The Quality of Mercy. William Dean Howells
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a pang that it was all true. He was being quite as aptly visited for his transgression; his heart was being wrung, too, by the very things that could hurt it most. He had not been very well of late, and was not feeling physically strong; his anxieties had preyed upon him, and he had never felt the need of the comfort and quiet of his home so much as now when he was forced to leave it. Never had it all been so precious; never had the beauty and luxury of it seemed so great. All that was nothing, though, to the thought of his children, especially of that youngest child, whom his heart was so wrapt up in, and whom he was going to leave to shame and ruin. The words she had spoken from her pride in him, her ignorant censure of that drunkard, as a man who had better die since he had become nothing but a burden and disgrace to his family, stung on as if by incessant repetition. He had crazy thoughts, impulses, fantasies, in which he swiftly dreamed renunciation of escape. Then he knew that it would not avail anything to remain; it would not avail anything even to die; nothing could avail anything at once, but in the end, his going would avail most. He must go; it would break the child's heart to face his shame, and she must face it. He did not think of his eldest daughter, except to think that the impending disaster could not affect her so ruinously.
"My God, my God!" he groaned, as he went up stairs. Adeline called from the room he had left, "Did you speak, father?"
He had a conscience, that mechanical conscience which becomes so active in times of great moral obliquity, against telling a little lie, and saying he had not spoken. He went on up stairs without answering anything. He indulged the self pity, a little longer, of feeling himself an old man forced from his home, and he had a blind reasonless resentment of the behavior of the men who were driving him away, and whose interests, even at that moment, he was mindful of. But he threw off this mood when he entered his room, and settled himself to business. There was a good deal to be done in the arrangement of papers for his indefinite absence, and he used the same care in providing for some minor contingencies in the company's affairs as in leaving instructions to his children for their action until they should hear from him again. Afterwards this curious scrupulosity became a matter of comment among those privy to it; some held it another proof of the ingrained rascality of the man, a trick to suggest lenient construction of his general conduct in the management of the company's finances, others saw in it an interesting example of the involuntary operation of business instincts which persisted at a juncture when the man might be supposed to have been actuated only by the most intensely selfish motives.
The question was not settled even in the final retrospect, when it appeared that at the very moment that Northwick showed himself mindful of the company's interests on those minor points, he was defrauding it further in the line of his defalcations, and keeping back a large sum of money that belonged to it. But at that moment Northwick did not consider that this money necessarily belonged to the company, any more than his daughters' house and farm belonged to it. To be sure it was the fruit of money he had borrowed or taken from the company and had used in an enormously successful deal; but the company had not earned it, and in driving him into a corner, in forcing him to make instant restitution of all its involuntary loans, it was justifying him in withholding this part of them. Northwick was a man of too much sense to reason explicitly to this effect, but there was a sophistry, tacitly at work in him to this effect, which made it possible for him to go on and steal more where he had already stolen so much. In fact it presented the further theft as a sort of duty. This sum, large as it was, really amounted to nothing in comparison with the sum he owed the company; but it formed his only means of restitution, and if he did not take it and use it to that end, he might be held recreant to his moral obligations. He contended, from that vestibule of his soul where he was not a thief, with that self of his inmost where he was a thief, that it was all most fortunate, if not providential, as it had fallen out. Not only had his broker sent him that large check for his winnings in stocks the day before, but Northwick had, contrary to his custom, cashed the check, and put the money in his safe instead of banking it. Now he could perceive a leading in the whole matter, though at the time it seemed a flagrant defiance of chance, and a sort of invitation to burglars. He seemed to himself like a burglar, when he had locked the doors and pulled down the curtains, and stood before the safe working the combination. He trembled, and when at last the mechanism announced its effect, with a slight click of the withdrawing bolt, he gave a violent start. At the same time there came a rough knock at the door, and Northwick called out in the choking, incoherent voice of one suddenly roused from sleep: "Hello! Who's there? What is it?"
"It's me," said Elbridge.
"Oh, yes! Well! All right! Hold on, a minute! Ah—you can come back in ten or fifteen minutes. I'm not quite ready for you, yet." Northwick spoke the first broken sentences from the safe, where he stood in a frenzy of dismay; the more collected words were uttered from his desk, where he ran to get his pistol. He did not know why he thought Elbridge might try to force his way in; perhaps it was because any presence on the outside of the door would have terrified him. He had time to recognize that he was not afraid for the money, but that he was afraid for himself in the act of taking it.
Elbridge gave a cough on the other side of the door, and said with a little hesitation, "All right," and Northwick heard him tramp away, and go down stairs.
He went back to the safe and pulled open the heavy door, whose resistance helped him shake off his nervousness. Then he took the money from the drawer where he had laid it, counted it, slipped it into the inner pocket of his waistcoat, and buttoned it in there. He shut the safe and locked it. The succession of these habitual acts calmed him more and more, and after he had struck a match and kindled the fire on his hearth, which he had hitherto forgotten, he was able to settle again to his preparations in writing.
VI.
When Elbridge came back, Northwick called out, "Come in!" and then went and unlocked the door for him. "I forgot it was locked," he said, carelessly. "Do you think the colt's going to be lame?"
"Well, I don't like the way she behaves, very well. Them shoes have got to come off." Elbridge stood at the corner of the desk, and diffused a strong smell of stable through the hot room.
"You'll see to it, of course," said Northwick. "I'm going away in the morning, and I don't know just how long I shall be gone." Northwick satisfied his mechanical scruple against telling a lie by this formula; and in its shelter he went on to give Elbridge instructions about the management of the place in his absence. He took some money from his pocket-book and handed it to him for certain expenses, and then he said, "I want to take the five o'clock train, that reaches Ponkwasset at nine. You can drive me up with the black mare."
"All right," said Elbridge; but his tone expressed a shadow of reluctance that did not escape Northwick.
"Anything the matter?" he asked.
"I dunno. Our little boy don't seem to be very well."
"What ails him?" asked Northwick, with the sympathy it was a relief for him to feel.
"Well, Dr. Morrell's just been there, and he's afraid it's the membranous crou—" The last letter stuck in Elbridge's throat; he gulped it down.
"Oh, I hope not," said Northwick.
"He's comin' back again—he had to go off to another place—but I could see 'twa'n't no use," said Elbridge with patient despair; he had got himself in hand again, and spoke clearly.
Northwick shrank back from the shadow sweeping so near him; a shadow thrown from the skies, no doubt, but terrible in its blackness on the earth. "Why, of course, you mustn't think of leaving your wife. You must telephone Simpson to come for me."
"All right." Elbridge took himself away.
Northwick watched him across the icy stable-yard, going to the coachman's quarters in that cosy corner of the spreading barn; the windows were still as cheerily bright with lamplight as when they struck a pang of dumb envy to Northwick's heart. The child's sickness must have been very sudden for his daughters not to have known of it. He thought he ought to call Adeline, and send her in there to those poor