Kitabı oku: «The Quality of Mercy», sayfa 22

II

These emotions still filled Pinney to the throat when at last he left his cabin and went forward to the smoking-room, where he found a number of veteran voyagers enjoying their cigars over the cards which they had already drawn against the tedium of the ocean passage. Some were not playing, but merely smoking and talking, with glasses of clear, pale straw-colored liquid before them. In a group of these the principal speaker seemed to be an American; the two men who chorused him were Canadians; they laughed and applauded with enjoyment of what was national as well as what was individual in his talk.

"Well, I never saw a man as mad as old Oiseau when he told about that fellow, and how he tried to start him out every day to visit his soap-mine in the 'ill, as he called it, and how the fellow would slip out of it, day after day, week after week, till at last Oiseau got tired, and gave him the bounce when the first boat came up in the spring. He tried to make him believe it would be good for his health, to go out prospecting with him, let alone making his everlasting fortune; but it was no good; and all the time Oiseau was afraid he would fall into my hands and invest with me. 'I make you a present of 'im, Mr. Markham,' says he. 'I 'ave no more use for him, if you find him.'"

One of the Canadians said, "I don't suppose he really had anything to invest."

"Why, yes, that was the curious thing about it; he had a belt full of thousand-dollar bills round him. They found it when he was sick; and old Oiseau was so afraid that something would happen to him, and he would be suspected of it, that he nursed him like a brother till he got well, and as soon as he was able to get away he bounced him."

"And what do you suppose was the matter with him, that he wouldn't even go to look at Oiseau's soap-mine?"

"Well," said the American, closing his eyes for the better enjoyment of the analysis, and giving a long, slow pull at his cigar, "there might have been any one of several things. My idea is that he was a defaulter, and the thousand-dollar bills – there were forty or fifty of them, Oiseau says – were part of the money he got away with. Then, very likely he had no faith in Oiseau – knew it was probably a soap-mine, and was just putting him off till he could get away himself. Or, maybe his fever left him a little cracked, and he didn't know exactly what he was about. Then, again, if my theory of what the man was is true, I think that kind of fellow gets a twist simply from what he's done. A good many of them must bring money away with them, and there are business openings everywhere; but you never hear of their going into anything over here."

"That is odd," said the Canadian.

"Or would be if it were not so common. It's the rule here, and I don't know an exception. The defaulter never does anything with his money, except live on it. Meigs, who built those railroads on the Andes, is the only one who ever showed enterprise; and I never understood that it was a private enterprise with him. Anyway, the American defaulter who goes to Canada never makes any effort to grow up with the country. He simply rests on his laurels, or else employs his little savings to negotiate a safe return. No, sir; there's something in defalcation that saps a man's business energies, and I don't suppose that old fellow would have been able to invest in Oiseau's gold mine if it had opened at his feet, and he could have seen the sovereigns ready coined in it. He just couldn't. I can understand that state of mind, though I don't pretend to respect it. I can imagine just how the man trembled to go into some speculation, and didn't dare to. Must have been an old hand at it, too. But it seems as if the money he steals becomes sacred to a man when he gets away with it, and he can't risk it."

"I rather think you could have overcome his scruples, Markham, if you could have got at him," said the Canadian.

"Perhaps," Markham assented. "But I guess I can do better with our stock in England."

Pinney had let his cigar go out, in his excitement. He asked Markham for a light, though there were plenty of matches, and Markham accepted the request as an overture to his acquaintance.

"Brother Yank?" he suggested.

"Boston."

"Going over?"

"Only to Rimouski. You don't happen to know the name of that defaulter, do you?"

"No; I don't," said Markham.

"I had an idea I knew who it was," said Pinney.

Markham looked sharply at him. "After somebody in Rimouski?"

"Well, not just in that sense, exactly, if you mean as a detective. But I'm a newspaper man, and this is my holiday, and I'm working up a little article about our financiers in exile while I'm resting. My name's Pinney."

"Markham can fill you up with the latest facts," said the Canadian, going out; "and he's got a gold mine that beats Oiseau's hollow. But don't trust him too far. I know him; he's a partner of mine."

"That accounts for me," said Markham, with the tolerant light of a much-joked joker in his eyes. With Pinney alone he ceased to talk the American which seemed to please his Canadian friend, and was willing soberly to tell all he knew about Oiseau's capitalist, whom he merely conjectured to be a defaulter. He said the man called himself Warwick, and professed to be from Chicago; and then Pinney recalled the name and address in the register of his Quebec hotel, and the date, which was about that of Northwick's escape. "But I never dreamt of his using half of his real name," and he told Markham what the real name was; and then he thought it safe to trust him with the nature of his special mission concerning Northwick.

"Is there any place on board where a man could go and kick himself?" he asked.

"Do it here as well as anywhere," said Markham, breaking his cigar-ash off. But Pinney's alluring confidence, and his simple-hearted acknowledgment of his lack of perspicacity had told upon him; he felt the fascinating need of helping Pinney, which Pinney was able to inspire in those who respected him least, and he said, "There was a priest who knew this man when he was at Haha Bay, and I believe he has a parish now – yes, he has! I remember Oiseau told me – at Rimouski. You'd better look him up."

"Look him up!" said Pinney, in a frenzy. "I'll live with him before I'm in Rimouski twenty seconds."

He had no trouble in finding Père Étienne, but after the first hopeful encounter with the sunny surface sweetness of the young priest, he found him disposed to be reserved concerning the Mr. Warwick he had known at Haha Bay. It became evident that Père Étienne took Pinney for a detective; and however willing he might have been to save a soul for Paradise in the person of the man whose unhappiness he had witnessed, he was clearly not eager to help hunt a fugitive down for State's prison.

Even when Pinney declared his true character and mission, the priest's caution exacted all the proofs he could give, and made him submit his authorization to an English-speaking notary of the priest's acquaintance. Then he owned that he had seen Mr. Warwick since their parting at Haha Bay; Mr. Warwick had followed him to Rimouski, after several weeks, and Père Étienne knew where he was then living. But he was still so anxious to respect the secrecy of a man who had trusted him as far as Northwick had, that it required all the logic and all the learning of the notary to convince him that Mr. Warwick, if he were the largest defaulter ever self-banished, was in no danger of extradition at Pinney's hands. It was with many injunctions, and upon many promises, that at last he told Pinney where Mr. Warwick was living, and furnished him with a letter which was at once warrant and warning to the exile.

Pinney took the first train back toward Quebec; he left it at St. André, and crossed the St. Lawrence to Malbaie. He had no trouble there, in finding the little hostelry where Mr. Warwick lodged. But Pinney's spirit, though not of the greatest delicacy, had become sensitized toward the defaulter through the scrupulous regard for him shown by Père Étienne no loss than by the sense of holding almost a filial relation to him in virtue of his children's authorization. So his heart smote him at the ghastly look he got, when he advanced upon Warwick, where he sat at the inn-door, in the morning sun, and cheerily addressed him, "Mr. Northwick, I believe."

It was the first time Northwick had heard his real name spoken since Putney had threatened him in the station, the dark February morning when he fled from home. The name he had worn for the last five months was suddenly no part of him, though till that moment it had seemed as much so as the white beard which he had suffered to hide his face.

"I don't expect you to answer me," said Pinney, feeling the need of taking, as well as giving time, "till you've looked at this letter, and of course I've no wish to hurry you. If I'm mistaken, and it isn't Mr. Northwick, you won't open the letter."

He handed him, not the letter which Père Étienne had given him, but the letter Suzette Northwick had written her father; and Pinney saw that he recognized the hand-writing of the superscription. He saw the letter tremble in the old man's hand, and heard its crisp rustle as he clutched it to keep it from falling to the ground. He could not bear the sight of the longing and the fears that came into his face. "No hurry; no hurry," he said, kindly, and turned away.

III

When Pinney came back from the little turn he took, Northwick was still holding the unopened letter in his hand. He stood looking at it in a kind of daze, and he was pale, and seemed faint.

"Why, Mr. Northwick," said Pinney, "why don't you read your letter? If it hadn't been yours, don't I know that you'd have given it back to me at once?"

"It isn't that," said the man, who was so much older and frailer than Pinney had expected to find him. "But – are they well? Is it – bad news?"

"No!" Pinney exulted. "They're first-rate. You needn't be afraid to read the letter!" Pinney's exultation came partly from his certainty that it was really Northwick, and partly from the pleasure he felt in reassuring him; he sympathized with him as a father. His pleasure was not marred by the fact that he knew nothing of the state of Northwick's family, and built his assertion upon the probability that the letter would contain nothing to alarm or afflict him, "Like a glass of water?" he suggested, seeing Northwick sit inert and helpless on the steps of the inn-porch, apparently without the force to break the seal of the letter. "Or a little brandy?" Pinney handed him the neat leather-covered flask his wife had reproached him for buying when they came away from home; she said he could not afford it; but he was glad he had got it, now, and he unscrewed the stopple with pride in handing it to Northwick. "You look sick."

"I haven't been very well," Northwick admitted, and he touched the bottle with his lips. It revived him, and Pinney now saw that if he would leave him again, he would open the letter. There was little in it but the tender assurance Suzette gave him of their love, and the anxiety of Adeline and herself to know how and where he was. She told him that he was not to feel troubled about them; that they were well, and unhappy only for him; but he must not think they blamed him, or had ever done so. As soon as they were sure they could reach him, she said, they would write to him again. Adeline wrote a few lines with her name, to say that for some days past she had not been quite well; but that she was better and had nothing to wish for but to hear from him.

When Pinney came back a second time, he found Northwick with the letter open in his hand.

"Well, sir," he said, with the easy respectfulness toward Northwick that had been replacing, ever since he talked with Matt Hilary, the hail-fellow manner he used with most men, and that had now fully established itself, "You've got some noble scenery about here." He meant to compliment Northwick on the beauty of the landscape, as people ascribe merit to the inhabitants of a flourishing city.

Northwick, by his silence, neither accepted nor disclaimed the credit of the local picturesqueness; and Pinney ventured to add, "But you seem to take it out in nature, Mr. Northwick. The place is pretty quiet, sir."

Northwick paid no heed to this observation, either; but after sitting mute so long that Pinney began to doubt whether he was ever going to speak at all, he began to ask some guarded and chary questions as to how Pinney had happened to find him. Pinney had no unwillingness to tell, and now he gave him the letter of Père Étienne, with a eulogy of the priest's regard for Northwick's interest and safety. He told him how Markham's talk had caught his attention, and Northwick tacitly recognized the speculator. But when Pinney explained that it was the postmark on his letter to the Events that gave him the notion of going to Rimouski, he could see that Northwick was curious to know the effect of that letter with the public. At first he thought he would let him ask; but he perceived that this would be impossible for Northwick, and he decided to say, "That letter was a great sensation, Mr. Northwick." The satisfaction that lighted up Northwick's eyes caused Pinney to add, "I guess it set a good many people thinking about you in a different way. It showed that there was something to be said on both sides, and I believe it made friends for you, sir. Yes, sir." Pinney had never believed this till the moment he spoke, but then it seemed so probable he had that he easily affirmed it. "I don't believe, Mr. Northwick," he went on, "but what this trouble could be patched up, somehow, so that you could come back, if you wanted to, give 'em time to think it over a little."

As soon as he said this, the poison of that ulterior purpose which his wife had forbidden him, began to work in Pinney's soul. He could not help feeling what a grand thing it would be if he could go back with Northwick in his train, and deliver him over, a captive of moral suasion, to his country's courts. Whatever the result was, whether the conviction or the acquittal of Northwick, the process would be the making of Pinney. It would carry him to such a height in the esteem of those who knew him, that he could choose either career, and whether as a reporter or a detective, it would give his future the distinction of one of the most brilliant pieces of work in both sorts. Pinney tried his best to counteract the influence of these ideas by remembering his promises to his wife; but it was difficult to recall his promises with accuracy in his wife's absence; and he probably owed his safety in this matter more to Northwick's temperament than to any virtue of his own.

"I think I understand how that would be," said the defaulter coldly; and he began very cautiously to ask Pinney the precise effect of his letter as Pinney had gathered it from print and hearsay. It was not in Pinney's nature to give any but a rose-colored and illusory report of this; but he felt that Northwick was sizing him up while he listened, and knew just when and how much he was lying. This heightened Pinney's respect for him, and apparently his divination of Pinney's character had nothing to do with Northwick's feeling toward him. So far as Pinney could make out it was friendly enough, and as their talk went on he imagined a growing trustfulness in it. Northwick kept his inferences and conclusions to himself. His natural reticence had been intensified by the solitude of his exile; it stopped him short of any expression concerning Pinney's answers; and Pinney had to construct Northwick's opinions from his questions. His own cunning was restlessly at work exploring Northwick's motives in each of these, and it was not at fault in the belief it brought him that Northwick clearly understood the situation at home. He knew that the sensation of his offence and flight were past, and that so far as any public impulse to punish him was concerned, he might safely go back. But he knew that the involuntary machinery of the law must begin to operate upon him as soon as he came within its reach; and he could not learn from Pinney that anything had been done to block its wheels. The letter from his daughters threw no light upon this point; it was an appeal for some sign of life and love from him; nothing more. They, or the friends who were advising them, had not thought it best to tell him more than that they were well, and anxious to hear from him; and Pinney really knew nothing more about them. He had not been asked to Hatboro' to see them before he started, and with all the will he had to invent comfortable and attractive circumstances for them, he was at a disadvantage for want of material. The most that he could conjecture was that Mr. Hilary's family had not broken off their friendly relations with them. He had heard old Hilary criticised for it, and he told Northwick so.

"I guess he's been standing by you, Mr. Northwick, as far as he consistently could," he said; and Northwick ventured to reply that he expected that. "It was young Hilary who brought me the letter, and talked the whole thing up with me," Pinney added.

Northwick had apparently not expected this; but he let no more than the fact appear. He kept silent for a time; then he said, "And you don't know anything about the way they're living?"

"No, I don't," said Pinney, with final candor. "But I should say they were living along there about as usual. Mr. Hilary didn't say but what they were. I guess you haven't got any cause to be uneasy on that score. My idea is, Mr. Northwick, that they wanted to leave you just as free as they could about themselves. They wanted to find out your whereabouts in the land of the living, first of all. You know that till that letter of yours came out, there were a good many that thought you were killed in that accident at Wellwater, the day you left home."

Northwick started. "What accident? What do you mean?" he demanded.

"Why, didn't you know about it? Didn't you see the accounts? They had a name like yours amongst the missing, and people who thought you were not in it, said it was a little job you had put up. There was a despatch engaging a Pullman seat signed, T. W. Northwick – "

"Ah! I knew it!" said Northwick. "I knew that I must have signed my real name!"

"Well, of course," said Pinney, soothingly, "a man is apt to do that, when he first takes another. It's natural."

"I never heard of the accident. I saw no papers for months. I wouldn't; and then I was sick – They must have believed I was dead!"

"Well, sir," said Pinney, "I don't know that that follows. My wife and myself talked that up a good deal at the time, and we concluded that it was about an even thing. You see it's pretty hard to believe that a friend is dead, even when you've seen him die; and I don't understand how people that lose friends at a distance can ever quite realize that they're gone. I guess that even if the ladies went upon the theory of the accident, there was always a kind of a merciful uncertainty about it, and that was my wife's notion, too. But that's neither here nor there, now, Mr. Northwick. Here you are, alive and well, in spite of all theories to the contrary – though they must have been pretty well exploded by your letter to the Events– and the question is what answer are you going to let me take back to your family? You want to send some word, don't you? My instructions were not to urge you at all, and I won't. But if I was in your place, I know what I should do."

Northwick did not ask him what it was he would do. He fell into a deep silence which it seemed to Pinney he would never break; and his face became such a blank that all Pinney's subtlety was at fault. It is doubtful, indeed, if there was anything definite or directed in the mute misery of Northwick's soul. It was not a sharp anguish, such as a finer soul's might have been, but it was a real misery, of a measure and a quality that he had not felt before. Now he realized how much he must have made his children suffer. Perhaps it wrung him the more keenly because it seemed to be an expression of the divine displeasure, which he flattered himself he had appeased, and was a fatal consequence of his guilt. It was a terrible suggestion of the possibility that, after all, Providence might not have been a party to the understanding between them, and that his good-will toward those he had wronged had gone for nothing. He had blamed himself for not having tried to retrieve himself and make their losses good. It was no small part of his misery now to perceive that anything he might have done would have gone for nothing in this one-sided understanding. He fetched a long, unconscious sigh.

"Why, it's all over, now, Mr. Northwick," said Pinney, with a certain amusement at the simple-heartedness of this sigh, whose cause he did not misinterpret. "The question is now about your getting back to them."

"Getting back? You know I can't go back," said Northwick, with bitter despair, and an openness that he had not shown before.

Far beneath and within the senses that apprehend the obvious things, Pinney felt the unhappy man beginning to cling to him. He returned, joyously, "I don't know about that. Now, see here, Mr. Northwick, you believe that I'm here as your friend, don't you? That I want to deal in good faith with you?" Northwick hesitated, and Pinney pursued, "Your daughter's letter ought to be a guaranty of that!"

"Yes," Northwick admitted, after another hesitation.

"Well, then, what I'm going to say is in your interest, and you've got to believe that I have some authority for saying it. I can't tell you just how much, for I don't know as I know myself exactly. But I think you can get back if you work it right. Of course, you can't get back for nothing. It's going to cost you something. It's going to cost you all you've brought with you," – Pinney watched Northwick's impassive face for the next change that should pass upon it; he caught it, and added – "and more. But I happen to know that the balance will be forthcoming when it's needed. I can't say how I know it, for I don't exactly know how I know it. But I do know it; and you know that it's for you to take the first step. You must say how much money you brought with you, and where it is, and how it can be got at. I should think," said Pinney, with a drop in his earnestness, and as if the notion had just occurred to him, "you would want to see that place of yours again."

Northwick gave a gasp in the anguish of homesickness the words brought upon him. In a flash of what was like a luminous pang, he saw it all as it looked the night he left it in the white landscape under the high, bare wintry sky. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said, with a kind of severity.

"No," Pinney admitted, "I don't suppose any one can begin to appreciate it as you do. But I was there, just after you skipped – "

"Then I was the kind of man who would skip," Northwick swiftly reflected —

"And I must say I would take almost any chance of getting back to a place like that. Why," he said, with an easy, caressing cordiality, "you can't have any idea how completely the thing's blown over. Why, sir, I'll bet you could go back to Hatboro' now, and be there twenty-four hours before anybody would wake up enough to make trouble for you. Mind, I don't say that's what we want you to do. We couldn't make terms for you half as well, with you on the ground. We want you to keep your distance for the present, and let your friends work for you. Like a candidate for the presidency," Pinney added, with a smile. "Hello! Who's this?"

A little French maid, barefooted, black-eyed, curly-headed, shyly approached Northwick, and said, "Diner, Monsieur."

"That means dinner," Northwick gravely interpreted. "I will ask you to join me."

"Oh, thank you, I shall be very glad," said Pinney rising with him. They had been sitting on the steps of a structure that Pinney now noticed was an oddity among the bark-sheathed cabins of the little hamlet. "Why, what's this?"

"It's the studio of an American painter who used to come here. He hasn't been here for several years."

"I suppose you expect to light out if he comes," Pinney suggested, in the spirit of good fellowship towards Northwick now thoroughly established in him.

"He couldn't do me any harm, if he wanted to," answered Northwick, with unresentful dignity.

"No," Pinney readily acquiesced, "and I presume you'd be glad to hear a little English, after all the French you have around."

"The landlord speaks a little; and the priest. He is a friend of Father Étienne."

"Oh, I see," said Pinney. He noticed that Northwick walked slowly and weakly; he ventured to put his hand under his elbow, and Northwick did not resent the help offered him.

"I had a very severe sickness during the latter part of the winter," he explained, "and it pulled me down a good deal."

"At Rimouski, I presume?" said Pinney.

"No," said Northwick, briefly.