“Why do they come to you with this?”
“Mr. Hubbard is away.”
“Oh, yes. I heard. When do you expect him home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
She looked at him piteously without speaking.
Atherton stepped to his door, and gave the order forgotten before. Then he closed the door, and came back to Marcia. “Don’t you know where your husband is, Mrs. Hubbard?”
“Oh, he will come back! He couldn’t leave me! He’s dead, — I know he’s dead; but he will come back! He only went away for the night, and something must have happened to him.”
The whole tragedy of her life for the past fortnight was expressed in these wild and inconsistent words; she had not been able to reason beyond the pathetic absurdities which they involved; they had the effect of assertions confirmed in the belief by incessant repetition, and doubtless she had said them to herself a thousand times. Atherton read in them, not only the confession of her despair, but a prayer for mercy, which it would have been inhuman to deny, and for the present he left her to such refuge from herself as she had found in them. He said, quietly, “You had better give me that paper, Mrs. Hubbard,” and took the bill from her. “If the others come with their accounts again, you must send them to me. When did you say Mr. Hubbard left home?”
“The night after the election,” said Marcia.
“And he didn’t say how long he should be gone?” pursued the lawyer, in the feint that she had known he was going.
“No,” she answered.
“He took some things with him?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you could judge how long he meant to be absent from the preparation he made?”
“I’ve never looked to see. I couldn’t!”
Atherton changed the line of his inquiry. “Does any one else know of this?”
“No,” said Marcia, quickly, “I told Mrs. Halleck and all of them that he was in New York, and I said that I had heard from him. I came to you because you were a lawyer, and you would not tell what I told you.”
“Yes,” said Atherton.
“I want it kept a secret. Oh, do you think he’s dead?” she implored.
“No,” returned Atherton, gravely, “I don’t think he’s dead.”
“Sometimes it seems to me I could bear it better if I knew he was dead. If he isn’t dead, he’s out of his mind! He’s out of his mind, don’t you think, and he’s wandered off somewhere?”
She besought him so pitifully to agree with her, bending forward and trying to read the thoughts in his face, that he could not help saying, “Perhaps.”
A gush of grateful tears blinded her, but she choked down her sobs.
“I said things to him that night that were enough to drive him crazy. I was always the one in fault, but he was always the one to make up first, and he never would have gone away from me if he had known what he was doing! But he will come back, I know he will,” she said, rising. “And oh, you won’t say anything to anybody, will you? And he’ll get back before they find out. I will send those men to you, and Bartley will see about it as soon as he comes home—”
“Don’t go, Mrs. Hubbard,” said the lawyer. “I want to speak with you a little longer.” She dropped again in her chair, and looked at him inquiringly. “Have you written to your father about this?”
“Oh, no,” she answered quickly, with an effect of shrinking back into herself.
“I think you had better do so. You can’t tell when your husband will return, and you can’t go on in this way.”
“I will never tell father,” she replied, closing her lips inexorably.
The lawyer forbore to penetrate the family trouble he divined. “Are you all alone in the house?” he asked.
“The girl is there. And the baby.”
“That won’t do, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Atherton, with a compassionate shake of the head. “You can’t go on living there alone.”
“Oh, yes, I can. I’m not afraid to be alone,” she returned with the air of having thought of this.
“But he may be absent some time yet,” urged the lawyer; “he may be absent indefinitely. You must go home to your father and wait for him there.”
“I can’t do that. He must find me here when he comes,” she answered firmly.
“But how will you stay?” pleaded Atherton; he had to deal with an unreasonable creature who could not be driven, and he must plead. “You have no money, and how can you live?”
“Oh,” replied Marcia, with the air of having thought of this too, “I will take boarders.”
Atherton smiled at the hopeless practicality, and shook his head; but he did not oppose her directly. “Mrs. Hubbard,” he said earnestly, “you have done well in coming to me, but let me convince you that this is a matter which can’t be kept. It must be known. Before you can begin to help yourself, you must let others help you. Either you must go home to your father and let your husband find you there—”
“He must find me here, in our own house.”
“Then you must tell your friends here that you don’t know where he is, nor when he will return, and let them advise together as to what can be done. You must tell the Hallecks—”
“I will never tell them!” cried Marcia. “Let me go! I can starve there and freeze, and if he finds me dead in the house, none of them shall have the right to blame him, — to say that he left me, — that he deserted his little child! Oh! oh! oh! oh! What shall I do?”
The hapless creature shook with the thick-coming sobs that overpowered her now, and Atherton refrained once more. She did not seem ashamed before him of the sorrows which he felt it a sacrilege to know, and in a blind instinctive way he perceived that in proportion as he was a stranger it was possible for her to bear her disgrace in his presence. He spoke at last from the hint he found in this fact: “Will you let me mention the matter to Miss Kingsbury?”
She looked at him with sad intensity in the eyes, as if trying to fathom any nether thought that he might have. It must have seemed to her at first that he was mocking her, but his words brought her the only relief from her self-upbraiding she had known. To suffer kindness from Miss Kingsbury would be in some sort an atonement to Bartley for the wrong her jealousy had done him; it would be self-sacrifice for his sake; it would be expiation. “Yes, tell her,” she answered with a promptness whose obscure motive was not illumined by the flash of passionate pride with which she added, “I shall not care for her.”
She rose again, and Atherton did not detain her; but when she had left him he lost no time in writing to her father the facts of the case as her visit had revealed them. He spoke of her reluctance to have her situation known to her family, but assured the Squire that he need have no anxiety about her for the present. He promised to keep him fully informed in regard to her, and to telegraph the first news of Mr. Hubbard. He left the Squire to form his own conjectures, and to take whatever action he thought best. For his own part, he had no question that Hubbard had abandoned his wife, and had stolen Halleck’s money; and the detectives to whom he went were clear that it was a case of European travel.
XXXV.
Atherton went from the detectives to Miss Kingsbury, and boldly resisted the interdict at her door, sending up his name with the message that he wished to see her immediately on business. She kept him waiting while she made a frightened toilet, and leaving the letter to him which she had begun half finished on her desk, she came down to meet him in a flutter of despondent conjecture. He took her mechanically yielded hand, and seated himself on the sofa beside her. “I sent word that I had come on business,” he said, “but it is no affair of yours,” — she hardly knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed,— “except as you make all unhappy people’s affairs your own.”
“Oh!” she murmured in meek protest, and at the same time she remotely wondered if these affairs were his.
“I came to you for help,” he began again, and again she interrupted h
im in deprecation.
“You are very good, after — after — what I — what happened, — I’m sure.” She put up her fan to her lips, and turned her head a little aside. “Of course I shall be glad to help you in anything, Mr. Atherton; you know I always am.”
“Yes, and that gave me courage to come to you, even after the way in which we parted this morning. I knew you would not misunderstand me” —
“No,” said Clara softly, doing her best to understand him.
“Or think me wanting in delicacy—”
“Oh, no, no!”
“If I believed that we need not have any embarrassment in meeting in behalf of the poor creature who came to see me just after you left me. The fact is,” he went on, “I felt a little freer to promise your interest since I had no longer any business relation to you, and could rely on your kindness like — like — any other.”
“Yes,” assented Clara, faintly; and she forbore to point out to him, as she might fitly have done, that he had never had the right to advise or direct her at which he hinted, except as she expressly conferred it from time to time. “I shall be only too glad—”
“And I will have a statement of your affairs drawn up to-morrow, and sent to you.” Her heart sank; she ceased to move the fan which she had been slowly waving back and forth before her face. “I was going to set about it this morning, but Mrs. Hubbard’s visit—”
“Mrs. Hubbard!” cried Clara, and a little air of pique qualified her despair.
“Yes; she is in trouble, — the greatest: her husband has deserted her.”
“Oh, Mr. Atherton!” Clara’s mind was now far away from any concern for herself. The woman whose husband has deserted her supremely appeals to all other women. “I can’t believe it! What makes you think so?”
“What she concealed, rather than what she told me, I believe,” answered Atherton. He ran over the main points of their interview, and summed up his own conjectures. “I know from things Halleck has let drop that they haven’t always lived happily together; Hubbard has been speculating with borrowed money, and he’s in debt to everybody. She’s been alone in her house for a fortnight, and she only came to me because people had begun to press her for money. She’s been pretending to the Hallecks that she hears from her husband, and knows where he is.”
“Oh, poor, poor thing!” said Clara, too shocked to say more. “Then they don’t know?”
“No one knows but ourselves. She came to me because I was a comparative stranger, and it would cost her less to confess her trouble to me than to them, and she allowed me to speak to you for very much the same reason.”
“But I know she dislikes me!”
“So much the better! She can’t doubt your goodness—”
“Oh!”
“And if she dislikes you, she can keep her pride better with you.”
Clara let her eyes fall, and fingered the edges of her fan. There was reason in this, and she did not care that the opportunity of usefulness was personally unflattering, since he thought her capable of rising above the fact. “What do you want me to do?” she asked, lifting her eyes docilely to his.
“You must find some one to stay with her, in her house, till she can be persuaded to leave it, and you must lend her some money till her father can come to her or write to her. I’ve just written to him, and I’ve told her to send all her bills to me; but I’m afraid she may be in immediate need.”
“Terrible!” sighed Clara to whom the destitution of an acquaintance was appalling after all her charitable knowledge of want and suffering. “Of course, we mustn’t lose a moment,” she added; but she lingered in her corner of the sofa to discuss ways and means with him, and to fathom that sad enjoyment which comfortable people find in the contemplation of alien sorrows. It was not her fault if she felt too kindly toward the disaster that had brought Atherton back to her on the old terms; or if she arranged her plans for befriending Marcia in her desolation with too buoyant a cheerfulness. But she took herself to task for the radiant smile she found on her face, when she ran up stairs and looked into her glass to see how she looked in parting with Atherton: she said to herself that he would think her perfectly heartless.
She decided that it would be indecent to drive to Marcia’s under the circumstances, and she walked; though with all the time this gave her for reflection she had not wholly banished this smile when she looked into Marcia’s woe-begone eyes. But she found herself incapable of the awkwardnesses she had deliberated, and fell back upon the native motherliness of her heart, into which she took Marcia with sympathy that ignored everything but her need of help and pity. Marcia’s bruised pride was broken before the goodness of the girl she had hated, and she performed her sacrifice to Bartley’s injured memory, not with the haughty self-devotion which she intended should humiliate Miss Kingsbury, but with the prostration of a woman spent with watching and fasting and despair. She held Clara away for a moment of scrutiny, and then submitted to the embrace in which they recognized and confessed all.
It was scarcely necessary for Clara to say that Mr. Atherton had told her; Marcia already knew that; and Clara became a partisan of her theory of Bartley’s absence almost without an effort, in spite of the facts that Atherton had suggested to the contrary. “Of course! He has wandered off somewhere, and at soon as he comes to his senses he will hurry home. Why I was reading of such a case only the other day, — the case of a minister who wandered off in just the same way, and found himself out in Western New York somewhere, after he had been gone three mouths.”
“Bartley won’t be gone three months,” protested Marcia.
“Certainly not!” cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. “In the mean time,” she added, “you must stay here; you’re quite right about that, too, but you mustn’t stay here alone: he’d be quite as much shocked at that as if he found you gone when he came back. I’m going to ask you to let my friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,” — Clara dropped her voice to a lower and gentler note,— “you mustn’t try to keep this from your friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me tell the Hallecks: they’ll be hurt if you don’t. You needn’t be troubled; of course he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and nobody will think differently.”
She adopted the fiction of Bartley’s aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton’s injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley’s valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family.
Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at.
“Oh,” he answered, “at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant.”
Clara reflected. “I don’t know whether I like that,” she said finally.
“No?” said Atherton. “Why not?”
She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully.
“I can’t say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization. But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with,” she concluded.
“And you wouldn’t approve of a man’s saying it of the woman his friend was in love with?” pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her.
“If they were very close friends.” She did not know why, but she blushed, and then grew a little pale.
“I understand what you mean,” he said, “and I shouldn’t have liked the speech from another kind of man. But Halleck’s innocence characterized it.” He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction.
“Yes, he is good,” sighed Clara. “If he were not so good, it would be hard to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he’s done.”
“It’s the best thing he could have done,” said Atherton gravely, even severely.
“I know you advised it,” asserted Clara. “But it’s a great blow to them. How strange that Mr. Hubbard should have disappeared the last night Ben was at home! I’m glad that he got away without knowing anything about it.”
Atherton drank off his tea, and refused a second cup with a gesture of his hand. “Yes, so am I,” he said. “I’m glad of every league of sea he puts behind him.” He rose, as if eager to leave the subject.
Clara rose too, with the patient acquiescence of a woman, and took his hand proffered in parting. They had certainly talked out, but there seemed no reason why he should go. He held her hand, while he asked, “How shall I make my peace with you?”
“My peace? What for?” She flushed joyfully. “I was the one in fault.”
He looked at her mystified. “Why, surely, you didn’t repeat Halleck’s remark?”
“Oh!” she cried indignantly, withdrawing her hand. “I meant this morning. It doesn’t matter,” she added. “If you still wish to resign the charge of my affairs, of course I must submit. But I thought — I thought—” She did not go on, she was too deeply hurt. Up to this moment she had imagined that she had befriended Marcia, and taken all that trouble upon herself for goodness’ sake; but now she was ready to upbraid him for ingratitude in not seeing that she had done it for his sake. “You can send me the statement, and then — and then — I don’t know what I shall do! Why do you mind what I said? I’ve often said quite as much before, and you know that I didn’t mean it. I want you to take my property back again, and never to mind anything I say: I’m not worth minding.” Her intended upbraiding had come to this pitiful effect of self-contempt, and her hand somehow was in his again. “Do take it back!”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 179
