Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.”

  IX.

  They did not discuss Northwick’s letter at the dinner-parties in Hatboro’ because, socially speaking, they never dined there; but the stores, the shops, the parlors, buzzed with comment on it; it became a part of the forms of salutation, the color of the day’s joke. Gates, the provision man, had to own the error of his belief in Northwick’s death. He found his account in being the only man to own that he ever had such a belief; he was a comfort to those who said they had always had their doubts of it; the ladies of South Hatboro’, who declared to a woman that they had never believed it, respected the simple heart of a man who acknowledged that he had never questioned it. Such a man was not one to cheat his customers in quantity or quality; that stood to reason; his faith restored him to the esteem of many.

  Mr. Gerrish was very bitter about the double fraud which he said Northwick had practised on the community, in having allowed the rumor of his death to gain currency. He denounced him to Mrs. Munger, making an early errand from South Hatboro’ to the village to collect public opinion, as a person who had put himself beyond the pale of public confidence, and whose professions of repentance for the past, and good intention for the future, he tore to shreds. “It is said, and I have no question correctly, that hell is paved with good intentions — if you will excuse me, Mrs. Munger. When Mr. Northwick brings forth fruits meet for repentance — when he makes the first payment to his creditors — I will believe that he is sorry for what he has done, and not till then.”

  “That is true,” said Mrs. Munger. “I wonder what Mr. Putney will have to say to all this. Can he feel that his skirts are quite clean, acting that way, as the family counsel of the Northwicks, after all he used to say against him?”

  Mr. Gerrish expressed his indifference by putting up a roll of muslin on the shelf while he rejoined, “I care very little for the opinions of Mr. Putney on any subject.”

  In some places Mrs. Munger encountered a belief, which she did not discourage, that the Northwick girls had known all along that their father was alive, and had been in communication with him; through Putney, most probably. In the light of this conjecture the lawyer’s character had a lurid effect, which it did not altogether lose when Jack Wilmington said, bluntly, “What of it? He’s their counsel. He’s not obliged to give the matter away. He’s obliged to keep it.”

  “But isn’t it very inconsistent,” Mrs. Munger urged, “after all he used to say against Mr. Northwick?”

  “I suppose it’s a professional, not a personal matter,” said Wilmington.

  “And then, their putting on mourning! Just think of it!” M
rs. Munger appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew’s savagery of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always to feel in it.

  “Yes. Do you suppose they meant it for a blind?”

  “Why, that’s what people think now, don’t they?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think, Jack?”

  “I think they’re a pack of fools!” he blurted out, like a man who avenges on the folly of others the hurt of his own conscience. He cast a look of brutal contempt at Mrs. Munger, who said she thought so, too.

  “It is too bad the way people allow themselves to talk,” she went on. “To be sure, Sue Northwick has never done anything to make herself loved in Hatboro’ — not among the ladies at least.”

  Mrs. Wilmington gave a spluttering laugh, and said, “And I suppose it’s the ladies who allow themselves to talk as they do. I can’t get the men in my family to say a word against her.”

  Jack scowled his blackest. “It would be a pitiful scoundrel that did. Her misfortunes ought to make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a man.”

  “Well, so it does. That is just what I was saying. The trouble is that they don’t make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a woman,” Mrs. Wilmington teased.

  “I know it doesn’t,” Jack returned, in helpless scorn, as he left Mrs. Munger alone to his aunt.

  “Do you suppose he still cares anything for her?” Mrs. Munger asked, with cosey confidentiality.

  “Who knows?” Mrs. Wilmington rejoined, indolently. “It would be very poetical, wouldn’t it, if he were to seize the opportunity to go back to her?”