The Quality of Mercy Part 27

"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 rest.i.tution!"

"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 quant.i.ty 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 h.e.l.l 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!" Mrs. 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?"

"Beautiful!" sighed Mrs. Munger. "I do _like_ a manly man!"

She drove home through the village slowly, hoping for a chance of a further interchange of conjectures and impressions; but she saw no one she had not already talked with till she met Dr. Morrell, driving out of the avenue from his house. She promptly set her phaeton across the road so that he could not get by, if he were rude enough to wish it.

"Doctor," she called out, "what _do_ you think of this extraordinary letter of Mr. Northwick's?"

Dr. Morrell's boyish eyes twinkled. "You mean that letter in the _Events_? Do you think Northwick wrote it?"