The Debtor Part 86

After dinner he went up to the Carroll place. He had his instructions from Carroll what to do. Some of the creditors were partly satisfied with the things belonging to the Carrolls; some were taken to the Anderson house for Charlotte. As for Charlotte herself, she was, in reality, not so far from the fever which Mrs. Anderson had predicted.

She adored her father. Every day she watched for a letter. At last Anderson told her as much as he could and not break his word to her father.

"Your father is perfectly safe, dear," he said, "and he is earning a great deal of money."

"What is he doing?" asked Charlotte, and her manner showed for the first time suspicion of her father.

"Something perfectly honest, dear," Anderson replied, simply, "but he does not want you to know and he does not want the others to know.

You just be contented and brave and make the best of it all."

That was not long before they were married. It had seemed best to them all that they should not delay long. Mrs. Carroll did not come to the wedding, because Ina was ill. Anna knew as well as Anderson what her brother was doing. She had somehow comforted her sister-in-law without telling her anything, but she did not think it best to visit Banbridge. She had at times a feeling as if she herself were doing what her brother was, and the shame and pride together stung her in the same way. She wrote by every mail to Carroll, and posted it in another town, and n.o.body knew. In one of the letters she told him with an unconcealed glee that his old enemy, the man who had brought about all this, had had a shock of paralysis.

"He will never speak again," she wrote. "He has become dead while he is alive. After all, the Lord is just."

Carroll got that letter a few weeks after Charlotte was married. One Sunday night he made a trip to Banbridge. He was close-shaven; he had grown very thin; n.o.body would have recognized him, n.o.body did recognize him, although he met several Banbridge people whom he used to know on the train. It was after dark, but the winter sky was full of stars, which seemed very near as he took his way up the street towards the Anderson house. He walked slowly when he approached the house, and frequently cast a look behind him, as if he were afraid of being seen. When he reached the house he saw the curtains in the sitting-room were not drawn, and a warm glow of home seemed to s.h.i.+ne forth into the wintry night. Carroll cautiously went up the steps, very softly. He went far enough to see the interior of the room, and he saw Charlotte and her husband sitting there. Mrs. Anderson was there also. She was reading the Bible, as befitted a Sunday night.

Now and then she looked at Charlotte with a look of the utmost love and pride. Anderson, who was reading the paper, looked up, and the watching man saw him, and his eyes and Charlotte's met. The man watching knew that no anxiety about him seriously troubled her then, that she was entirely happy, and a feeling of sublime content and delight that it should be so, and he quite outside of it all, came over him.

He went softly down the steps and along the street to the station, where he could get a train back to the City in a few moments. To his own amazement, he was quite happy, he was even more than happy. A species of exaltation possessed him. Even the thought of himself, Arthur Carroll, posing nightly as a buffoon before the City crowds, did not daunt him. He realized a kind of joyful acquiescence with even that. He felt a happy patience when he considered the time that might elapse before he could see his family again. He pa.s.sed the butcher's shop, and reflected with delight that he should be able to meet the note which was due next day. He remembered happily that he had been able to send Charlotte a little sum of money for her _trousseau_, and that perhaps a part of it had bought the pretty, rose-colored dress which she was wearing that night. Still, all this did not altogether account for the wonderful happiness which seemed to fill him as with light. He hurried along the street frozen in ridges like a sea, and he remembered what Anna had written about the man who had wronged him, and all at once he understood what filled him with this exaltation of joy, and he understood that underneath all the petty dishonors of his life had been a worse dishonor which took hold of his very soul and precipitated all the rest, and that he was now rid of it. He had no sense of triumph over his enemy, no joy that the Lord had at last wreaked vengeance upon the man who had injured him; but he was filled with an exceeding pity, and a sense of forgiveness which he had never in his life felt before. He had never forgiven before; now he forgave. He remembered, going along the streets, the words of The Lord's Prayer, "Forgive my debts as I forgive my debtors," and his very heart leaped with the knowledge that forgiveness was due him because of his forgiveness of another, and that the debt of honor to G.o.d and his own soul was paid.

THE END