"Then you must tell your friends here that you don"t know where he is, nor when he will return, and let them advise together as to what can be done.
You must tell the Hallecks--"
"I will _never_ tell them!" cried Marcia. "Let me go! I can starve there and freeze, and if he finds me dead in the house, none of them shall have the right to blame him,--to say that he left me,--that he deserted his little child! Oh! oh! oh! oh! What shall I do?"
The hapless creature shook with the thick-coming sobs that overpowered her now, and Atherton refrained once more. She did not seem ashamed before him of the sorrows which he felt it a sacrilege to know, and in a blind instinctive way he perceived that in proportion as he was a stranger it was possible for her to bear her disgrace in his presence. He spoke at last from the hint he found in this fact: "Will you let me mention the matter to Miss Kingsbury?"
She looked at him with sad intensity in the eyes, as if trying to fathom any nether thought that he might have. It must have seemed to her at first that he was mocking her, but his words brought her the only relief from her self-upbraiding she had known. To suffer kindness from Miss Kingsbury would be in some sort an atonement to Bartley for the wrong her jealousy had done him; it would be self-sacrifice for his sake; it would be expiation. "Yes, tell her," she answered with a promptness whose obscure motive was not illumined by the flash of pa.s.sionate pride with which she added, "I shall not care for _her_."
She rose again, and Atherton did not detain her; but when she had left him he lost no time in writing to her father the facts of the case as her visit had revealed them. He spoke of her reluctance to have her situation known to her family, but a.s.sured the Squire that he need have no anxiety about her for the present. He promised to keep him fully informed in regard to her, and to telegraph the first news of Mr. Hubbard. He left the Squire to form his own conjectures, and to take whatever action he thought best. For his own part, he had no question that Hubbard had abandoned his wife, and had stolen Halleck"s money; and the detectives to whom he went were clear that it was a case of European travel.
x.x.xV.
Atherton went from the detectives to Miss Kingsbury, and boldly resisted the interdict at her door, sending up his name with the message that he wished to see her immediately on business. She kept him waiting while she made a frightened toilet, and leaving the letter to him which she had begun half finished on her desk, she came down to meet him in a flutter of despondent conjecture. He took her mechanically yielded hand, and seated himself on the sofa beside her. "I sent word that I had come on business,"
he said, "but it is no affair of yours,"--she hardly knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed,--"except as you make all unhappy people"s affairs your own."
"Oh!" she murmured in meek protest, and at the same time she remotely wondered if these affairs were his.
"I came to you for help," he began again, and again she interrupted him in deprecation.
"You are very good, after--after--what I--what happened,--I"m sure." She put up her fan to her lips, and turned her head a little aside. "Of course I shall be glad to help you in anything, Mr. Atherton; you know I always am."
"Yes, and that gave me courage to come to you, even after the way in which we parted this morning. I knew you would not misunderstand me"--
"No," said Clara softly, doing her best to understand him.
"Or think me wanting in delicacy--"
"Oh, no, no!"
"If I believed that we need not have any embarra.s.sment in meeting in behalf of the poor creature who came to see me just after you left me. The fact is," he went on, "I felt a little freer to promise your interest since I had no longer any business relation to you, and could rely on your kindness like--like--any other."
"Yes," a.s.sented Clara, faintly; and she forbore to point out to him, as she might fitly have done, that he had never had the right to advise or direct her at which he hinted, except as she expressly conferred it from time to time. "I shall be only too glad--"
"And I will have a statement of your affairs drawn up to-morrow, and sent to you." Her heart sank; she ceased to move the fan which she had been slowly waving back and forth before her face. "I was going to set about it this morning, but Mrs. Hubbard"s visit--"
"Mrs. Hubbard!" cried Clara, and a little air of pique qualified her despair.
"Yes; she is in trouble,--the greatest: her husband has deserted her."
"_Oh_, Mr. Atherton!" Clara"s mind was now far away from any concern for herself. The woman whose husband has deserted her supremely appeals to all other women. "I can"t believe it! What makes you think so?"
"What she concealed, rather than what she told me, I believe," answered Atherton. He ran over the main points of their interview, and summed up his own conjectures. "I know from things Halleck has let drop that they haven"t always lived happily together; Hubbard has been speculating with borrowed money, and he"s in debt to everybody. She"s been alone in her house for a fortnight, and she only came to me because people had begun to press her for money. She"s been pretending to the Hallecks that she hears from her husband, and knows where he is."
"Oh, poor, poor thing!" said Clara, too shocked to say more. "Then they don"t know?"
"No one knows but ourselves. She came to me because I was a comparative stranger, and it would cost her less to confess her trouble to me than to them, and she allowed me to speak to you for very much the same reason."
"But I know she dislikes me!"
"So much the better! She can"t doubt your goodness--"
"Oh!"
"And if she dislikes you, she can keep her pride better with you."
Clara let her eyes fall, and fingered the edges of her fan. There was reason in this, and she did not care that the opportunity of usefulness was personally unflattering, since he thought her capable of rising above the fact. "What do you want me to do?" she asked, lifting her eyes docilely to his.
"You must find some one to stay with her, in her house, till she can be persuaded to leave it, and you must lend her some money till her father can come to her or write to her. I"ve just written to him, and I"ve told her to send all her bills to me; but I"m afraid she may be in immediate need."
"Terrible!" sighed Clara to whom the dest.i.tution of an acquaintance was appalling after all her charitable knowledge of want and suffering. "Of course, we mustn"t lose a moment," she added; but she lingered in her corner of the sofa to discuss ways and means with him, and to fathom that sad enjoyment which comfortable people find in the contemplation of alien sorrows. It was not her fault if she felt too kindly toward the disaster that had brought Atherton back to her on the old terms; or if she arranged her plans for befriending Marcia in her desolation with too buoyant a cheerfulness. But she took herself to task for the radiant smile she found on her face, when she ran up stairs and looked into her gla.s.s to see how she looked in parting with Atherton: she said to herself that he would think her perfectly heartless.
She decided that it would be indecent to drive to Marcia"s under the circ.u.mstances, and she walked; though with all the time this gave her for reflection she had not wholly banished this smile when she looked into Marcia"s woe-begone eyes. But she found herself incapable of the awkwardnesses she had deliberated, and fell back upon the native motherliness of her heart, into which she took Marcia with sympathy that ignored everything but her need of help and pity. Marcia"s bruised pride was broken before the goodness of the girl she had hated, and she performed her sacrifice to Bartley"s injured memory, not with the haughty self-devotion which she intended should humiliate Miss Kingsbury, but with the prostration of a woman spent with watching and fasting and despair. She held Clara away for a moment of scrutiny, and then submitted to the embrace in which they recognized and confessed all.
It was scarcely necessary for Clara to say that Mr. Atherton had told her; Marcia already knew that; and Clara became a partisan of her theory of Bartley"s absence almost without an effort, in spite of the facts that Atherton had suggested to the contrary. "Of _course_! He has wandered off somewhere, and at soon as he comes to his senses he will hurry home. Why I was reading of such a case only the other day,--the case of a minister who wandered off in just the same way, and found himself out in Western New York somewhere, after he had been gone three mouths."
"Bartley won"t be gone three months," protested Marcia.
"Certainly not!" cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. "In the mean time," she added, "you must stay here; you"re quite right about that, too, but you mustn"t stay here alone: he"d be quite as much shocked at that as if he found you gone when he came back. I"m going to ask you to let my friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,"--Clara dropped her voice to a lower and gentler note,--"you mustn"t try to keep this from your friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me tell the Hallecks: they"ll be hurt if you don"t. You needn"t be troubled; of _course_ he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and n.o.body will think differently."
She adopted the fiction of Bartley"s aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton"s injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley"s valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family.
Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at.
"Oh," he answered, "at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant."
Clara reflected. "I don"t know whether I like that," she said finally.
"No?" said Atherton. "Why not?"
She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully.
"I can"t say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization.
But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with," she concluded.
"And you wouldn"t approve of a man"s saying it of the woman his friend was in love with?" pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her.
"If they were very close friends." She did not know why, but she blushed, and then grew a little pale.
"I understand what you mean," he said, "and I shouldn"t have liked the speech from another kind of man. But Halleck"s innocence characterized it."
He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction.
"Yes, he is good," sighed Clara. "If he were not so good, it would be hard to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he"s done."
"It"s the best thing he could have done," said Atherton gravely, even severely.