from Olive Halleck!” she said, with a glance at the handwriting on the envelope; and she tore it open, and ran it through. “Yes, and they'll come here, any time I let them know. They've been at Niagara, and they've come down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and they will be at North Conway the last of next week. Now, father, I want to do something for them!” she cried, feeling an American daughter's right to dispose of her father, and all his possessions, for the behoof of her friends at any time. “I want they should come to the house.”
“Well, I guess there won't be any trouble about that, if you think they can put up with our way of living.' He smiled at her over his spectacles.
“Our way of living! Put up with it! I should hope as much! They're just the kind of people that will put up with anything, because they've had everything. And because they're all as sweet and good as they can be. You don't know them, father, you don't half know them! Now, just get right away,”—she pushed him out of the chair he had taken at the table,—“and let me write to Bartley this instant. He's got to come when they're here, and I'll invite them to come over at once, before they get settled at North Conway.”
He gave his dry chuckle to see her so fired with pleasure, and he enjoyed the ardor with which she drove him up out of his chair, and dashed off her letters. This was her old way; he would have liked the prospect of the Hallecks coming, because it made his girl so happy, if for nothing else.
“Father, I will tell you about Ben Halleck,” she said, pounding her letter to Olive with the thick of her hand to make the envelope stick. “You know that lameness of his?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it came from his being thrown down by another boy when he was at school. He knew the boy that did it; and the boy must have known that Mr. Halleck knew it, but he never said a word to show that he was sorry, or did anything to make up for it He's a man now, and lives there in Boston, and Ben Halleck often meets him. He says that if the man can stand it he can. Don't you think that's grand? When I heard that, I made up my mind that I wanted Flavia to belong to Ben Halleck's church,—or the church he did belong to; he doesn't belong to any now!”
“He couldn't have got any damages for such a thing anyway,” the Squire said.
Marcia paid no heed to this legal opinion of the case. She took off her father's hat to put the letters into it, and, replacing it on his head, “Now don't you forget them, father,” she cried.
She gathered up her baby and hurried into the house, where she began her preparations for her guests.
The elder Miss Hallecks had announced with much love, through Olive, that they should not be able to come to Equity, and Ben was to bring Olive alone. Marcia decided that Ben should have the guest-chamber, and Olive should have her room; she and Bartley could take the little room in the L while their guests remained.
But when the Hallecks came, it appeared that Ben had engaged quarters for himself at the hotel, and no expostulation would prevail with him to come to Squire Gaylord's house.
“We have to humor him in such things, Mrs. Hubbard,” Olive explained, to Marcia's distress. “And most people get on very well without him.”
This explanation was of course given in Halleck's presence. His sister added, behind his back: “Ben has a perfectly morbid dread of giving trouble in a house. He won't let us do anything to make him comfortable at home, and the idea that you should attempt it drove him distracted. You mustn't mind it. I don't believe he'd have come if his bachelor freedom couldn't have been respected; and we both wanted to come Very much.”
The Hallecks arrived in the forenoon, and Bartley was due in the evening. But during the afternoon Marcia had a telegram saying that he could not come till two days later, and asking her to postpone the picnic she had planned. The Hallecks were only going to stay three days, and the suspicion that Bartley had delayed in order to leave himself as little time as possible with them rankled in her heart so that she could not keep it to herself when they met.
“Was that what made you give me such a cool reception?” he asked, with cynical good-nature. “Well, you're mistaken; I don't suppose I mind the Hallecks any more than they do me. I'll tell you why I stayed. Some people dropped down on Witherby, who were a little out of his line,—fashionable people that he had asked to let him know if they ever came to Boston; and when they did come and let him know, he didn't know what to do about it, and he called on me to help him out. I've been almost boarding with Witherby for the last three days; and I've been barouching round all over the moral vineyard with his friends: out to Mount Auburn and the Washington Elm, and Bunker Hill, and Brookline, and the Art Museum, and Lexington; we've been down the harbor, and we haven't left a monumental stone unturned. They were going north, and they came down here with me; and I got them to stop over a day for the picnic.”
“You got them to stop over for the picnic? Why, I don't want anybody but ourselves, Bartley! This spoils everything.”
“The Hallecks are not ourselves,” said Bartley. “And these are jolly people; they'll help to make it go off.”
“Who are they?” asked Marcia, with provisional self-control.
“Oh, some people that Witherby met in Portland at Willett's, who used to have the logging-camp out here.”
“That Montreal woman!” cried Marcia, with fatal divination.
Bartley laughed. “Yes, Mrs. Macallister and her husband. She's a regular case. She'll amuse you.”
Marcia's passionate eyes blazed. “She shall never come to my picnic in the world!”
“No?” Bartley looked at her in a certain way. “She shall come to mine, then. There will be two picnics. The more the merrier.”
Marcia gasped, as if she felt the clutch in which her husband had her tightening on her heart. She said that she could only carry her point against him at the cost of disgraceful division before the Hallecks, for which he would not care in the least. She moved her head a little from side to side, like one that breathes a stifling air. “Oh, let her come,” she said quietly, at last.
“Now you're talking business,” said Bartley. “I haven't forgotten the little snub Mrs. Macallister gave me, and you'll see me pay her off.”
Marcia made no answer, but went downstairs to put what face she could upon the matter to Olive, whom she had left alone in the parlor, while she ran up with Bartley immediately upon his arrival to demand an explanation of him. In her wrathful haste she had forgotten to kiss him, and she now remembered that he had not looked at the baby, which she had all the time had in her arms.
The picnic was to be in a pretty glen three or four miles north of the village, where there was shade on a bit of level green, and a spring bubbling out of a fern-hung bluff: from which you looked down the glen over a stretch of the river. Marcia had planned that they were to drive thither in a four-seated carryall, but the addition of Bartley's guests disarranged this.
“There's only one way,” said Mrs. Macallister, who had driven up with her husband from the hotel to the Squire's house in a buggy. “Mr. Halleck tells me he doesn't know how to drive, and my husband doesn't know the way. Mr. Hubbard must get in here with me, and you must take Mr. Macallister in your party.” She looked authoritatively at the others.
“First rate!” cried Bartley, climbing to the seat which Mr. Macallister left vacant. “We'll lead the way.”
Those who followed had difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight. Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after a word or two of gay banter, was off again.
They had taken possession of the picnic grounds, and Mrs. Macallister was disposing shawls for rugs and drapery, while Bartley, who had got the horse out, and tethered where he could graze, was pushing the buggy out of the way by the shafts, when the carryall came up.
“Don't we look quite domestic?” she asked of the arriving company, in her neat English tone, and her rising English inflection. “You know I like this,” she added, singling Halleck out for her remark, and making it as if it were brilliant. “I like being out of doors, don't you know. But there's one thing I don't like: we weren't able to get a drop of champagne at that ridiculous hotel. They told us they were not allowed to keep 'intoxicating liquors.' Now I call that jolly stupid, you know. I don't know whatever we shall do if you haven't brought something.”
“I believe this is a famous spring,” said Halleck.
“How droll you are! Spring, indeed!” cried Mrs. Macallister. “Isthatthe way you let your brother make game of people, Miss Halleck?” She directed a good deal of her rattle at Olive; she scarcely spoke to Marcia, but she was nevertheless furtively observant of her. Mr. Macallister had his rattle too, which, after trying it unsatisfactorily upon Marcia, he plied almost exclusively for Olive. He made puns; he asked conundrums; he had all the accomplishments which keep people going in a lively, mirthful, colonial society; and he had the idea that he must pay attentions and promote repartee. His wife and he played into each other's hands in theirjeux d'esprit; and kept Olive's inquiring Boston mind at work in the vain endeavor to account for and to place them socially. Bartley hung about Mrs. Macallister, and was nearly as obedient as her husband. He felt that the Hallecks disapproved his behavior, and that made him enjoy it; he was almost rudely negligent of Olive.
The composition of the party left Marcia and Halleck necessarily to each other, and she accepted this arrangement in a sort of passive seriousness; but Halleck saw that her thoughts wandered from her talk with him, and that her eyes were always turning with painful anxiety to Bartley. After their lunch, which left them with the whole afternoon before them, Marcia said, in a timid effort to resume her best leadership of the affair, “Bartley, don't you think they would like to see the view from the Devil's Backbone?”
“Would you like to see the view from the Devil's Backbone?” he asked in turn of Mrs. Macallister.
“Andwhatis the Devil's Backbone?” she inquired.
“It's a ridge of rocks on the bluff above here,” said Bartley, nodding his head vaguely towards the bank.
“Andhowdo you get to it?” asked Mrs. Macallister, pointing her pretty chin at him in lifting her head to look.
“Walk.”
“Thanks, then; I shall try to be satisfied with me own backbone,” said Mrs. Macallister, who had that freedom in alluding to her anatomy which marks the superior civilization of Great Britain and its colonial dependencies.
“Carry you,” suggested Bartley.
“I dare say you'd be very sure-footed; but I'd quite enough of donkeys in the hills at home.”
Bartley roared with the resolution of a man who will enjoy a joke at his own expense.
Marcia turned away, and referred her invitation, with a glance, to Olive.
“I don't believe Miss Halleck wants to go,” said Mr. Macallister.
“I couldn't,” said Olive, regretfully. “I've neither the feet nor the head for climbing over high rocky places.”
Marcia was about to sink down on the grass again, from which she had risen, in the hopes that her proposition would succeed, when Bartley called out: “Why don't you show Ben the Devil's Backbone? The view is worth seeing, Halleck.”
“Would you like to go?” asked Marcia, listlessly.
“Yes, I should, very much,” said Halleck, scrambling to his feet, “if it won't tire you too much?”
“Oh, no,” said Marcia, gently, and led the way. She kept ahead of him in the climb, as she easily could, and she answered briefly to all he said. When they arrived at the top, “There is the view,” she said coldly. She waved her hand toward the valley; she made a sound in her throat as if she would speak again, but her voice died in one broken sob.
Halleck stood with downcast eyes, and trembled. He durst not look at her, not for what he should see in her face, but for what she should see in his: the anguish of intelligence, the helpless pity. He beat the rock at his feet with the ferule of his stick, and could not lift his head again. When he did, she stood turned from him and drying her eyes on her handkerchief. Their looks met, and she trusted her self-betrayal to him without any attempt at excuse or explanation.
“I will send Hubbard up to help you down,” said Halleck.
“Well,” she answered, sadly.
He clambered down the side of the bluff, and Bartley started to his feet in guilty alarm when he saw him approach. “What's the matter?”
“Nothing. But I think you had better help Mrs. Hubbard down the bluff.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Macallister. “A panic! how interesting!”
Halleck did not respond. He threw himself on the grass, and left her to change or pursue the subject as she liked. Bartley showed moresavoir-fairewhen he came back with Marcia, after an absence long enough to let her remove the traces of her tears.
“Pretty rough on your game foot, Halleck. But Marcia had got it into her head that it wasn't safe to trust you to help her down, even after you had helped her up.”
“Ben,” said Olive, when they were seated in the train the next day, “whydidyou send Marcia's husband up there to her?” She had the effect of not having rested till she could ask him.
“She was crying,” he answered.
“What do you suppose could have been the matter?”
“What you do: she was miserable about his coquetting with that woman.”
“Yes. I could see that she hated terribly to have her come; and that she felt put down by her all the time. What kind of personisMrs. Macallister?”
“Oh, a fool,” replied Halleck. “All flirts are fools.”
“I think she's more wicked than foolish.”
“Oh, no, flirts are better than they seem,—perhaps because men are better than flirts think. But they make misery just the same.”
“Yes,” sighed Olive. “Poor Marcia, poor Marcia! But I suppose that, if it were not Mrs. Macallister, it would be some one else.”
“Given Bartley Hubbard,—yes.”
“And given Marcia. Well,—I don't like being mixed up with other people's unhappiness, Ben. It's dangerous.”
“I don't like it either. But you can't very well keep out of people's unhappiness in this world.”
“No,” assented Olive, ruefully.
The talk fell, and Halleck attempted to read a newspaper, while Olive looked out of the window. She presently turned to him. “Did you ever fancy any resemblance between Mrs. Hubbard and the photograph of that girl we used to joke about,—your lost love?”
“Yes,” said Halleck.
“What's become of it,—the photograph? I can't find it any more; I wanted to show it to her one day.”
“I destroyed it. I burnt it the first evening after I had met Mrs. Hubbard. It seemed to me that it wasn't right to keep it.”
“Why, you don't think it washerphotograph!”
“I think it was,” said Halleck. He took up his paper again, and read on till they left the cars.
That evening, when Halleck came to his sister's room to bid her good night, she threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his plain, common face, in which she saw a heavenly beauty.
“Ben, dear,” she said, “if you don't turn out the happiest man in the world, I shall say there's no use in being good!”
“Perhaps you'd better say that after all I wasn't good,” he suggested, with a melancholy smile.
“I shall know better,” she retorted.
“Why, what's the matter, now?”
“Nothing. I was only thinking. Good night!”
“Good night,” said Halleck. “You seem to think my room is better than my company, good as I am.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing in that breathless way which means weeping next, with women. Her eyes glistened.
“Well,” said Halleck, limping out of the room, “you're quite good-looking with your hair down, Olive.”
“All girls are,” she answered. She leaned out of her doorway to watch him as he limped down the corridor to his own room. There was something pathetic, something disappointed and weary in the movement of his figure, and when she shut her door, and ran back to her mirror, she could not see the good-looking girl there for her tears.