Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “We can’t. We don’t know whether they’re ours.”

  “Not ours?”

  “They may belong to the creditors. We must wait till the trial is over.”

  Adeline made no answer. They had disputed enough about that trial, which they understood so little. Adeline had always believed they ought to speak to a lawyer about it; but Suzette had not been willing. Even when a man came that morning with a paper which he said was an attachment, and left it with them, they had not agreed to ask advice. For one thing, they did not know whom to ask. Northwick had a lawyer in Boston; but they had been left to the ignorance in which most women live concerning such matters, and they did not know his name.

  Now Adeline resolved to act upon a plan of her own that she had kept from Suzette because she thought Suzette would not like it. Her sister went to her room after dinner, and then Adeline put on her things and let herself softly out into the night. She took that paper the man had left, and she took the deeds of the property which her father had given her soon after her mother died, while Sue was a little girl. He said that the deeds were recorded, and that she could keep them safely enough, and she had kept them ever since in the box where her old laces were, and her mother’s watch, that had never been wound up since her death.

  Adeline was not afraid of the dark on the road or in the lonely village-streets; but when she rang at the lawyer Putney’s door, her heart beat so with fright that it seemed as if it must jump out of her mouth. She came to him because she had always heard that, in spite of his sprees, he was the smartest lawyer in Hatboro’; and she believed that he could protect their rights if any one could. At the same time she wished justice to be done, though they should suffer, and she came to Putney, partly because she knew he had always disliked her father, and she reasoned that such a man would be less likely to advise her against the right in her interest than a friendlier person.

  Putney came to the door himself, as he was apt to do at night, when he was in the house, and she saw him control his surprise at sight of her. “Can I see — see — see you a moment,” she stammered out, “about some — some law business?”

  “Certainly,” said Putney, with grave politeness. “Will you come in?” He led the way into the parlor, where he was reading when she rang, and placed a chair for her, and then shut the parlor door, and waited for her to offer him the papers that rattled in her nervous clutch.

  “It’s this one that I want to show you first,” she said, and she gave him the writ of attachment. “A man left it this noon, and we don’t know what it means.”

  “It means,” said Putney, “that your father’s creditors have brought suit against his estate, and have attached his property so that you cannot sell it, or put it out of your hands in any way. If the court declares him insolvent, then everything belonging to him must go to pay his debts.”

  “But what can we do? We can’t buy anything to feed the stock, and they will suffer,” cried Adeline.

  “I don’t think long,” said Putney. “Some one will be put in charge of the place, and then the stock will be taken care of by the creditors.”

  “And will they turn us out? Can they take our house? It is our house — mine and my sister’s; here are the deeds that my father gave me long ago; and he said they were recorded.” Her voice grew shrill.

  Putney took the deeds, and glanced at the recorder’s endorsement before he read them. He seemed to Adeline a long time; and she had many fears till he handed them back to her. “The land, and the houses, and all the buildings are yours and your sister’s, Miss Northwick, and your father’s creditors can’t touch them.”

  The tears started from Adeline’s eyes; she fell weakly back in her chair and let them run silently down her worn face. After a while Putney said, gently, “Was this all you wanted to ask me?”

  “That is all,” Adeline answered, and she began blindly to put her papers together. He helped her. “How much is there to pay?” she asked, with an anxiety she could not keep out of her voice.

  “Nothing. I haven’t done you any legal service. Almost any man you showed those papers to could have told you as much as I have.” She tried to gasp out some acknowledgments and protests as he opened the doors for her. At the outer threshold he said, “Why, you’re alone!”

  “Yes. I’m not at all afraid—”

  “I will go home with you.” Putney caught his hat from the rack, and plunged into a shabby overcoat that dangled under it.

  Adeline tried to refuse, but she could not. She was trembling so that it seemed as if she could not have set one foot before the other without help. She took his arm, and stumbled along beside him through the quiet, early spring night.

  After a while he said, “Miss Northwick, there’s a little piece of advice I should like to give you.”

  “Well?” she quavered, meekly.

  “Don’t let anybody lead you into the expense of trying to fight this case with the creditors. It wouldn’t be any use. Your father was deeply involved—”

  “He had been unfortunate, but he didn’t do anything wrong,” Adeline hastened to put in, nervously.

  “It isn’t a question of that,” said Putney, with a smile which he could safely indulge in the dark. “But he owed a great deal of money, and his creditors will certainly be able to establish their right to everything but the real estate.”

  “My sister never wished to have anything to do with the trial. We intended just to let it go.”

  “That’s the best way,” Putney said.

  “But I wanted to know whether they could take the house and the place from us.”

  “That was right, and I assure you they can’t touch either. If you get anxious, come to me again — as often as you like.”

  “I will, indeed, Mr. Putney,” said the old maid, submissively. She let him walk home with her, and up the avenue till they came in sight of the house. Then she plucked her hand away from his arm, and thanked him, with a pathetic little titter. “I don’t know what Suzette would say if she knew I had been to consult you,” she suggested.

  “It’s for you to tell her,” said Putney, seriously. “But you’d better act together. You will need all your joint resources in that way.”

  “Oh, I shall tell her,” said Adeline. “I’m not sorry for it, and I think just as you do, Mr. Putney.”

  “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-class 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. N
ow 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 assignee’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 fashion 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 class 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 punishing 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 passed 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 assurance 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 friendship 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 assignee’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 associated 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 Ponkwasset 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 Ponkwasset 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 passengers’ 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 an
d 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 passed 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.