The Presidential canvas of the summer—which, followed upon these events in Bartley's career was not very active. Sometimes, in fact, it languished so much that people almost forgot it, and a good field was afforded the Events for the practice of independent journalism. To hold a course of strict impartiality, and yet come out on the winning side was a theory of independent journalism which Bartley illustrated with cynical enjoyment. He developed into something rather artistic the gift which he had always shown in his newspaper work for ironical persiflage. Witherby was not a man to feel this burlesque himself; but when it was pointed out to him by others, he came to Bartley in some alarm from its effect upon the fortunes of the paper. “We can't afford, Mr. Hubbard,” he said, with virtuous trepidation, “we can'taffordto make fun of our friends!”
Bartley laughed at Witherby's anxiety. “They're no more our friends than the other fellows are. We are independent journalists; and this way of treating the thing leaves us perfectly free hereafter to claim, just as we choose, that we were in fun or in earnest on any particular question if we're ever attacked. See?”
“I see,” said Witherby, with not wholly subdued misgiving. But after due time for conviction no man enjoyed Bartley's irony more than Witherby when once he had mastered an instance of it. Sometimes it happened that Bartley found him chuckling over a perfectly serious paragraph, but he did not mind that; he enjoyed Witherby's mistake even more than his appreciation.
In these days Bartley was in almost uninterrupted good humor, as he had always expected to be when he became fairly prosperous. He was at no time an unamiable fellow, as he saw it; he had his sulks, he had his moments of anger; but generally he felt good, and he had always believed, and he had promised Marcia, that when he got squarely on his legs he should feel good perpetually. This sensation he now agreeably realized; and he was also now in that position in which he had proposed to himself some little moral reforms. He was not much in the habit of taking stock; but no man wholly escapes the contingencies in which he is confronted with himself, and sees certain habits, traits, tendencies, which he would like to change for the sake of his peace of mind hereafter. To some souls these contingencies are full of anguish, of remorse for the past, of despair; but Bartley had never yet seen the time when he did not feel himself perfectly able to turn over a new leaf and blot the old one. There were not many things in his life which he really cared to have very different; but there were two or three shady little corners which he always intended to clean up. He had meant some time or other to have a religious belief of some sort, he did not much care what; since Marcia had taken to the Hallecks' church, he did not see why he should not go with her, though he had never yet done so. He was not quite sure whether he was always as candid with her as he might be, or as kind; though he maintained against this question that in all their quarrels it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. He had never been tipsy but once in his life, and he considered that he had repented and atoned for that enough, especially as nothing had ever come of it; but sometimes he thought he might be over-doing the beer; yes, he thought he must cut down on the tivoli; he was getting ridiculously fat. If ever he met Kinney again he should tell him that it was he and not Ricker who had appropriated his facts and he intended to make it up with Ricker somehow.
He had not found just the opportunity yet; but in the mean time he did not mind telling the real cause of their alienation to good fellows who could enjoy a joke. He had his following, though so many of his brother journalists had cooled toward him, and those of his following considered him as smart as chain-lightning and bound to rise. These young men and not very wise elders roared over Bartley's frank declaration of the situation Between himself and Ricker, and they contended that, if Ricker had taken the article for the Chronicle-Abstract, he ought to take the consequences. Bartley told them that, of course, he should explain the facts to Kinney; but that he meant to let Ricker enjoy his virtuous indignation awhile. Once, after a confidence of this kind at the club, where Ricker had refused to speak to him, he came away with a curious sense of moral decay. It did not pain him a great deal, but it certainly surprised him that now, with all these prosperous conditions, so favorable for cleaning up, he had so little disposition to clean up. He found himself quite willing to let the affair with Ricker go, and he suspected that he had been needlessly virtuous in his intentions concerning church-going and beer. As to Marcia, it appeared to him that he could not treat a woman of her disposition otherwise than as he did. At any rate, if he had not done everything he could to make her happy, she seemed to be getting along well enough, and was probably quite as happy as she deserved to be. They were getting on very quietly now; there had been no violent outbreak between them since the trouble about Kinney, and then she had practically confessed herself in the wrong, as Bartley looked at it. She had appeared contented with his explanation; there was what might be called a perfect business amity between them. If her life with him was no longer an expression of that intense devotion which she used to show him, it was more like what married life generally comes to, and he accepted her tractability and what seemed her common-sense view of their relations as greatly preferable. With his growth in flesh, Bartley liked peace more and more.
Marcia had consented to go down to Equity alone, that summer, for he had convinced her that during a heated political contest it would not do for him to be away from the paper. He promised to go down for her when she wished to come home; and it was easily arranged for her to travel as far as the Junction under Halleck's escort, when he went to join his sisters in the White Mountains. Bartley missed her and the baby at first. But he soon began to adjust himself with resignation to his solitude. They had determined to keep their maid over this summer, for they had so much trouble in replacing her the last time after their return; and Bartley said he should live very economically. It was quiet, and the woman kept the house cool and clean; she was a good cook, and when Bartley brought a man home to dinner she took an interest in serving it well. Bartley let her order the things from the grocer and butcher, for she knew what they were used to getting, and he had heard so much talk from Marcia about bills since he bought that Events stock that he was sick of the prices of things. There was no extravagance, and vet he seemed to live very much better after Marcia went. There is no doubt but he lived very much more at his ease. One little restriction after another fell away from him; he went and came with absolute freedom, not only without having to account for his movements, but without having a pang for not doing so. He had the sensation of stretching himself after a cramping posture; and he wrote Marcia the cheerfulest letters, charging her not to cut short her visit from anxiety on his account. He said that he was working hard, but hard work evidently agreed with him, for he was never better in his life. In this high content he maintained a feeling of loyalty by going to the Hallecks, where Mrs. Halleck often had him to tea in pity of his loneliness. They were dull company, certainly; but Marcia liked them, and the cooking was always good. Other evenings he went to the theatres, where there were amusing variety bills; and sometimes he passed the night at Nantasket, or took a run for a day to Newport; he always reported these excursions to Marcia, with expressions of regret that Equity was too far away to run down to for a day.
Marcia's letters were longer and more regular than his; but he could have forgiven some want of constancy for the sake of a less searching anxiety on her part. She was anxious not only for his welfare, which was natural and proper, but she was anxious about the housekeeping and the expenses, things Bartley could not afford to let trouble him, though he did what he could in a general way to quiet her mind. She wrote fully of the visit which Olive Halleck had paid her, but said that they had not gone about much, for Ben Halleck had only been able to come for a day. She was very well, and so was Flavia.
Bartley realized Flavia's existence with an effort, and for the rest this letter bored him. What could he care about Olive Halleck's coming, or Ben Halleck's staying away? All that he asked of Ben Halleck was a little extension of time when his interest fell due. The whole thing was disagreeable; and he resented what he considered Marcia's endeavor to clap the domestic harness on him again. His thoughts wandered to conditions, to contingencies, of which a man does not permit himself even to think without a degree of moral disintegration. In these ill-advised reveries he mused upon his life as it might have been if he had never met her, or if they had never met after her dismissal of him. As he recalled the facts, he was at that time in an angry and embittered mood, but he was in a mood of entire acquiescence; and the reconciliation had been of her own seeking. He could not blame her for it; she was very much in love with him, and he had been fond of her. In fact, he was still very fond of her; when he thought of little ways of hers, it filled him with tenderness. He did justice to her fine qualities, too: her generosity, her truthfulness, her entire loyalty to his best interests; he smiled to realize that he himself preferred his second-best interests, and in her absence he remembered that her virtues were tedious, and even painful at times. He had his doubts whether there was sufficient compensation in them. He sometimes questioned whether he had not made a great mistake to get married; he expected now to stick it through; but this doubt occurred to him. A moment came in which he asked himself, What if he had never come back to Marcia that night when she locked him out of her room? Might it not have been better for both of them? She would soon have reconciled herself to the irreparable; he even thought of her happy in a second marriage; and the thought did not enrage him; he generously wished Marcia well. He wished—he hardly knew what he wished. He wished nothing at all but to have his wife and child back again as soon as possible; and he put aside with a laugh the fancies which really found no such distinct formulation as I have given them; which were mere vague impulses, arrested mental tendencies, scraps of undirected revery. Their recurrence had nothing to do with what he felt to be his sane and waking state. But they recurred, and he even amused himself in turning them over.
One morning in September, not long before Marcia returned, Bartley found Witherby at the office waiting for him. Witherby wore a pensive face, which had the effect of being studied. “Good morning, Mr. Hubbard,” he said, and when Bartley answered, “Good morning,” cheerfully ignoring his mood, he added, “What is this I hear, Mr. Hubbard, about a personal misunderstanding between you and Mr. Ricker?”
“I'm sure I don't know,” said Bartley; “but I suppose that if you have heard anythingyouknow.”
“I have heard,” proceeded Witherby, a little dashed by Bartley's coolness, “that Mr. Ricker accuses you of having used material in that article you sold him which had been intrusted to you under the seal of confidence, and that you had left it to be inferred by the party concerned—that Mr. Ricker had written the article himself.”
“All right,” said Bartley.
“But, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby, struggling to rise into virtuous supremacy, “what am I to think of such a report?”
“I can't say; unless you should think that it wasn't your affair. That would be the easiest thing.”
“But Ican'tthink that, Mr. Hubbard! Such a report reflects through you upon the Events; it reflects uponme!” Bartley laughed. “I can't approve of such a thing. If you admit the report, it appears to me that you have—a—done a—a—wrong action, Mr. Hubbard.”
Bartley turned upon him with a curious look; at the same time he felt a pang, and there was a touch of real anguish in the sarcasm of his demand, “Have I fallen so low as to be rebuked byyou?”
“I—I don't know what you mean by such an expression as that, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby. “I don't know what I've done to forfeit your esteem,—to justify you in using such language to me.”
“I don't suppose you really do,” said Bartley. “Go on.”
“I have nothing more to say, Mr. Hubbard, except—except to add that this has given me a great blow,—agreatblow. I had begun to have my doubts before as to whether we were quite adapted to each other, and this has—increased them. I pass no judgment upon what you have done, but I will say that it has made me anxious and—a—unrestful. It has made me ask myself whether upon the whole we should not be happier apart. I don't say that we should; but I only feel that nine out of ten business men would consider you, in the position you occupy on the Events,—a—a—dangerous person.”
Bartley got up from his desk, and walked toward Witherby, with his hands in his pockets; he halted a few paces from him, and looked down on him with a sinister smile. “I don't think they'd consider you a dangerous person in any position.”
“May be not, may be not,” said Witherby, striving to be easy and dignified. In the effort he took up an open paper from the desk before him, and, lifting it between Bartley and himself, feigned to be reading it.
Bartley struck it out of his trembling hands. “You impudent old scoundrel! Do you pretend to be reading when I speak to you? For half a cent—”
Witherby, slipping and sliding in his swivel chair, contrived to get to his feet “No violence, Mr. Hubbard, no violencehere!”
“Violence!” laughed Bartley. “I should have totouchyou! Come! Don't be afraid! But don't you put on airs of any sort! I understand your game. You want, for some reason, to get rid of me, and you have seized the opportunity with a sharpness that does credit to your cunning. I don't condescend to deny this report,”—speaking in this lofty strain, Bartley had a momentary sensation of its being a despicable slander,—“but I see that as far as you are concerned it answers all the purposes of truth. You think that with the chance of having this thing exploited against me I won't expose your nefarious practices, and you can get rid of me more safely now than ever you could again. Well, you're right. I dare say you heard of this report a good while ago, and you've waited till you could fill my place without inconvenience to yourself. So I can go at once. Draw your check for all you owe me, and pay me back the money I put into your stock, and I'll clear out at once.” He went about putting together a few personal effects on his desk.
“I must protest against any allusion to nefarious practices, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby, “and I wish you to understand that I part from you without the slightest ill-feeling. I shall always have a high regard for your ability, and—and—your social qualities.” While he made these expressions he hastened to write two checks.
Bartley, who had paid no attention to what Witherby was saying, came up and took the checks. “This is all right,” he said of one. But looking at the other, he added, “Fifteen hundred dollars? Where is the dividend?”
“That is not due till the end of the month,” said Witherby. “If you withdraw your money now, you lose it.”
Bartley looked at the face to which Witherby did his best to give a high judicial expression. “You old thief!” he said good-humoredly, almost affectionately. “Ihavea mind to tweak your nose!” But he went out of the room without saying or doing anything more. He wondered a little at his own amiability; but with the decay of whatever was right-principled in him, he was aware of growing more and more incapable of indignation. Now, his flash of rage over, he was not at all discontented. With these checks in his pocket, with his youth, his health, and his practised hand, he could have faced the world, with a light heart, if he had not also had to face his wife. But when he thought of the inconvenience of explaining to her, of pacifying her anxiety, of clearing up her doubts on a thousand points, and of getting her simply to eat or sleep till he found something else to do, it dismayed him. “Good Lord!” he said to himself, “I wish I was dead—or some one.” That conclusion made him smile again.
He decided not to write to Marcia of the change in his affairs, but to take the chance of finding something better before she returned. There was very little time for him to turn round, and he was still without a place or any prospect when she came home. It had sufficed with his acquaintance when he said that he had left the Events because he could not get on with Witherby; but he was very much astonished when it seemed to suffice with her.
“Oh, well,” she said, “I am glad of it. You will do better by yourself; and I know you can earn just as much by writing on the different papers.”
Bartley knew better than this, but he said, “Yes, I shall not be in a hurry to take another engagement just yet. But, Marsh,” he added, “I was afraid you would blame me,—think I had been reckless, or at fault—”
“No,” she answered after a little pause, “I shall not do that any more. I have been thinking all these things over, while I was away from you, and I'm going to do differently, after this. I shall believe that you've acted for the best,—that you've not meant to do wrong in anything,—and I shall never question you or doubt you any more.”
“Isn't that giving me rather toomuchrope?” asked Bartley, with lightness that masked a vague alarm lest the old times of exaction should be coming back with the old times of devotion.
“No; I see where my mistake has always been. I've always asked too much, and expected too much, even when I didn't ask it. Now, I shall be satisfied with what you don't do, as well as what you do.”
“I shall try to live up to my privileges,” said Bartley, with a sigh of relief. He gave her a kiss, and then he unclasped Kinney's nugget from his watch-chain, and fastened it on the baby's necklace, which lay in a box Marcia had just taken from her trunk. She did not speak; but Bartley felt better to have the thing off him; Marcia's gentleness, the tinge of sadness in her tone, made him long to confess himself wrong in the whole matter, and justly punished by Ricker's contempt and Witherby's dismissal. But he did not believe that he could trust her to forgive him, and he felt himself unable to go through all that without the certainty of her forgiveness.
As she took the things out of her trunk, and laid them away in this drawer and that, she spoke of events in the village, and told who was dead, who was married, and who had gone away. “I stayed longer than I expected, a little, because father seemed to want me to. I don't think mother's so well as she used to be, I—I'm afraid she seems to be failing, somehow.”
Her voice dropped to a lower key, and Bartley said, “I'm sorry to hear that. I guess she isn't failing. But of course she's getting on, and every year makes a difference.”
“Yes, that must be it,” she answered, looking at a bundle of collars she had in her hand, as if absorbed in the question as to where she should put them.
Before they slept that night she asked, “Bartley, did you hear about Hannah Morrison?”
“No. What about her?”
“She's gone—gone away. The last time she was seen was in Portland. They don't know what's become of her. They say that Henry Bird is about heart-broken; but everybody knows she never cared for him. I hated to write to you about it.”
Bartley experienced so disagreeable a sensation that he was silent for a time. Then he gave a short, bitter laugh. “Well, that's what it was bound to come to, sooner or later, I suppose. It's a piece of good luck for Bird.”
Bartley went about picking up work from one paper and another, but not securing a basis on any. In that curious and unwholesome leniency which corrupt natures manifest, he and Witherby met at their next encounter on quite amicable terms. Bartley reported some meetings for the Events, and experienced no resentment when Witherby at the office introduced him to the gentleman with whom he had replaced him. Of course Bartley expected that Witherby would insinuate things to his disadvantage, but he did not mind that. He heard of something of the sort being done in Ricker's presence, and of Ricker's saying that in any question of honor and veracity between Witherby and Hubbard he should decide for Hubbard. Bartley was not very grateful for this generous defence; he thought that if Ricker had not been such an ass in the first place there would have been no trouble between them, and Witherby would not have had that handle against him.
He was enjoying himself very well, and he felt entitled to the comparative rest which had not been of his seeking. He wished that Halleck would come back, for he would like to ask his leave to put that money into some other enterprise. His credit was good, and he had not touched the money to pay any of his accumulated bills; he would have considered it dishonorable to do so. But it annoyed him to have the money lying idle. In his leisure he studied the stock market, and he believed that he had several points which were infallible. He put a few hundreds—two or three—of Halleck's money into a mining stock which was so low that itmustrise. In the mean time he tried a new kind of beer,—Norwegian beer, which he found a little lighter even than tivoli. It was more expensive, but it wasverylight, and it was essential to Bartley to drink the lightest beer he could find.
He stayed a good deal at home, now, for he had leisure, and it was a much more comfortable place since Marcia had ceased to question or reproach him. She did not interfere with some bachelor habits he had formed, in her absence, of sleeping far into the forenoon; he now occasionally did night-work on some of the morning papers, and the rest was necessary; he had his breakfast whenever he got up, as if he had been at a hotel. He wondered upon what new theory she was really treating him; but he had always been apt to accept what was comfortable in life without much question, and he did not wonder long. He was immensely good-natured now. In his frequent leisure he went out to walk with Marcia and Flavia, and sometimes he took the little girl alone. He even went to church with them one Sunday, and called at the Hallecks as often as Marcia liked. The young ladies had returned, but Ben Halleck was still away. It made Bartley smile to hear his wife talking of Halleck with his mother and sisters, and falling quite into the family way of regarding him as if he were somehow a saint and martyr.
Bartley was still dabbling in stocks with Halleck's money; some of it had lately gone to pay an assessment which had unexpectedly occurred in place of a dividend. He told Marcia that he was holding the money ready to return to Halleck when he came back, or to put it into some other enterprise where it would help to secure Bartley a new basis. They were now together more than they had been since the first days of their married life in Boston; but the perfect intimacy of those days was gone; he had his reserves, and she her preoccupations,—with the house, with the little girl, with her anxiety about her mother. Sometimes they sat a whole evening together, with almost nothing to say to each other, he reading and she sewing. After an evening of this sort, Bartley felt himself worse bored than if Marcia had spent it in taking him to task as she used to do. Once he looked at her over the top of his paper, and distinctly experienced that he was tired of the whole thing.
But the political canvass was growing more interesting now. It was almost the end of October, and the speech-making had become very lively. The Democrats were hopeful and the Republicans resolute, and both parties were active in getting out their whole strength, as the saying is, at such times. This was done not only by speech-making, but by long nocturnal processions of torch-lights; by day, as well as by night, drums throbbed and horns brayed, and the feverish excitement spread its contagion through the whole population. But it did not affect Bartley. He had cared nothing about the canvass from the beginning, having an equal contempt for the bloody shirt of the Republicans and the reform pretensions of the Democrats. The only thing that he took an interest in was the betting; he laid his wagers with so much apparent science and sagacity that he had a certain following of young men who bet as Hubbard did. Hubbard, they believed, had a long head; he disdained bets of hats, and of barrels of apples, and ordeals by wheelbarrow; he would bet only with people who could put up their money, and his followers honored him for it; when asked where he got his money, being out of place, and no longer instant to do work that fell in his way, they answered from a ready faith that he had made a good thing in mining stocks.
In her heart, Marcia probably did not share this faith. But she faithfully forbore to harass Bartley with her doubts, and on those evenings when he found her such dull company she was silent because if she spoke she must express the trouble in her mind. Women are more apt to theorize their husbands than men in their stupid self-absorption ever realize. When a man is married, his wife almost ceases to be exterior to his consciousness; she afflicts or consoles him like a condition of health or sickness; she is literally part of him in a spiritual sense, even when he is rather indifferent to her; but the most devoted wife has always a corner of her soul in which she thinks of her husband ashim; in which she philosophizes him wholly aloof from herself. In such an obscure fastness of her being, Marcia had meditated a great deal upon Bartley during her absence at Equity,—meditated painfully, and in her sort prayerfully, upon him. She perceived that he was not her young dream of him; and since it appeared to her that she could not forego that dream and live, she could but accuse herself of having somehow had a perverse influence upon him. She knew that she had never reproached him except for his good, but she saw too that she had always made him worse, and not better. She recurred to what he said the first night they arrived in Boston: “I believe that, if you have faith in me, I shall get along; and when you don't, I shall go to the bad.” She could reason to no other effect, than that hereafter, no matter what happened, she must show perfect faith in him by perfect patience. It was hard, far harder than she had thought. But she did forbear; she did use patience.
The election day came and went. Bartley remained out till the news of Tilden's success could no longer be doubted, and then came home jubilant. Marcia seemed not to understand. “I didn't know you cared so much for Tilden,” she said, quietly. “Mr. Halleck is for Hayes; and Ben Halleck was coming home to vote.”
“That's all right: a vote in Massachusetts makes no difference. I'm for Tilden, because I have the most money up on him. The success of that noble old reformer is worth seven hundred dollars to me in bets.” Bartley laughed, rubbed her cheeks with his chilly hands, and went down into the cellar for some beer. He could not have slept without that, in his excitement; but he was out very early the next morning, and in the raw damp of the rainy November day he received a more penetrating chill when he saw the bulletins at the newspaper offices intimating that a fair count might give the Republicans enough Southern States to elect Hayes. This appeared to Bartley the most impudent piece of political effrontery in the whole history of the country, and among those who went about denouncing Republican chicanery at the Democratic club-rooms, no one took a loftier tone of moral indignation than he. The thought that he might lose so much of Halleck's money through the machinations of a parcel of carpet-bagging tricksters filled him with a virtue at which he afterwards smiled when he found that people were declaring their bets off. “I laid a wager on the popular result, not on the decision of the Returning Boards,” he said in reclaiming his money from the referees. He had some difficulty in getting it back, but he had got it when he walked homeward at night, after having been out all day; and there now ensued in his soul a struggle as to what he should do with this money. He had it all except the three hundred he had ventured on the mining stock, which would eventually he worth everything he had paid for it. After his frightful escape from losing half of it on those bets, he had an intense longing to be rid of it, to give it back to Halleck, who never would ask him for it, and then to go home and tell Marcia everything, and throw himself on her mercy. Better poverty, better disgrace before Halleck and her, better her condemnation, than this life of temptation that he had been leading. He saw how hideous it was in the retrospect, and he shuddered; his good instincts awoke, and put forth their strength, such as it was; tears came into his eyes; he resolved to write to Kinney and exonerate Ricker, he resolved humbly to beg Ricker's pardon. He must leave Boston; but if Marcia would forgive him, he would go back with her to Equity, and take up the study of the law in her father's office again, and fulfil all her wishes. He would have a hard time to overcome the old man's prejudices, but he deserved a hard time, and he knew he should finally succeed. It would be bitter, returning to that stupid little town, and he imagined the intrusive conjecture and sarcastic comment that would attend his return; but he believed that he could live this down, and he trusted himself to laugh it down. He already saw himself there, settled in the Squire's office, reinstated in public opinion, a leading lawyer of the place, with Congress open before him whenever he chose to turn his face that way.
He had thought of going first to Halleck, and returning the money, but he was willing to give himself the encouragement of Marcia's pleasure, of her forgiveness and her praise in an affair that had its difficulties and would require all his manfulness. The maid met him at the door with little Flavia, and told him that Marcia had gone out to the Hallecks', but had left word that she would soon return, and that then they would have supper together. Her absence dashed his warm impulse, but he recovered himself, and took the little one from the maid. He lighted the gas in the parlor, and had a frolic with Flavia in kindling a fire in the grate, and making the room bright and cheerful. He played with the child and made her laugh; he already felt the pleasure of a good conscience, though with a faint nether ache in his heart which was perhaps only his wish to have the disagreeable preliminaries to his better life over as soon as possible. He drew two easy-chairs up at opposite corners of the hearth, and sat down in one, leaving the other for Marcia; he had Flavia standing on his knees, and clinging fast to his fingers, laughing and crowing while he danced her up and down, when he heard the front door open, and Marcia burst into the room.
She ran to him and plucked the child from him, and then went back as far as she could from him in the room, crying, “Givemethe child!” and facing him with the look he knew. Her eyes were dilated, and her visage white with the transport that had whirled her far beyond the reach of reason. The frail structure of his good resolutions dropped to ruin at the sight, but he mechanically rose and advanced upon her till she forbade him with a muffled shriek of “Don'ttouchme! So!” she went on, gasping and catching her breath, “it wasyou! I might have known it! I might have guessed it from the first!You! Wasthatthe reason why you didn't care to have me hurry home this summer? Was that—was that—” She choked, and convulsively pressed her face into the neck of the child, which began to cry.
Bartley closed the doors, and then, with his hands in his pockets, confronted her with a smile of wicked coolness. “Will you be good enough to tell me what you're talking about?”
“Do you pretend that you don't know? I met a woman at the bottom of the street just now. Do you know who?”
“No; but it's very dramatic. Go on!”
“It was Hannah Morrison! She reeled against me; and when I—such a fool as I was!—pitied her, because I was on my way home to you, and was thinking about you and loving you, and was so happy in it, and asked her how she came to that, shestruckme, and told me to—to—ask my—husband!”
The transport broke in tears; the denunciation had turned to entreaty in everything but words; but Bartley had hardened his heart now past all entreaty. The idiotic penitent that he had been a few moments ago, the soft, well-meaning dolt, was so far from him now as to be scarce within the reach of his contempt. He was going to have this thing over once for all; he would have no mercy upon himself or upon her; the Devil was in him, and uppermost in him, and the Devil is fierce and proud, and knows how to make many base emotions feel like a just self-respect. “And did you believe a woman like that?” he sneered.
“Do I believe a man like this?” she demanded, with a dying flash of her fury. “You—you don't dare to deny it.”
“Oh, no, I don't deny it. For one reason, it would be of no use. For all practical purposes, I admit it. What then?”
“What then?” she asked, bewildered. “Bartley; You don't mean it!”
“Yes, I do. I mean it. Idon'tdeny it. What then? What are you going to do about it?” She gazed at him in incredulous horror. “Come! I mean what I say. What will you do?”
“Oh, merciful God! what shall I do?” she prayed aloud.
“That's just what I'm curious to know. When you leaped in here, just now, you must have meant to do something, if I couldn't convince you that the woman was lying. Well, you see that I don't try. I give you leave to believe whatever she said. What then?”
“Bartley!” she besought him in her despair. “Do you drive me from you?”
“Oh, no, certainly not. That isn't my way. You have driven me from you, and I might claim the right to retaliate, but I don't. I've no expectation that you'll go away, and I want to see what else you'll do. You would have me, before we were married; you were tolerably shameless in getting me; when your jealous temper made you throw me away, you couldn't live till you got me back again; you ran after me. Well, I suppose you've learnt wisdom, now. At least you won't trythatgame again. But whatwillyou do?” He looked at her smiling, while he dealt her these stabs one by one.
She set down the child, and went out to the entry where its hat and cloak hung. She had not taken off her own things, and now she began to put on the little one's garments with shaking hands, kneeling before it. “I will never live with you again, Bartley,” she said.
“Very well. I doubt it, as far as you're concerned; but if you go away now, you certainlywon'tlive with me again, for I shall not let you come back. Understand that.”
Each had most need of the other's mercy, but neither would have mercy.
“It isn't for what you won't deny. I don't believe that. It's for what you've said now.” She could not make the buttons and the button-holes of the child's sack meet with her quivering fingers; he actually stooped down and buttoned the little garment for her, as if they had been going to take the child out for a walk between them. She caught it up in her arms, and, sobbing “Good by, Bartley!” ran out of the room.
“Recollect that if you go, you don't come back,” he said. The outer door crashing to behind her was his answer.
He sat down to think, before the fire he had built for her. It was blazing brightly now, and the whole room had a hideous cosiness. He could not think, he must act. He went up to their room, where the gas was burning low, as if she had lighted it and then frugally turned it down as her wont was. He did not know what his purpose was, but it developed itself. He began to pack his things in a travelling-bag which he took out of the closet, and which he had bought for her when she set out for Equity in the summer; it had the perfume of her dresses yet.
When this was finished, he went down stairs again and being now strangely hungry he made a meal of such things as he found set out on the tea-table. Then he went over the papers in his secretary; he burnt some of them, and put others into his bag.
After all this was done he sat down by the fire again, and gave Marcia a quarter of an hour longer in which to return. He did not know whether he was afraid that she would or would not come. But when the time ended, he took up his bag and went out of the house. It began to rain, and he went back for an umbrella: he gave her that one chance more, and he ran up into their room. But she had not come back. He went out again, and hurried away through the rain to the Albany Depot, where he bought a ticket for Chicago. There was as yet nothing definite in his purpose, beyond the fact that he was to be rid of her: whether for a long or short time, or forever, he did not yet know; whether he meant ever to communicate with her, or seek or suffer a reconciliation, the locomotive that leaped westward into the dark with him knew as well as he.
Yet all the mute, obscure forces of habit, which are doubtless the strongest forces in human nature, were dragging him back to her. Because their lives had been united so long, it seemed impossible to sever them, though their union had been so full of misery and discord; the custom of marriage was so subtile and so pervasive, that his heart demanded her sympathy for what he was suffering in abandoning her. The solitude into which he had plunged stretched before him so vast, so sterile and hopeless, that he had not the courage to realize it; he insensibly began to give it limits: he would return after so many months, weeks, days.
He passed twenty-four hours on the train, and left it at Cleveland for the half-hour it stopped for supper. But he could not eat; he had to own to himself that he was beaten, and that he must return, or throw himself into the lake. He ran hastily to the baggage-car, and effected the removal of his bag; then he went to the ticket-office, and waited at the end of a long queue for his turn at the window. His turn came at last, and he confronted the nervous and impatient ticket-agent, without speaking.
“Well, sir, what do you want?” demanded the agent. Then, with rising temper, “What is it? Are you deaf? Are you dumb? You can't expect to stand there all night!”
The policeman outside the rail laid his hand on Bartley's shoulder: “Move on, my friend.”
He obeyed, and reeled away in a fashion that confirmed the policeman's suspicions. He searched his pockets again and again; but his porte-monnaie was in none of them. It had been stolen, and Halleck's money with the rest. Now he could not return; nothing remained for him but the ruin he had chosen.
Halleck prolonged his summer vacation beyond the end of October. He had been in town from time to time and then had set off again on some new absence; he was so restless and so far from well during the last of these flying visits, that the old people were glad when he wrote them that he should stay as long as the fine weather continued. He spoke of an interesting man whom he had met at the mountain resort where he was staying; a Spanish-American, attached to one of the Legations at Washington, who had a scheme for Americanizing popular education in his own country. “He has made a regular set at me,” Halleck wrote, “and if I had not fooled away so much time already on law and on leather, I should like to fool away a little more on such a cause as this.” He did not mention the matter again in his letters; but the first night after his return, when they all sat together in the comfort of having him at home again, he asked his father, “What should you think of my going to South America?”
The old man started up from the pleasant after-supper drowse into which he was suffering himself to fall, content with Halleck's presence, and willing to leave the talk to the women folk. “I don't know what you mean, Ben?”
“I suppose it's my having the matter so much in mind that makes me feel as if we had talked it over. I mentioned it in one of my letters.”
“Yes,” returned his father; “but I presumed you were joking.”
Halleck frowned impatiently; he would not meet the gaze of his mother and sisters, but he addressed himself again to his father. “I don't know that I was in earnest.” His mother dropped her eyes to her mending, with a faint sigh of relief. “But I can't say,” he added, “that I was joking, exactly. The man himself was very serious about it.” He stopped, apparently to govern an irritable impulse, and then he went on to set the project of his Spanish-American acquaintance before them, explaining it in detail.
At the end, “That's good,” said his father, “but why needyouhave gone, Ben?”
The question seemed to vex Halleck; he did not answer at once. His mother could not bear to see him crossed, and she came to his help against herself and his father, since it was only supposing the case. “I presume,” she said, “that we could have looked at it as a missionary work.”
“It isn't a missionary work, mother,” answered Halleck, severely, “in any sense that you mean. I should go down there to teach, and I should be paid for it. And I want to say at once that they have no yellow-fever nor earthquakes, and that they have not had a revolution for six years. The country's perfectly safe every way, and so wholesome that it will be a good thing for me. But I shouldn't expect to convert anybody.”
“Of course not, Ben,” said his mother, soothingly.
“I hope you wouldn't object to it if itwerea missionary work,” said one of the elder sisters.
“No, Anna,” returned Ben.
“I merely wanted to know,” said Anna.
“Then I hope you're satisfied, Anna,” Olive cut in. “Ben won't refuse to convert the Uruguayans if they apply in a proper spirit.”
“I think Anna had a right to ask,” said Miss Louisa, the eldest.
“Oh, undoubtedly, Miss Halleck,” said Olive. “I like to see Ben reproved for misbehavior to his mother, myself.”
Her father laughed at Olive's prompt defence. “Well, it's a cause that we've all got to respect; but I don't see whyyoushould go, Ben, as I said before. It would do very well for some young fellow who had no settled prospects, but you've got your duties here. I presume you looked at it in that light. As you said in your letter, you've fooled away so much time on leather and law—”
“I shall never amount to anything in the law!” Ben broke out. His mother looked at him in anxiety; his father kept a steady smile on his face; Olive sat alert for any chance that offered to put down her elder sisters, who drew in their breath, and grew silently a little primmer. “I'm not well—”
“Oh, I know you're not, dear,” interrupted his mother, glad of another chance to abet him.
“I'm not strong enough to go on with the line of work I've marked out, and I feel that I'm throwing away the feeble powers I have.”
His father answered with less surprise than Halleck had evidently expected, for he had thrown out his words with a sort of defiance; probably the old man had watched him closely enough to surmise that it might come to this with him at last. At any rate, he was able to say, without seeming to assent too readily, “Well, well, give up the law, then, and come back into leather, as you call it. Or take up something else. We don't wish to make anything a burden to you; but take up some useful work at home. There are plenty of things to be done.”
“Not for me,” said Halleck, gloomily.
“Oh, yes, there are,” said the old man.
“I see you are not willing to have me go,” said Halleck, rising in uncontrollable irritation. “But I wish you wouldn't all take this tone with me!”
“We haven't taken any tone with you, Ben,” said his mother, with pleading tenderness.
“I think Anna has decidedly taken a tone,” said Olive.
Anna did not retort, but “What tone?” demanded Louisa, in her behalf.
“Hush, children,” said their mother.
“Well, well,” suggested his father to Ben. “Think it over, think it over. There's no hurry.”
“I've thought it over; thereishurry,” retorted Halleck. “If I go, I must go at once.”
His mother arrested her thread, half drawn through the seam, letting her hand drop, while she glanced at him.
“It isn't so much a question of your giving up the law, Ben, as of your giving up your family and going so far away from us all,” said his father. “That's what I shouldn't like.”
“I don't like that, either. But I can't help it.” He added, “Of course, mother, I shall not go without your full and free consent. You and father must settle it between you.” He fetched a quick, worried sigh as he put his hand on the door.
“Ben isn't himself at all,” said Mrs. Halleck, with tears in her eyes, after he had left the room.
“No,” said her husband. “He's restless. He'll get over this idea in a few days.” He urged this hope against his wife's despair, and argued himself into low spirits.
“I don't believe but what itwouldbe the best thing for his health, may be,” said Mrs. Halleck, at the end.
“I've always had my doubts whether he would ever come to anything in the law,” said the father.
The elder sisters discussed Halleck's project apart between themselves, as their wont was with any family interest, and they bent over a map of South America, so as to hide what they were doing from their mother.
Olive had left the room by another door, and she intercepted Halleck before he reached his own.
“What is the matter, Ben?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” he answered, coldly. But he added, “Come in, Olive.”
She followed him, and hovered near after he turned up the gas.
“I can't stand it here, I must go,” he said, turning a dull, weary look upon her.
“Who was at the Elm House that you knew this last time?” she asked, quickly.
“Laura Dixmore isn't driving me away, if you mean that,” replied Halleck.
“Icouldn'tbelieve it was she! I should have despised you if it was. But I shall hate her, whoever it was.”
Halleck sat down before his table, and his sister sank upon the corner of a chair near it, and looked wistfully at him. “I know there is some one!”
“If you think I've been fool enough to offer myself to any one, Olive, you're very much mistaken.”
“Oh, it needn't have come to that,” said Olive, with indignant pity.
“My life's a failure here,” cried Halleck, moving his head uneasily from side to side. “I feel somehow as if I could go out there and pick up the time I've lost. Great Heaven!” he cried, “if I were only running away from some innocent young girl's rejection, what a happy man I should be!”
“It's some horrid married thing, then, that's been flirting with you!”
He gave a forlorn laugh. “I'd almost confess it to please you, Olive. But I'd prefer to get out of the matter without lying, if I could. Why need you suppose any reason but the sufficient one I've given?—Don't afflict me! don't imagine things about me, don't make a mystery of me! I've been blunt and awkward, and I've bungled the business with father and mother; but I want to get away because I'm a miserable fraud here, and I think I might rub on a good while there before I found myself out again.”
“Ben,” demanded Olive, regardless of his words, “what have you been doing?”
“The old story,—nothing.”
“Is that true, Ben?”
“You used to be satisfied with asking once, Olive.”
“Youhaven'tbeen so wicked, so careless, as to get some poor creature in love with, you, and then want to run away from the misery you've made?”
“I suppose if I look it there's no use denying it,” said Halleck, letting his sad eyes meet hers, and smiling drearily. “You insist upon having a lady in the case?”
“Yes. But I see you won't tell me anything; and Iwon'tafflict you. Only I'm afraid it's just some silly thing, that you've got to brooding over, and that you'll let drive you away.”
“Well, you have the comfort of reflecting that I can't get away, whatever the pressure is.”
“You know better than that, Ben; and so do I. You know that, if you haven't got father and mother's consent already, it's only because you haven't had the heart to ask for it. As far as that's concerned, you're gone already. But I hope you won't go without thinking it over, as father says,—and talking it over. I hate to have you seem unsteady and fickle-minded, when I know you're not; and I'm going to set myself against this project till I know what's driving you from us,—or till I'm sure that it's something worth while. You needn't expect that I shall help to make it easy for you; I shall help to make it hard.”
Her loving looks belied her threats; if the others could not resist Ben when any sort of desire showed itself through his habitual listlessness, how could she, who understood him best and sympathized with him most? “There was something I was going to talk to you about, to-night, if you hadn't scared us all with this ridiculous scheme, and ask you whether you couldn't do something.” She seemed to suggest the change of interest with the hope of winning his thoughts away from the direction they had taken; but he listened apathetically, and left her to go further or not as she chose. “I think,” she added abruptly, “that some trouble is hanging over those wretched Hubbards.”
“Some new one?” asked Halleck, with sad sarcasm, turning his eyes towards her, as if with the resolution of facing her.
“You know he's left his place on that newspaper.”
“Yes, I heard that when I was at home before.”
“There are some very disagreeable stories about it. They say he was turned away by Mr. Witherby for behaving badly,—for printing something he oughtn't to have done.”
“That was to have been expected,” said Halleck.
“He hasn't found any other place, and Marcia says he gets very little work to do. He must be running into debt, terribly. I feel very anxious about them. I don't know what they're living on.”
“Probably on some money I lent him,” said Halleck, quietly. “I lent him fifteen hundred in the spring. It ought to make him quite comfortable for the present.”
“Oh, Ben! Why did you lend him money? You might have known he wouldn't do any good with it.”
Halleck explained how and why the loan had been made, and added: “If he's supporting his family with it, he's doing some good. I lent it to him for her sake.”
Halleck looked hardily into his sister's face, but he dropped his eyes when she answered, simply: “Yes, of course. But I don't believe she knows anything about it; and I'm glad of it: it would only add to her trouble. She worships you, Ben!”
“Does she?”
“She seems to think you are perfect, and she never comes here but she asks when you're to be home. I suppose she thinks you have a good influence on that miserable husband of hers. He's going from bad to worse, I guess. Father heard that he is betting on the election. That's what he's doing with your money.”
“It would be somebody else's money if it wasn't mine,” said Halleck. “Bartley Hubbard must live, and he must have the little excitements that make life agreeable.”
“Poor thing!” sighed Olive, “I don't know what she would do if she heard that you were going away. To hear her talk, you would think she had been counting the days and hours till you got back. It's ridiculous, the way she goes on with mother; asking everything about you, as if she expected to make Bartley Hubbard over again on your pattern. I should hate to have anybody think me such a saint as she does you. But there isn't much danger, thank goodness! I could laugh, sometimes, at the way she questions us all about you, and is so delighted when she finds that you and that wretch have anything in common. But it's all too miserably sad. She certainlyisthe most single-hearted creature alive,” continued Olive, reflectively. “Sometimes shescaresme with her innocence. I don't believe that even her jealousy ever suggested a wicked idea to her: she's furious because she feels the injustice of giving so much more than he does. She hasn't really a thought for anybody else: I do believe that if she were free to choose from now till doomsday she would always choose Bartley Hubbard, bad as she knows him to be. And if she were a widow, and anybody else proposed to her, she would be utterly shocked and astonished.”
“Very likely,” said Halleck, absently.
“I feel very unhappy about her,” Olive resumed. “I know that she's anxious and troubled all the time.Can'tyou do something, Ben? Have a talk with that disgusting thing, and see if you can't put him straight again, somehow?”
“No!” exclaimed Halleck, bursting violently from his abstraction. “I shall have nothing to do with them! Let him go his own way and the sooner he goes to the—I won't interfere,—I can't, I mustn't! I wonder at you, Olive!” He pushed away from the table, and went limping about the room, searching here and there for his hat and stick, which were on the desk where he had put them, in plain view. As he laid hand on them at last, he met his sister's astonished eyes. “If I interfered, I should not interfere because I cared forhimat all!” he cried.
“Of course not,” said Olive. “But I don't see anything to make youwonderat me about that.”
“It would be because I cared for her—”
“Certainly! You didn't suppose I expected you to interfere from any other motive?”
He stood looking at her in stupefaction, with his hand on his hat and stick, like a man who doubts whether he has heard aright. Presently a shiver passed over him, another light came into his eyes, and he said quietly, “I'm going out to see Atherton.”
“To-night?” said his sister, accepting provisionally, as women do, the apparent change of subject. “Don't go to-night, Ben! You're too tired.”
“I'm not tired. I intended to see him to-night, at any rate. I want to talk over this South American scheme with him.” He put on his hat, and moved quickly toward the door.
“Ask him about the Hubbards,” said Olive. “Perhaps he can tell you something.”
“I don't want to know anything. I shall ask him nothing.”
She slipped between him and the door. “Ben, you haven't heard anything against poor Marcia, have you?”
“No!”
“You don't think she's to blame in any way for his going wrong, do you?
“How could I?”
“Then I don't understand why you won't do anything to help her.”
He looked at her again, and opened his lips to speak once, but closed them before he said, “I've got my own affairs to worry me. Isn't that reason enough for not interfering in theirs?”
“Not for you, Ben.”
“Then I don't choose to mix myself up in other people's misery. I don't like it, as you once said.”
“But you can't help it sometimes, asyousaid.”
“I can this time, Olive. Don't you see,—” he began.
“I see there's something you won't tell me. But I shall find it out.” She threatened him half playfully.
“I wish you could,” he answered. “Then perhaps you'd let me know.” She opened the door for him now, and as he passed out he said gently, “Iamtired, but I sha'n't begin to rest till I have had this talk with Atherton. I had better go.”
“Yes,” Olive assented, “you'd better.” She added in banter, “You're altogether too mysterious to be of much comfort at home.”
The family heard him close the outside door behind him after Olive came back to them, and she explained, “He's gone out to talk it over with Mr. Atherton.”
His father gave a laugh of relief. “Well, if he leaves it to Atherton, I guess we needn't worry about it.”
“The child isn't at all well,” said his mother.