William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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poor Bartley!" she cried in laughing triumph. "I don't believe any of them noticed it; and you kept twirling it round in your hands all the time to make them look."
"Yes, I did my level best," said Bartley.
They had a jolly time about that. Marcia was proud of her sacque; when she took it off and held it up by the loop in the neck, so as to realize its prettiness, she said she should make it last three winters at least; and she leaned over and gave Bartley a sweet kiss of gratitude and affection, and told him not to try to make up for it by extra work, but to help her scrimp for it.
"I'd rather do the extra work," he protested. In fact he already had the extra work done. It was something that he felt he had the right to sell outside of the Events, and he carried his manuscript to Ricker and offered it to him for his Sunday edition.
Ricker read the title and ran his eye down the first slip, and then glanced quickly at Hubbard. "You don't mean it?"
"Yes I do," said Bartley. "Why not?"
"I thought he was going to use the material himself some time."
Bartley laughed. "He use the material! Why, he can't write, any more than a hen; he can make tracks on paper, but nobody would print 'em, much less buy 'em. I know him, he's all right. It wouldn't hurt the material for his purpose, any way; and he'll be tickled to death when he sees it. If he ever does. Look here, Ricker!" added Bartley, with a touch of anger at the hesitation in his friend's face, "if you're going to spring any conscientious scruples on me, I prefer to offer my manuscript elsewhere. I give you the first chance at it; but it needn't go begging. Do you suppose I'd do this if I didn't understand the man, and know just how he'd take it?"
"Why, of course, Hubbard! I beg your pardon. If you say it's all right, I am bound to be satisfied. What do you want for it?"
"Fifty dollars."
"That's a good deal, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is. But I can't afford to do a dishonorable thing for less money," said Bartley, with a wink.
The next Sunday, when Marcia came home from church, she went into the parlor a moment to speak to Bartley before she ran upstairs to the baby. He was writing, and she put her left hand on his back while with her right she held her sacque slung over her shoulder by the loop, and leaned forward with a wandering eye on the papers that strewed the table. In that attitude he felt her pause and grow absorbed, and then rigid; her light caress tightened into a grip. "Why, how base! How shameful! That man shall never enter my doors again! Why, it's stealing!"
"What's the matter? What are you talking about?" Bartley looked up with a frown of preparation.
"This!" cried Marcia, snatching up the Chronicle-Abstract, at which she had been looking. "Haven't you seen it? Here's Mr. Kinney's life all written out! And when he said that he was going to keep it and write it out himself. That thief has stolen it!"
"Look out how you talk," said Bartley. "Kinney's an old fool, and he never could have written it out in the world—"
"That makes no difference. He said that he told the things because he knew he was among gentlemen. A great gentleman Mr. Ricker is! And I thought he was so nice!" The tears sprang to her eyes, which flashed again. "I want you to break off with him. Bartley; I don't want you to have anything to do with such a thief! And I shall be proud to tell everybody that you've broken off with him because he was a thief. Oh, Bartley—"
"Hold your tongue!" shouted her husband.
"I won't hold my tongue! And if you defend—"
"Don't you say a word against Ricker. It's all right, I tell you. You don't understand such things. You don't know what you're talking about. I—I—I wrote the thing myself."
He could face her, but she could not face him. There was a subsidence in her proud attitude, as if her physical strength had snapped with her breaking spirit.
"There's no theft about it." Bartley went on. "Kinney would never write it out, and if he did, I've put the material in better shape for him here than he could ever have given it. Six weeks from now nobody will remember a word of it; and he could tell the same things right over again, and they would be just as good as new." He went on to argue the point.
She seemed not to have listened to him. When he stopped, she said, in a quiet, passionless voice, "I suppose you wrote it to get money for this sacque."
"Yes; I did," replied Bartley.
She dropped it on the floor at his feet. "I shall never wear it again," she said in the same tone, and a little sigh escaped her.
"Use your pleasure about that," said Bartley, sitting down to his writing again, as she turned and left the room.
She went upstairs and came down immediately, with the gold nugget, which she had wrenched from the baby's necklace, and laid it on the paper before him. "Perhaps you would like to spend it for tivoli beer," she suggested. "Flavia shall not wear it."
"I'll get it fitted on to my watch-chain." Bartley slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.
The sacque still lay on the floor at his feet; he pulled his chair a little forward and put his feet on it. He feigned to write awhile longer, and then he folded up his papers, and went out, leaving Marcia to make her Sunday dinner alone. When he came home late at night, he found the sacque where she had dropped it, and with a curse he picked it up and hung it on the hat-rack in the hall.
He slept in the guest-chamber, and at times during the night the child cried in Marcia's room and waked him; and then he thought he heard a sound of sobbing which was not the child's. In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, Marcia met him with swollen eyes.
"Bartley," she said tremulously, "I wish you would tell me how you felt justified in writing out Mr. Kinney's life in that way."
"My dear," said Bartley, with perfect amiability, for he had slept off his anger, and he really felt sorry to see her so unhappy, "I would tell you almost anything you want on any other subject; but I think we had better remand that one to the safety of silence, and go upon the general supposition that I know what I'm about."
"I can't, Bartley!"
"Can't you? Well, that's a pity." He pulled his chair to the breakfast-table. "It seems to me that girl's imagination always fails her on Mondays. Can she never give us anything but hash and corn-bread when she's going to wash? However, the coffee's good. I suppose you made it?"
"Bartley!" persisted Marcia, "I want to believe in everything you do,—I want to be proud of it—"
"That will be difficult," suggested Bartley, with an air of thoughtful impartiality, "for the wife of a newspaper man."
"No, no! It needn't be! It mustn't be! If you will only tell me—" She stopped, as if she feared to repeat her offence.
Bartley leaned back in his chair and looked at her intense face with a smile. "Tell you that in some way I had Kinney's authority to use his facts? Well, I should have done that yesterday if you had let me. In the first place, Kinney's the most helpless ass in the world. He could never have used his own facts. In the second place, there was hardly anything in his rigmarole the other day that he hadn't told me down there in the lumber camp, with full authority to use it in any way I liked; and I don't see how he could revoke that authority. That's the way I reasoned about it."
"I see,—I see!" said Marcia, with humble eagerness.
"Well, that's all there is about it. What I've done can't hurt Kinney. If he ever does want to write his old facts out, he'll be glad to take my report of them, and—spoil it," said Bartley, ending with a laugh.
"And if—if there had been anything wrong about it," said Marcia, anxious to justify him to herself, "Mr. Ricker would have told you so when you offered him the article."
"I don't think Mr. Ricker would have ventured on any impertinence with me," said Bartley, with grandeur. But he lapsed into his wonted,