The Quality of Mercy Part 47

"But it's three miles!" Adeline shrieked. "You can never get there in the world in time for the train. Oh, why didn't I tell Elbridge to come for you! I must go and tell him to get ready right away."

"No, I'll go!" said Suzette. "Adeline!"

Adeline flung the door open, and started back, with a cry, from the dark, van-like vehicle before the door, which looked like the Black Maria, or an undertaker's wagon, in the pale light.

"It's me," said Elbridge's voice from the front of it, and Elbridge's head dimly showed itself. "I got to thinkin' maybe you'd want the carryall, and I didn't know but what I'd better go and hitch up, anyway."

"Oh, well, we _did_!" cried Adeline, with an hysterical laugh. "Here, now, father, get right in! Don't lose a second. Kiss Suzette; good-by!

Be sure you get him to East Hatboro' in time for the four-forty, Elbridge!" She helped her father, shaking and stumbling, into the shelter of the curtained carryall. "If anybody tries to stop you--"

"I'd like to see anybody try to stop me," said Elbridge, and he whipped up his horse. Then he leaned back toward Northwick, and said, "I'm going to get the black colt's time out of the old mare."

"Which mare is it?" Northwick asked.

VII.

On his way home from the station, Elbridge Newton began to have some anxieties. He had no longer occasion for any about Northwick, he was safe on his way back to Canada; and Elbridge's anxieties were for himself. He was in the cold fit after his act of ardent generosity. He had no desire to entangle himself with the law by his act of incivism in helping Northwick to escape, and he thought it might be well to put himself on the safe side by seeing Putney about it, and locking the stable after the horse was stolen.

He drove round by the lawyer's house, and stopped at his gate just as Putney pushed his lawn-mower up to it, in his exercise of the instrument before breakfast.

Elbridge leaned out of the carryall, and asked, in a low confidential voice, "If J. Milton Northwick was to come back here, on the sly, say, to see his family, and I was to help him git off again, would I be li'ble?"

"Why?" asked Putney.

"Because I just done it," said Elbridge, desperately.

"Just done it?" shouted Putney. "Why, confound you!" He suddenly brought his voice down. "Do you mean to tell me the fellow's been back here, and you didn't let me know?"

"I hadn't any orders to do it," Elbridge weakly urged.

"Orders, the devil!" Putney retorted. "I'd 'a' given a hundred dollars to see that man and talk with him. Come, now; tell me all you know about it! Don't miss a thing!" After a few words from Newton, he broke out: "Found him in the house! And I was down there prowling round the place myself not three hours before! Go on! Great Scott! Just think of it!"

Putney was at one of those crises of his life when his drink-devil was besetting him with sore temptation, and for the last twenty-four hours he had been fighting it with the ruses and pretences which he had learned to employ against it, but he felt that he was losing the game, though he was playing for much greater stakes than usual. He had held out so long since his last spree, that if he lost now he would defeat hopes that were singularly precious and sacred to him: the hopes that those who loved him best, and distrusted him most, and forgave him soonest, had begun to cherish. It would not break his wife's heart; she was used to his lapses; but it would wring it more cruelly than usual if he gave way now.

When the fiend thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superst.i.tions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the place where they lived, as if there might be rescue for him in the mere vicinity of those women who had appealed to him in their distress, as to a faithful enemy. His professional pride, his personal honor, were both involved in the feeling that he must not fail them; their implicit reliance had been a source of strength to him. He was always hoping for some turn of affairs which would enable him to serve them, or rather to serve Adeline; for he cared little for Suzette, or only secondarily; and since Pinney had gone upon his mission to Canada he was daily looking for this chance to happen. He must keep himself for that, and not because of them alone, but because those dearest to him had come tacitly to connect his resistance of the tempter with his zeal for the interests of his clients. With no more reasoned motives than these he had walked over the Northwick place, calling himself a fool for supposing that some virtue should enter into him out of the ground there, and yet finding a sort of relief, in the mere mechanical exercise, the novelty of exploring by night the property grown so familiar to him by day, and so strangely mixed up with the great trial and problem of his own usefulness.

He listened by turns, with a sinking and a rising heart, as Newton now dug the particulars of his adventure out of himself. At the end, he turned to go into the house.

"Well, what do you say, Squire Putney?" Elbridge called softly after him.

"Say?"

"You know: about what I done."

"Keep your mouth shut about what you 'done.' I should like to see you sent to jail, though, for what you didn't do."

Elbridge felt a consolatory quality in Putney's resentment, and Putney, already busy with the potentialities of the future, was buoyed up by the strong excitement of what had actually happened rather than finally cast down by what he had missed. He took three cups of the blackest coffee at breakfast, and he said to the mute, anxious face of his wife, "Well, Ellen, I seem to be pulling through, somehow."

VIII.

Adeline was in a flutter of voluble foreboding till Elbridge came back.

She asked Suzette whether she believed their father would get away; she said she knew that Elbridge would miss the train, with that slow, old mare, and their father would be arrested. Weak as she was from the sick-bed she had left to welcome him, she dressed herself carefully, so as to be ready for the worst; she was going to jail with him if they brought him back; she had made up her mind to that. From time to time she went out and looked up the road, to see if Elbridge was coming back alone, or whether the officers were bringing her father; she expected they would bring him first to his family; she did not know why. Suzette tried to keep her indoors; to make her lie down. She refused, with wild upbraidings. She declared that Suzette had never cared anything for her father; she had wanted to give their mother's property away, to please the Hilarys; and now that she was going to marry Matt Hilary, she was perfectly indifferent to everything else. She asked Suzette what had come over her.

Elbridge drove first to the stable and put up his horse, when he came back. Then he walked to the lodge to report.

"Is he safe? Did he get away? Where is he?" Adeline shrieked at him before he could get a word out.

"He's all right, Miss Northwick," Elbridge answered soothingly. "He's on his way back to Canady, again."

"Then I've driven him away!" she lamented. "I've hunted him out of his home, and I shall never see him any more. Send for him! _Send_ for him!

Bring him _back_, I tell you! Go right straight after him, and tell him I said to come back! What are you standing there for?"

She fell fainting. Elbridge helped Suzette carry her upstairs to her bed, and then ran to get his wife, to stay with them while he went for the doctor.

Matt Hilary had been spending the night at the rectory with Wade, and he walked out to take leave of Suzette once more before he went home. He found the doctor just driving away. "Miss Northwick seems not so well,"

said the doctor. "I'm very glad you happen to be here, on all accounts.

I shall come again later in the day."

Matt turned from the shadow of mystery the doctor's manner left, and knocked at the door. It was opened by Suzette almost before he touched it.

"Come in," she said, in a low voice, whose quality fended him from her almost as much as the conditional look she gave him. The excited babble of the sick woman overhead, mixed with Mrs. Newton's nasal attempts to quiet her, broke in upon their talk.

"Mr. Hilary," said Suzette, formally, "are you willing my father should come back, no matter what happens?"

"If he wishes to come back. You know what I have always said."

"And you would not care if they put him in prison?"

"I should care very much."

"You would be ashamed of me!"

"No! Never! What has it to do with you?"

"Then," she pursued, "he has come back. He has been here." She flashed all the fact upon him in vivid, rapid phrases, and he listened with an intelligent silence that stayed and comforted her as no words could have done. Before she had finished, his arms were round her, and she felt how inalienably faithful he was. "And now Adeline is raving to have him come back again, and stay. She thinks she drove him away; she will die if something can't be done. She says she would not let him stay because--because you would be ashamed of us. She says I would be ashamed--"

"Suzette! Sue!" Adeline called down from the chamber above, "don't you let Mr. Hilary go before I get there. I want to speak to him," and while they stared helplessly at each other, they heard her saying to Mrs.

Newton, "Yes, I shall, too! I'm perfectly rested, now; and I shall go down. I should think I knew how I felt. I don't care what the doctor said; and if you try to stop me--" She came clattering down the stairs in the boots which she had pulled loosely on, and as soon as she showed her excited face at the door, she began; "I've thought out a plan, Mr.

Hilary, and I want you should go and see Mr. Putney about it. You ask him if it won't do. They can get father let out on bail, when he comes back, and I can be his bail, and then, when there's a trial, they can take me instead of him. It won't matter to the court which they have, as long as they have somebody. Now, you go and ask Mr. Putney. I know he'll say so, for he's thought just as I have about father's case, all along.

Will you go?"