The Quality of Mercy

"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."

"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!" 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?"

"Why, don't you, doctor?" she questioned back, with a note of personal grievance in her voice.

"I'm not very well acquainted with his style. Then, you think he did write it? Of course, there are always various opinions. But I understood you thought he was burned in that accident last winter."

"Now, doctor!" said Mrs. Munger, with the pout which Putney said always made him want to kill her. "You're just trying to tease me; I know you are. I'm going to drive right in and see Mrs. Morrell. She will tell me what you think."

"I don't believe you can see her," said the doctor. "She isn't at all well."

"Oh, I'm sorry for that. I don't understand what excuse she has, though, with a physician for her husband. You must turn hom[oe]opathy. Dr. Morrell, do you think it's true that Jack Wilmington will offer himself to Sue Northwick, now that it's come to the worst with her? Wouldn't it be romantic?"

"Very," said the doctor. He craned his head out of the buggy, as if to see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger. He said politely, as he started, "Don't disturb yourself! I can get by."

She sent a wail of reproach after him, and then continued toward South Hatboro'. As she passed the lodge at the gate of the Northwick avenue, where the sisters now lived, she noted that the shades were closely drawn. They were always drawn on the side toward the street, but Mrs. Munger thought it interesting that she had never noticed it before, and in the dearth of material she made the most of it, both for her own emotion, and for the sensation of others when she reached South Hatboro'.

Behind the drawn shades that Mrs. Munger noted, Adeline Northwick sat crying over the paper that Elbridge Newton had pushed under the door that morning. It was limp from the nervous clutch and tremor of her hands, and wet with her tears; but she kept reading her father's letter in it, and trying to puzzle out of it some hope or help. "He must be crazy, he must be crazy," she moaned, more to herself than to Suzette, who sat rigidly and silently by. "He couldn't have been so cruel, if he had been in his right mind; he couldn't! He was always so good to us, and so thoughtful; he must have known that we had given him up for dead, long ago; and he has let us go on grieving for him all this time. It's just as if he had come back from death, and the first he did was to tell us that everything they said against him was true, and that everything we said and believed was all wrong. How could he do it, how could he do it! We bore to think he was dead; yes, we bore that, and we didn't complain; but this is more than any one can ask us to bear. Oh, Suzette, what can we say, now? What can we say, after he's confessed himself that he took the money, and that he has got part of it yet? But I know he didn't! I know he hasn't! He's crazy! Oh, poor, poor father! Don't you think he must be crazy? And where is he? Why don't he write to us, and tell us what he wants us to do? Does he think we would tell any one where he was? That shows he's out of his mind. I always thought that if he could come back to life somehow, he'd prove that they had lied about him; and now! Oh, it isn't as if it were merely the company that was concerned, or what people said; but it's as if our own father, that we trusted so much, had broken his word to us. That is what kills me."

The day passed. They sent Mrs. Newton away when she came to help them at dinner. They locked their doors, and shut themselves in from the world, as mourners do with death. Adeline's monologue went on, with the brief responses which she extorted from Suzette, and at last it ceased, as if her heart had worn itself out in the futile repetition of its griefs.

Then Suzette broke her silence with words that seemed to break from it of themselves in their abrupt irrelevance to what Adeline had last said. "We must give it up!"

"Give what up?" Adeline groaned back.

"The house – and the farm – and this hovel. Everything! It isn't ours."

"Not ours?"

"No. That letter makes it theirs – the people's whose money he took. We must send for Mr. Putney and tell him to give it to them. He will know how."

Adeline looked at her sister's face in dismay. She gasped out, "Why, but Mr. Putney says it's ours, and nobody can touch it!"

"That was before. Now it is theirs; and if we kept it from them we should be stealing it. How do we know that father had any right to give it to us when he did?"

"Suzette!"

"I keep thinking such things, and I had better say them unless I want to go out of my senses. Once I would have died before I gave it up, because he left it to us, and now it seems as if I couldn't live till I gave it up, because he left it to us. No, I can never forgive him, if he is my father. I can never speak to him again, or see him; never! He is dead to me, now!"

The words seemed to appeal to the contrary-mindedness that lurks in such natures as Adeline's. "Why, I don't see what there is so wrong about father's letter," she began. "It just shows what I always said: that his mind was affected by his business troubles, and that he wandered away because he couldn't get them straight. And now it's preyed so upon him that he's beginning to believe the things they say are true, and to blame himself. That's the way I look at it."

"Adeline!" Suzette commanded, with a kind of shriek, "Be still! You know you don't believe that!"

Adeline hesitated between her awe of her sister, and her wish to persist in a theory which, now that she had formulated it for Suzette's confusion, she found effective for her own comfort. She ventured at last, "It is what I said, the first thing, and I shall always say it, Suzette; and I have a right."

"Say what you please. I shall say nothing. But this property doesn't belong to us till father comes back to prove it."

"Comes back!" Adeline gasped. "Why, they'll send him to State's prison!"

"They won't send him to State's prison if he's innocent, and if he isn't – "

"Suzette! Don't you dare!"

"But that has nothing to do with it. We must give up what doesn't belong to us. Will you go for Mr. Putney, or shall I go? I'm not afraid to be seen, if you don't like to go. I can hold up my head before the whole world, now I know what we ought to do, and we're going to do it; but if we kept this place after that letter, I couldn't even look you in the face again." She continued to Adeline's silence, "Why, we needn't either of us go! I can get Elbridge to go." She made as if to leave the room.

"Wait! I can't let you – yet. I haven't thought it out," said Adeline.

"Not thought it out!" Suzette went back and stood over her where she sat in her rocking-chair.

"No!" said Adeline, shrinking from her fierce look, but with a gathering strength of resistance in her heart. "Because you've been thinking of it, you expect me to do what you say in an instant. The place was mother's, and when she died it came to me, and I hold it in trust for both of us; that's what Mr. Putney says. Even supposing that father did use their money – and I don't believe he did – I don't see why I should give up mother's property to them." She waited a moment before she said, "And I won't."

"Is half of it mine?" asked Suzette.

"I don't know. Yes, I suppose so."

"I'm of age, and I shall give up my half. I'm going to send for Mr. Putney." She went out of the room, and came back with her hat and gloves on, and her jacket over her arm. She had never been so beautiful, or so terrible. "Listen to me, Adeline," she said, "I'm going out to send Elbridge for Mr. Putney; and when he comes I am not going to have any squabbling before him. You can do what you please with your half of the property, but I'm going to give up my half to the company. Now, if you don't promise you'll freely consent to what I want to do with my own, I will never come back to this house, or ever see you again, or speak to you. Do you promise?"

"Oh, well, I promise," said Adeline, forlornly, with a weak dribble of tears. "You can take your half of the place that mother owned, and give it to the men that are trying to destroy father's character! But I shall never say that I wanted you should do it."

"So that you don't say anything against it, I don't care what else you say." Suzette put on her jacket and stood buttoning it at her soft throat. "I do it; and I do it for mother's sake and for father's. I care as much for them as you do."

In the evening Putney came, and she told him she wished him to contrive whatever form was necessary to put her father's creditors in possession of her half of the estate. "My sister doesn't feel as I do about it," she ended. "She thinks they have no right to it, and we ought to keep it. But she has agreed to let me give my half up."

Putney went to the door and threw out the quid of tobacco which he had been absently chewing upon while she spoke. "You know," he explained, "that the creditors have no more claim on this estate, in law, than they have on my house and lot?"

"I don't know. I don't care for the law."

"The case isn't altered at all, you know, by the fact that your father is still living, and your title isn't affected by any of the admissions made in the letter he has published."

"I understand that," said the girl.

"Well," said Putney, "I merely wanted to make sure you had all the bearings of the case. The thing can be done, of course. There's nothing to prevent any one giving any one else a piece of property."

He remained silent for a moment, as if doubtful whether to say more, and Adeline asked, "And do you believe that if we were to give up the property, they'd let father come back?"

Putney could not control a smile at her simplicity. "The creditors have got nothing to do with that, Miss Northwick. Your father has been indicted, and he's in contempt of court as long as he stays away. There can't be any question of mercy till he comes back for trial."

"But if he came back," she persisted, "our giving up the property would make them easier with him?"

"A corporation has no bowels of compassion, Miss Northwick. I shouldn't like to trust one. The company has no legal claim on the estate. Unless you think it has a moral claim, you'd better hold on to your property."

"And do you think it has a moral claim?"

Putney drew a long breath. "Well, that's a nice question." He stroked his trousers down over his little thin leg, as he sat. "I have some peculiar notions about corporations. I don't think a manufacturing company is a benevolent institution, exactly. It isn't even a sanitarium. It didn't come for its health; it came to make money, and it makes it by a profit on the people who do its work and the people who buy its wares. Practically, it's just like everything else that earns its bread by the sweat of its capital – neither better nor worse." Launched in this direction, Putney recalled himself with an effort from the prospect of an irrelevant excursion in the fields of speculative economy. "But as I understand, the question is not so much whether the Ponkwasset Mills have a moral claim, as whether you have a moral obligation. And there I can't advise. You would have to go to a clergyman. I can only say that if the property were mine I should hold on to it, and let the company be damned, or whatever could happen to a body that hadn't a soul for that purpose."

Putney thrust his hand into his pocket for his tobacco; and then recollected himself, and put it back.

"There, Suzette!" said Adeline.

Suzette had listened in a restive silence, while Putney was talking with her sister. She said in answer to him: "I don't want advice about that. I wished to know whether I could give up my part of the estate to the company, and if you would do it for me at once."

"Oh, certainly," said Putney. "I will go down to Boston to-morrow morning and see their attorney."

"Their attorney? I thought you would have to go to Mr. Hilary."

"He would send me to their lawyer, I suppose. But I can go to him first, if you wish."