The Quality of Mercy Part 22

"Well, I'm glad you do," said Putney, as if it were a favor.

When he reached home, his wife asked, "Where in the world have you been, Ralph?"

"Oh, just philandering round in the dark a little with Adeline Northwick."

"Ralph, what _do_ you mean?"

He told her, and they were moved and amused together at the strange phase their relation to the Northwicks had taken. "To think of her coming to you, of all people in the world, for advice in her trouble!"

"Yes," said Putney. "But I was always a great friend of her father's, you know, Ellen."

"Ralph!"

"Oh. I may have spent my whole natural life in denouncing him as demoralization incarnate, and a curse to the community, but I always _liked_ him, Ellen. Yes, I loved J. Milton, and I was merely waiting for him to prove himself a first-cla.s.s scoundrel, to find out just how _much_ I loved him. I've no doubt but if we could have him among us again, in the attractive garb of the State's-prison inmates, I should be hand and glove with brother Northwick."

XXIV.

Adeline's reasons for going to Putney in their trouble had to avail with Suzette against the prejudice they had always felt towards him. In the tangible and immediate pressure that now came upon them they were glad to be guided by his counsel; they both believed it was dictated by a knowledge of law and a respect for justice, and by no regard for them.

They had a comfort in it for this reason, and they freely relied upon it, as in some sort the advice of an honest and faithful enemy. They remembered that the last evening he was with them, their father had spoken leniently of Putney's infirmity, and admiringly of his wasted ability. Now each step they took was at his suggestion. They left the great house before the creditors were put in possession of the personal property, and went to live in the porter's lodge at the gate of the avenue, which they furnished with the few things they could claim for their own out of their former belongings, and from the ready money Suzette had remaining in her name at the bank. They abandoned everything of value in the house they had left, even to their richer dresses and their jewels: they preferred to do this, and Putney approved; he saw that it saved them more than it cost them in their helpless pride.

The Newtons continued in their quarters unmolested; the furniture was theirs and the building belonged to the Northwick girls, as the Newtons called them. Mrs. Newton went every day to help them to get going in their new place, and Elbridge and she lived there for a few weeks with them, till they said they should not be afraid to stay alone. He stood guard over their rights, as far as he could ascertain them in the spoliation that had to come. He locked the avenue gate against the approach of those who came to the a.s.signee's sale, and made them enter and take away their purchases by the farm road; and in all lawful ways he rendered himself obstructive and inconvenient.

His deference to the law was paid entirely through Putney, whose smartness inspired Elbridge with a respect he felt for no other virtue in man. Putney arranged with him to take the Northwick place and manage it on shares for the Northwick girls; he got for him two of the old horses which Elbridge wanted for his work, and one of the cheaper cows.

The rest of the stock was sold to gentleman farmers round about, who had fancies for costly cattle: the horses, good, bad and indifferent, were sent to a sale-stable in Boston. The greenhouses were stripped of all that was valuable in them, and nothing was left upon the place, of its former equipment, except the few farm implements, a cart or two, and an ancient carryall that Putney bid off for Newton's use.

Then, when all was finished, he advertised the house to let for a term of years, and failing a permanent tenant before the season opened, he rented it to an adventurous landlady, who proposed to fill it with summer boarders, and who engaged to pay a rental for it monthly, in advance, that would enable the Northwick girls to live on, in the porter's lodge, without fear of want. For the future, Putney imagined a scheme for selling off some of the land next the villas of South Hatboro', in lots to suit purchasers. That summer sojourn had languished several years in uncertainty of its own fortunes; but now, by a caprice of the fas.h.i.+on which is sending people more and more to the country for the spring and fall months, it was looking up decidedly. Property had so rapidly appreciated there, that Putney thought of asking so much a foot for the Northwick lands, instead of offering it by the acre.

In proposing to become a land operator, in behalf of his clients, he had to reconcile his practice with theories he had held concerning unearned land-values; and he justified himself to his crony, Dr. Morrell, on the ground that these might be justly taken from such rich and idle people as wanted to spend the spring and fall at South Hatboro'. The more land at a high price you could get into the hands of the cla.s.s South Hatboro'

was now attracting, and make them pay the bulk of the town tax, the better for the land that working men wanted to get a living on. In helping the Northwick girls to keep all they could out of the clutches of their father's creditors, he held that he was only defending their rights; and any fight against a corporation was a kind of holy war. He professed to be getting on very comfortably with his conscience, and he promised that he would not let it worry other people. To Mr. Gerrish he made excuses for taking charge of the affairs of two friendless women, when he ought to have joined Gerrish in punis.h.i.+ng them for their father's sins, as any respectable man would. He asked Gerrish to consider the sort of fellow he had always been, drinking up his own substance, while Gerrish was thriftily devouring other people's houses, and begged him to make allowance for him.

The anomalous relation he held to the Northwicks afforded him so much excitement and enjoyment, that he pa.s.sed his devil's dividend, as he called his quarterly spree. He kept straight longer than his fellow citizens had known him to do for many years. But Putney was one of those men who could not be credited by people generally with the highest motives. He too often made a mock of what people generally regarded as the highest motives; he puzzled and affronted them; and as none of his most intimate friends could claim that he was respectable in the ordinary sense of the word, people generally attributed interested motives, or at least cynical motives, to him. Adeline Northwick profited by a call she made upon Dr. Morrell for advice about her dyspepsia, to sound him in regard to Putney's management of her affairs; and if the doctor's powders had not so distinctly done her good, she might not have been able to rely upon the a.s.surance he gave her, that Putney was acting wisely and most disinterestedly toward her and her sister.

"He has such a strange way of talking, sometimes," she said.

But she clung to Putney, and relied upon him in everything, not so much because she implicitly trusted him, as because she knew no one else to trust. The kindness that Mr. Hilary had shown for them in the first of their trouble, had, of course, become impossible to both the sisters. He had, in fact, necessarily ceased to offer it directly, and Sue had steadily rejected all the overtures Louise made her since they last met.

Louise wanted to come again to see her; but Sue evaded her proposals; at last she would not answer her letters; and their friends.h.i.+p outwardly ceased. Louise did not blame her; she accounted for her, and pitied and forgave her; she said it was what she herself would do in Sue's place, but probably if she had continued herself, she would not have done what Sue did, even in Sue's place. She remembered Sue with a tender constancy when she could no longer openly approach her without hurting more than she helped; and before the day of the a.s.signee's sale came, she thought out a scheme which Wade carried into effect with Putney's help. Those things of their own that the sisters had meant to sacrifice, were bidden off, and restored to them in such a way that it was not possible for them to refuse to take back the dresses, the jewels, the particular pieces of furniture which Louise a.s.sociated with them.

Each of the sisters dealt with the event in her sort; Adeline simply exulted in getting her things again; Sue gave all hers into Adeline's keeping, and bade her never let her see them.

PART SECOND.

I.

Northwick kept up the mental juggle he had used in getting himself away from Hatboro', and as far as Ponkwa.s.set Junction he made believe that he was going to leave the main line, and take the branch road to the mills.

He had a thousand-mile ticket, and he had no baggage check to define his destination; he could step off and get on where he pleased. At first he let the conductor take up the mileage on his ticket as far as Ponkwa.s.set Junction; but when he got there he kept on with the train, northward, in the pretence that he was going on as far as Willoughby Junction, to look after some business of his quarries. He verified his pretence by speaking of it to the conductor who knew him; he was not a person to take conductors into his confidence, but he felt obliged to account to the man for his apparent change of mind. He was at some trouble to make it seem casual and insignificant, and he wondered if the conductor meant to insinuate anything by saying in return that it was a pretty brisk day to be knocking round much in a stone quarry. Northwick smiled in saying, "It was, rather;" he watched the conductor to see if he should betray any particular interest in the matter when he left him. But the conductor went on punching the pa.s.sengers' tickets, and seemed to forget Northwick as soon as he left him. At the next station, Northwick followed him out on the platform to find if he sent any telegram off.

When he had once given way to this anxiety, which he knew to be perfectly stupid and futile, he had to yield to it at every station. He took his bag with him each time he left the car, and he meant not to go back if he saw the conductor telegraphing. It was intensely cold, and in spite of the fierce heat of the stove at the end of the car, the frost gathered thickly on the windows. The train creaked, when it stopped and started, as if it were crunching along on a bed of dry snow; the noises of the wheels seemed at times to lose their rhythmical cadence, and then Northwick held his breath for fear one of them might be broken. He had a dread of accident such as he had never felt before; his life had never seemed so valuable to him as now; he reflected that it was so because it was to be devoted now to retrieving the past in a new field under new conditions. His life, in this view, was not his own; it was a precious trust which he held for others, first for his children, and then for those whom he was finally to save from loss by the miscarriage of his enterprises. He justified himself anew in what he was intending; it presented itself as a piece of self-sacrifice, a sacred duty which he was bound to fulfil. All the time he knew that he was a defaulter who had used the money in his charge, and tampered with the record so as to cover up the fact, and that he was now absconding, and was carrying off a large sum of money that was not morally his. At one of the stations where he got out to see whether the conductor was telegraphing, he noticed the conductor eyeing his bag curiously; and he knew that he believed there was money in it. Northwick felt a thrill of gratified cunning in realizing how mistaken the conductor was; but he was willing the fellow should think he was carrying up money to pay off his quarry hands.

He was impatient to reach the Junction, where this conductor would leave the train, and it would continue northward in the charge of another man; he seldom went beyond Willoughby on that road, and the new conductor would hardly know him. He meant to go on to Blackbrook Junction, and take the New England Central there for Montreal; but he saw the conductor go to the telegraph office at Willoughby Junction, and it suddenly occurred to him that he must not go to Montreal by a route so direct that any absconding defaulter would be expected to take it. He had not the least proof that the conductor's dispatch had anything to do with him; but he could not help acting as if it had. He said good-day to the conductor as he pa.s.sed him, and he went out of the station, with his bag, as if he were going up into the town. He watched till he saw the conductor go off in another direction, and then he came back, and got aboard the train just as it was drawing out of the station. He knew that he was not shadowed in any way, but his consciousness of stealth was such that he felt as if he were followed, and that he must act so as to baffle and mislead pursuit.

At Blackbrook, where the train stopped for dinner, he was aware that no one knew him, and he ate hungrily; he felt strengthened and encouraged, and he began to react against the terror that had possessed him. He perceived that it was senseless and ridiculous; that the conductor could not possibly have been telegraphing about him from Willoughby, and there was as yet no suspicion abroad concerning him; he might go freely anywhere, by any road.

But he had now let the New England Central train leave without him, and it only remained for him to push on to Wellwater, where he hoped to connect with the Boston train for Montreal, on the Union and Dominion road. He remembered that this train divided at Wellwater, and certain cars ran direct to Quebec, up through Sherbrooke and Lennoxville. He meant to go from Montreal to Quebec, but now he questioned whether he had better not go straight on from Wellwater; when he recalled the long, all-night ride without a sleeper, which he had once made on that route many summers before, he said to himself that in his shaken condition, he must not run the risk of such a hards.h.i.+p. If he were to get sick from it, or die, it would be as bad as a railroad accident. The word now made him think of what Hilary had said; Hilary who had called him a thief. He would show Hilary whether he was a thief or not, give him time; he would make him eat his words, and he figured Hilary retracting and apologizing in the presence of the whole Board; Hilary apologized handsomely, and Northwick forgave him, while it was also pa.s.sing through his mind that he must reduce the risks of railroad accident to a minimum, by shortening the time. They reduced the risk of ocean travel in that way, by reducing the time, and logically the fastest s.h.i.+p was the safest. If he could get to Montreal from Wellwater in four or five hours, when it would take him twelve hours to get to Quebec, it was certainly his duty to go to Montreal. First of all, he must put himself out of danger of every kind. He must not even fatigue himself too much; and he decided to telegraph on to Wellwater, and secure a seat in the Pullman car to Montreal. He had been travelling all day in the ordinary car, and he had found it very rough.

It suddenly occurred to him that he must now a.s.sume a false name; and he reflected that he must take one that sounded like his own, or else he would not answer promptly and naturally to it. He chose Warwick, and he kept saying it over to himself while he wrote his dispatch to the station-master at Wellwater, asking him to secure a chair in the Pullman. He was pleased with the choice he had made; it seemed like his own name when spoken, and yet very unlike when written. But while he congratulated himself on his quickness and sagacity, he was aware of something detached, almost alien, in the operation of his mind. It did not seem to be working normally; he could govern it, but it was like something trying to get away from him, like a headstrong, restive horse.

The notion suggested the colt that had fallen lame; he wondered if Elbridge would look carefully after it; and then he thought of all the other horses. A torment of heartbreaking homesickness seized him; his love for his place, his house, his children, seemed to turn against him, and to tear him and leave him bleeding, like the evil spirit in the demoniac among the tombs. He was in such misery with his longing for his children, that he thought it must show in his face; and he made a feint of having to rise and arrange his overcoat so that he could catch sight of himself in the mirror at the end of the car. His face betrayed nothing; it looked, as it always did, like the face of a kindly, respectable man, a financially reliable face, the face of a leading citizen. He gathered courage and strength from it to put away the remorse that was devouring him. If that was the way he looked that was the way he must be; and he could only be leaving those so dear to him for some good purpose. He recalled that his purpose was to clear the name they bore from the cloud that must fall upon it; to rehabilitate himself; to secure his creditors from final loss. This was a good purpose, the best purpose that a man in his place could have; he recollected that he was to be careful of his life and health, because he had dedicated himself to this purpose.

He determined to keep this purpose steadily in mind, not to lose thought of it for an instant; it was his only refuge. Then a new anguish seized him; a doubt that swiftly became certainty; and he knew that he had signed that dispatch Northwick and not Warwick; he saw just how his signature looked on the yellow manilla paper of the telegraph blank. Now he saw what a fool he had been to think of sending any dispatch. He cursed himself under his breath, and in the same breath he humbly prayed to G.o.d for some way of escape. His terror made it certain to him that he would be arrested as soon as he reached Wellwater. That would be the next stop, the conductor told him, when he halted him with the question on his way through the cars. The conductor said they were behind time, and Northwick knew by the frantic pull of the train that they were running to make up the loss. It would simply be death to jump from the car; and he must not die, he must run the risk. In his prayer he bargained with G.o.d that if He would let him escape, he would give every thought, every breath to making up the loss of his creditors; he half promised to return the money he was carrying away, and trust to his own powers, his business talent in a new field, to retrieve himself. He resolved to hide himself as soon as he reached Wellwater; it would be dark, and he hoped that by this understanding with Providence he could elude the officer in getting out of the car. But if there were two, one at each end of the car?

There was none, and Northwick walked away from the station with the other pa.s.sengers, who were going to the hotel near the station for supper. In the dim light of the failing day and the village lamps, he saw with a kind of surprise, the deep snow, and felt the strong, still cold of the winterland he had been journeying into. The white drifts were everywhere; the vague level of the frozen lake stretched away from the hotel like a sea of snow; on its edge lay the excursion steamer in which Northwick had one summer made the tour of the lake with his family, long ago.

He was only a few miles from the Canadian frontier; with a rebound from his anxiety, he now exulted in the safety he had already experienced. He remained tranquilly eating after the departure of the Montreal train was cried; and when he was left almost alone, the head-waiter came to him and said, "Your train's just going, sir."

"Thank you," he answered, "I'm going out on the Quebec line." He wanted to laugh, in thinking how he had baffled fate. Now, if any inquiry were made for him it would be at the Montreal train before it started, or at the next station, which was still within the American border, on that line. But on the train for Quebec, which would reach Stanstead in half an hour, he would be safe from conjecture, even, thanks to that dispatch asking for a chair on the Montreal Pullman. The Quebec train was slow in starting; but he did not care; he walked up and down the platform, and waited patiently. He no longer thought with anxiety of the long all-night ride before him. If he did not choose to keep straight on to Quebec, he could stop at Lenoxville or Sherbrooke, and take up his journey again the next day. At Stanstead he ceased altogether to deal with the past in his thoughts. He was now safe from it beyond any possible peradventure, and he began to plan for the future. He had prepared himself for the all-night ride, if he should decide to take it, with a cup of strong coffee at Wellwater, and he was alert in every faculty. His mind worked nimbly and docilely now, with none of that perversity which had troubled him during the day with the fear that he was going wrong in it. His thought was clear and quick, and it obeyed his will like a part of it; that sense of duality in himself no longer agonized him. He took a calm and prudent survey of the work before him; and he saw how essential it was that he should make no false step, but should act at every moment with the sense that he was merely the agent of others in the effort to retrieve his losses.

II.

At Stanstead a party of three gentlemen came into the car; and their talk presently found its way through Northwick's revery, at first as an interruption, an annoyance, and afterwards as a matter of intensifying personal interest to him. They were in very good spirits, and they made themselves at home in the car; there were only a few other pa.s.sengers.

They were going to Montreal, as he easily gathered, and some friends were to join them at the next junction, and go on with them. They talked freely of an enterprise which they wished to promote in Montreal; and they were very confident of it if they could get the capital. One of them said, It was a thing that would have been done long ago, if the Yankees had been in it. "Well, we may strike a rich defaulter, in Montreal," another said, and they all laughed. Their laughter shocked Northwick; it seemed immoral; he remembered that though he might seem a defaulter, he was a man with a sacred trust, and a high purpose. But he listened eagerly; if their enterprise were one that approved itself to his judgment, the chance of their discussing it before him might be a leading of Providence which he would be culpable to refuse. Providence had answered his prayer in permitting him to pa.s.s the American frontier safely, and Northwick must not be derelict in fulfilling his part of the agreement. The Canadians borrowed the brakeman's lantern, and began to study a map which they spread out on their knees. The one who seemed first among them put his finger on a place in the map, and said that was the spot. It was in the region just back of Chicoutimi. Gold had always been found there, but not in paying quant.i.ty. It cost more to mine it than it was worth; but with the application of his new process of working up the tailings, there was no doubt of the result. It was simply wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Northwick had heard that song before; and he fell back in his seat, with a smile which was perhaps too cynical for a partner of Providence, but which was natural in a man of his experience. He knew something about processes to utilize the tailings of gold mines which would not otherwise pay for working; he had paid enough for his knowledge: so much that if he still had the purchase-money he need not be going into exile now, and beginning life under a false name, in a strange land.

By and by he found himself listening again, and he heard the Canadian saying, "And there's timber enough on the tract to pay twice over what it will cost, even if the mine wasn't worth a penny."

"Well, we might go down and see the timber, any way," said one of the party who had not yet spoken much. "And then we could take a look at Markham's soap-mine, too. Unless," he added, "you had to tunnel under a hundred feet of snow to get at it. A good deal like diggin' the north pole up by the roots, wouldn't it be?"

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" said he who seemed to be Markham, with the optimism of an enthusiast. "There's no trouble about it. We've got some shanties that we put up about the mouth of the hole in the ground we made in the autumn, and you can see the hole without digging at all. Or at least you could in the early part of January, when I was down there."

"The hole hadn't run away?"

"No. It was just where we left it."

"Well, that's encouragin'. But I say, Markham, how do you get down there in the winter?"

"Oh! very easily. Simplest thing in the world. Lots of fellows in the lumber trade do it all winter long. Do it by sleigh from St. Anne's, about twenty miles below Quebec--from Quebec you have your choice of train or sleigh. But I prefer to make a clean thing of it, and do it all by sleigh. I take it by easy stages, and so I take the long route: there is a short cut, but the stops are far between. You make your twenty miles to St. Anne from Quebec one day; eighteen to St. Joachim, the next; thirty-nine to Baie St. Paul, the next; twenty to Malbaie, the next; then forty to Tadoussac; then eighteen to Riviere Marguerite. You can do something every day at that rate, even in the new snow; but on the ice of the Saguenay, to Haha Bay, there's a pull of sixty miles; you're at Chicoutimi, eleven miles farther, before you know it. Good feed, and good beds, all along. You wrap up, and you don't mind. Of course," Markham concluded, "it isn't the climate of Stanstead," as if the climate of Stanstead were something like that of St. Augustine.