Kitabı oku: «The Quality of Mercy», sayfa 15

VII

It took the young priest somewhat longer than it would have taken a man of Northwick's own language and nation to perceive that his gentlemanly decorum and grave repose of manner masked a complete ignorance of the things that interest cultivated people, and that he was merely and purely a business man, a figment of commercial civilization, with only the crudest tastes and ambitions outside of the narrow circle of money-making. He found that he had a pleasure in horses and cattle, and from hints which Northwick let fall, regarding his life at home, that he was fond of having a farm and a conservatory with rare plants. But the flowers were possessions, not passions; he did not speak of them as if they afforded him any artistic or scientific delight. The young priest learned that he had put a good deal of money in pictures; but then the pictures seemed to have become investments, and of the nature of stocks and bonds. He found that this curious American did not care to read the English books which Bird offered to lend him out of the little store of gifts and accidents accumulated in the course of years from bountiful or forgetful tourists; the books in French Père Étienne proposed to him, Northwick said he did not know how to read. He showed no liking for music, except a little for the singing of Bird's niece, Virginie, but when the priest thought he might care to understand that she sang the ballads which the first voyagers had brought from France into the wilderness, or which had sprung out of the joy and sorrow of its hard life, he saw that the fact said nothing to Northwick, and that it rather embarrassed him. The American could not take part in any of those discussions of abstract questions which the priest and the old woodsman delighted in, and which they sometimes tried to make him share. He apparently did not know what they meant. It was only when Père Étienne gave him up as the creature of a civilization too ugly and arid to be borne, that he began to love him as a brother; when he could make nothing of Northwick's mind, he conceived the hope of saving his soul.

Père Étienne felt sure that Northwick had a soul, and he had his misgivings that it was a troubled one. He, too, had heard of the American defaulter, who has a celebrity of his own in Canada penetrating to different men with different suggestion, and touching here and there a pure and unworldly heart, such as Père Étienne bore in his breast, with commiseration. The young priest did not conceive very clearly of the make and manner of the crime he suspected the elusive and mysterious stranger of committing; but he imagined that the great sum of money he knew him possessed of, was spoil of some sort; and he believed that Northwick's hesitation to employ it in any way was proof of an uneasy conscience in its possession. Why had he come to that lonely place in midwinter with a treasure such as that; and why did he keep the money by him, instead of putting it in a bank? Père Étienne talked these questions over with Bird and the doctor, and he could find only one answer to them. He wondered if he ought not to speak to Northwick, and delicately offer him the chance to unburden his mind to such a friend as only a priest could be to such a sinner. But he could not think of any approach sufficiently delicate. Northwick was not a Catholic, and the church had no hold upon him. Besides, he had a certain plausibility and reserve of demeanor that forbade suspicion, as well as the intimacy necessary to the good which Père Étienne wished to do the lonely and silent man. Northwick was in those days much occupied with a piece of writing, which he always locked carefully into his bag when he left his room, and which he copied in part or in whole again and again, burning the rejected drafts in the hearth-fire that had now superseded the stove, and stirring the carbonized paper into ashes, so that no word was left distinguishable on it.

One day there came up the river a bateau from Tadoussac, bringing the news that the ice was all out of the St. Lawrence. "It will not be long time, now," said Bird, "before we begin to see you' countrymen. The steamboats come to Haha Bay in the last of June."

Northwick responded to the words with no visible sensation. His sphinx-like reticence vexed Bird more and more, and intolerably deepened the mystification of his failure to do any of the things with his capital which Bird had promised himself and his fellow-citizens. He no longer talked of going to Chicoutimi, that was true, and there was not the danger of his putting his money into Markham's enterprise there; but neither did he show any interest or any curiosity concerning Bird's discovery of the precious metal at Haha Bay. Bird had his delicacy as well as Père Étienne, and he could not thrust himself upon his guest, even with the intention of making their joint fortune.

A few days later there came to Père Étienne a letter, which, when he read it, superseded the interest in Northwick, which Bird felt gnawing him like a perpetual hunger. It was from the curé at Rimouski, where Père Étienne's family lived, and it brought word that his mother, who had been in failing health all winter, could not long survive, and so greatly desired to see him, that his correspondent had asked their superior to allow him to replace Père Étienne at Haha Bay, while he came to visit her. Leave had been given, and Père Étienne might expect his friend very soon after his letter reached him.

"Where is Rimouski?" Northwick asked, when he found himself alone with the priest that evening.

"It is on the St. Lawrence. It is the last and first point where the steamers touch in going and coming between Quebec and Liverpool." Père Étienne had been weeping, and his heart was softened and emboldened by the anxiety he felt. "It is my native village – where I lived till I went to make my studies in the Laval University. It is going home for me. Perhaps they will let me remain there." He added, by an irresistible impulse of pity and love, "I wish you were going home, too, Mr. Warwick!"

"I wish I were!" said Northwick, with a heavy sigh. "But I can't – yet."

"This is a desert for you," Père Étienne pressed on. "I can see that. I have seen how solitary you are."

"Yes. It's lonesome," Northwick admitted.

"My son," said the young priest to the man who was old enough to be his father, and he put his hand on Northwick's, where it lay on his knee, as they sat side by side before the fire, "is there something you could wish to say to me? Something I might do to help you?"

In a moment all was open between them, and they knew each other's meaning. "Yes," said Northwick, and he felt the wish to trust in the priest and to be ruled by him well up like a tide of hot blood from his heart. It sank back again. This pure soul was too innocent, too unversed in the world and its ways to know his offence in its right proportion; to know it as Northwick himself knew it; to be able to account for it and condone it. The affair, if he could understand it at all, would shock him; he must blame it as relentlessly as Northwick's own child would if her love did not save him. With the next word he closed that which was open between them, a rift in his clouds that heaven itself had seemed to look through. "I have a letter – a letter that I wish you would take and mail for me in Rimouski."

"I will take it with great pleasure," said the priest, but he had the sadness of a deep disappointment in his tone.

Northwick was disappointed, too; almost injured. He had something like a perception that if Père Étienne had been a coarser, commoner soul, he could have told him everything, and saved his own soul by the confession.

About a month after the priest's departure the first steamboat came up the Saguenay from Quebec. By this time Bird was a desperate man. Northwick was still there in his house, with all that money which he would not employ in any way; at once a temptation and a danger if it should in any manner become known. The wandering poor, who are known to the piety of the habitans as the Brethren of Christ, were a terror to Bird, in their visits, when they came by day to receive the charity which no one denies them; he felt himself bound to keep a watchful eye on this old Yankee, who was either a rascal or a madman, and perhaps both, and to see that no harm came to him; and when he heard the tramps prowling about at night, and feeling for the alms that kind people leave out-doors for them, he could not sleep. The old hunter neglected his wild-beast traps, and suffered his affairs to fall into neglect; but it was not his failing appetite, or his broken sleep alone that wore upon him. The disappointment with his guest that was spreading through the community, involved Bird, and he thought his neighbors looked askance at him: as if they believed he could have moved Northwick to action, if he would. Northwick could not have moved himself. He was like one benumbed. He let the days go by, and made no attempt to realize the schemes for the retrieval of his fortunes that had brought him to that region.

The sound of the steamboat's whistle was a joyful sound to Bird. He rose and went into Northwick's room. Northwick was awake; he had heard the whistle, too.

"Now, Mr. Warwick, or what you' name," said Bird, with trembling eagerness, "that is the boat. I want you take you' money and go hout my 'ouse. Yes, sir. Now! Pack you' things. Don't wait for breakfast. You get breakfast on board. Go!"

VIII

The letter which Père Étienne posted for Northwick at Rimouski was addressed to the editor of the Boston Events, and was published with every advantage which scare-heading could invent. A young journalist newly promoted to the management was trying to give the counting-room proofs of his efficiency in the line of the Events' greatest successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing, not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative value of the recognition of the fact that the Events had been selected by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The Abstract, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully stabbed its esteemed contemporary with an acknowledgment of its prime importance as the organ of the American defaulters in Canada; other papers, after questioning the document as a fake, made common cause in treating it as a matter of little or no moment. In fact, there had been many defalcations since Northwick's; the average of one a day in the despatches of the Associated Press had been fully kept up, and several of these had easily surpassed his in the losses involved, and in the picturesqueness of the circumstances. People generally recalled with an effort the supremely tragic claim of his case through the rumor of his death in the railroad accident; those who distinctly remembered it experienced a certain disgust at the man's willingness to shelter himself so long in the doubt to which it had left not only the public, but his own family, concerning his fate.

The evening after the letter appeared, Hilary was dining one of those belated Englishmen who sometimes arrive in Boston after most houses are closed for the summer on the Hill and the Back Bay. Mrs. Hilary and Louise were already with Matt at his farm for a brief season before opening their own house at the shore, and Hilary was living en garçon. There were only men at the dinner, and the talk at first ran chiefly to question of a sufficient incentive for Northwick's peculations; its absence was the fact which all concurred in owning. In deference to his guest's ignorance of the matter, Hilary went rapidly over it from the beginning, and as he did so the perfectly typical character of the man and of the situation appeared in clear relief. He ended by saying: "It isn't at all a remarkable instance. There is nothing peculiar about it. Northwick was well off and he wished to be better off. He had plenty of other people's money in his hands which he controlled so entirely that he felt as if it were his own. He used it and he lost it. Then he was found out, and ran away. That's all."

"Then, as I understand," said the Englishman, with a strong impression that he was making a joke, "this Mr. Northwick was not one of your most remarkable men."

Everybody laughed obligingly, and Hilary said, "He was one of our least remarkable men." Then, spurred on by that perverse impulse which we Americans often have to make the worst of ourselves to an Englishman, he added, "The defaulter seems to be taking the place of the self-made man among us. Northwick's a type, a little differentiated from thousands of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to be rich instead of great."

"Really?" said the Englishman.

Among Hilary's guests was Charles Bellingham, a bachelor of pronounced baldness, who said he would come to meet Hilary's belated Englishman, in quality of bear-leader to his cousin-in-law, old Bromfield Corey, a society veteran of that period when even the swell in Boston must be an intellectual man. He was not only old, but an invalid, and he seldom left town in summer, and liked to go out to dinner whenever he was asked. Bellingham came to the rescue of the national repute in his own fashion. "I can't account for your not locking up your spoons, Hilary, when you invited me, unless you knew where you could steal some more."

"Ah, it isn't quite like a gentleman's stealing a few spoons," old Corey began, in the gentle way he had, and with a certain involuntary sibilation through the gaps between his front teeth. "It's a much more heroic thing than an ordinary theft; and I can't let you belittle it as something commonplace because it happens every day. So does death; so does birth; but they're not commonplace."

"They're not so frequent as defalcation with us, quite – especially birth," suggested Bellingham.

"No," Corey went on, "every fact of this sort is preceded by the slow and long decay of a moral nature, and that is of the most eternal and tragical interest; and" – here Corey broke down in an old man's queer, whimpering laugh, as the notion struck him – "if it's very common with us, I don't know but we ought to be proud of it, as showing that we excel all the rest of the civilized world in the proportion of decayed moral natures to the whole population. But I wonder," he went on, "that it doesn't produce more moralists of a sanative type than it has. Our bad teeth have given us the best dentists in the world; our habit of defalcation hasn't resulted yet in any ethical compensation. Sewell, here, used to preach about such things, but I'll venture to say we shall have no homily on Northwick from him next Sunday."

The Rev. Mr. Sewell suffered the thrust in patience. "What is the use?" he asked, with a certain sadness. "The preacher's voice is lost in his sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud from twenty-eight pages illustrated."

"Perhaps they are our moralists," Corey suggested.

"Perhaps," Sewell assented.

"By the way, Hilary," said Bellingham, "did you ever know who wrote that article in the Abstract, when Northwick's crookedness first appeared?"

"Yes," said Hilary. "It was a young fellow of twenty-four or five."

"Come off!" said Bellingham, in a slang phrase then making its way into merited favor. "What's become of him? I haven't seen anything else like it in the Abstract."

"No, and I'm afraid you're not likely to. The fellow was a reporter on the paper at the time; but he happened to have looked up the literature of defalcation, and they let him say his say."

"It was a very good say."

"Better than any other he had in him. They let him try again on different things, but he wasn't up to the work. So the managing editor said – and he was a friend of the fellow's. He was too literary, I believe."

"And what's become of him?" asked Corey.

"You might get him to read to you," said Bellingham to the old man. He added to the company, "Corey uses up a fresh reader every three months. He takes them into his intimacy, and then he finds their society oppressive."

"Why," Hilary answered with a little hesitation, "he was out of health, and Matt had him up to his farm."

"Is he Matt's only beneficiary?" Corey asked, with a certain tone of tolerant liking for Matt. "I thought he usually had a larger colony at Vardley."

"Well, he has," said Hilary. "But when his mother and sister are visiting him, he has to reduce their numbers. He can't very well turn his family away."

"He might board them out," said Bellingham.

"Do you suppose," asked Sewell, as if he had not noticed the turn the talk had taken, "that Northwick has gone to Europe?"

"I've no doubt he wishes me to suppose so," said Hilary, "and of course we've had to cable the authorities to look out for him at Moville and Liverpool, but I feel perfectly sure he's still in Canada, and expects to make terms for getting home again. He must be horribly homesick."

"Yes?" Sewell suggested.

"Yes. Not because he's a man of any delicacy of feeling, or much real affection for his family. I've no doubt he's fond of them, in a way, but he's fonder of himself. You can see, all through his letter, that he's trying to make interest for himself, and that he's quite willing to use his children if it will tell on the public sympathies. He knows very well that they're provided for. They own the place at Hatboro'; he deeded it to them long before his crookedness is known to have begun; and his creditors couldn't touch it if they wished to. If he had really that fatherly affection for them, which he appeals to in others, he wouldn't have left them in doubt whether he was alive or dead for four or five months, and then dragged them into an open letter asking forbearance in their name, and promising, for their sake, to right those he had wronged. The thing is thoroughly indecent."

Since the fact of Northwick's survival had been established beyond question by the publication of his letter, Hilary's mind in regard to him had undergone a great revulsion. It relieved itself with a sharp rebound from the oppressive sense of responsibility for his death, which he seemed to have incurred in telling Northwick that the best thing for him would be a railroad accident. Now that the man was not killed, Hilary could freely declare, "He made a great mistake in not getting out of the world, as many of us believed he had; I confess I had rather got to believe it myself. But he ought at least to have had the grace to remain dead to the poor creatures he had dishonored till he could repay the people he had defrauded."

"Ah! I don't know about that," said Sewell.

"No? Why not?"

"Because it would be a kind of romantic deceit that he'd better not keep up."

"He seems to have kept it up for the last four or five months," said Hilary.

"That's no reason he should continue to keep it up," Sewell persisted. "Perhaps he never knew of the rumor of his death."

"Ah, that isn't imaginable. There isn't a hole or corner left where the newspapers don't penetrate, nowadays."

"Not in Boston. But if he were in hiding in some little French village down the St. Lawrence – "

"Isn't that as romantic as the other notion, parson?" crowed old Corey.

"No, I don't think so," said the minister. "The cases are quite different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save their feelings, would be against nature; it would be purely histrionic; a motive from the theatre; that is, perfectly false."

"Pretty hard on Hilary, who invented it," Bellingham suggested; and they all laughed.

"I don't know," said Hilary. "The man seems to be posing in other ways. You would think from his letter that he was a sort of martyr to principle, and that he'd been driven off to Canada by the heartless creditors whom he's going to devote his life to saving from loss, if he can't do it in a few months or years. He may not be a conscious humbug, but he's certainly a humbug. Take that pretence of his that he would come back and stand his trial if he believed it would not result in greater harm than good by depriving him of all hope of restitution!"

"Why, there's a sort of crazy morality in that," said Corey.

"Perhaps," said Bellingham, "the solution of the whole matter is that Northwick is cracked."

"I've no doubt he's cracked to a certain extent," said Sewell, "as every wrong-doer is. You know the Swedenborgians believe that insanity is the last state of the wicked."

"I suppose," observed old Corey, thoughtfully, "you'd be very glad to have him keep out of your reach, Hilary?"

"What a question!" said Hilary. "You're as bad as my daughter. She asked me the same thing."

"I wish I were no worse," said the old man.

"You speak of his children," said the Englishman. "Hasn't he a wife?"

"No. Two daughters. One an old maid, and the other a young girl, whom my daughter knew at school," Hilary answered.

"I saw the young lady at your house once," said Bellingham, in a certain way.

"Yes. She's been here a good deal, first and last."

"Rather a high-stepping young person, I thought," said Bellingham.

"She is a proud girl," Hilary admitted. "Rather imperious, in fact."

"Ah, what's the pride of a young girl?" said Corey. "Something that comes from her love and goes to it; no separable quality; nothing that's for herself."

"Well, I'm not sure of that," said Hilary. "In this case it seems to have served her own turn. It's enabled her simply and honestly to deny the fact that her father ever did anything wrong."

"That's rather fine," Corey remarked, as if tasting it.

"And what will it enable her to do, now that he's come out and confessed the frauds himself?" the Englishman asked.

Hilary shrugged, for answer. He said to Bellingham, "Charles, I want you to try some of these crabs. I got them for you."

"Why, this is touching, Hilary," said Bellingham, getting his fat head round with difficulty to look at them in the dish the man was bringing to his side. "But I don't know that I should have refused them, even if they had been got for Corey."