"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.
"It is something that we didn"t mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and I won"t say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham"s partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation of Mrs. Hasketh"s position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.
"Oh, don"t go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn"t help coming, and I don"t blame you at all. I don"t blame Mr. Tedham even. I didn"t suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that"s all long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March, and I don"t feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used to judge _him_. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don"t presume I"ve got very much love for him now, but I don"t want to punish him any more. That"s gone out of me. I don"t know how it came to go, but it went. I wish he hadn"t ever got anything more to do with us, but I"m afraid we haven"t had all our punishment yet, whatever _he_ has. It seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."
I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife"s sense of humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."
Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on, and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word, "that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had, and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over, and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I looked at it."
"And I a.s.sure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,"
said my wife.
"So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,"
the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was arguing it with herself, "and did what I could to make her forget him, I think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr.
Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as well as we did. There was n.o.body for her to look to but us, and he knew that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he _had_ no family but his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very fond of her, I don"t deny that; I don"t think it was any merit in him to love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I couldn"t bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down, all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I _was_ weak! But I couldn"t, I simply couldn"t. She was only between seven and eight when it happened--"
"I thought she was older," I ventured to put in, remembering my impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.
"No," said Mrs. Hasketh, "she always appeared rather old for her age, and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn"t ask about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that way about--how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of it; and by and by she didn"t speak of it. She had some of his lightness, and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes.
Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for life, and that was the reason she didn"t speak of him; she had given him up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn"t my duty to take her to see him--where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn"t take her. You may be sure I wasn"t anxious for the responsibility of _not_ doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham."
I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I had no doubt she was telling the truth.
"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course I let her--"
My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence, which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.
"I presume he told you?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."
"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four years and let our place here."
"I didn"t know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his throat to explain:
"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."
"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences concerning the severity of Tedham"s sentence in coming out of the court-room together.
"_I_ hadn"t any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange _we_ should be in Canada, and not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going to a convent school there as externes--outside pupils, you know," Mrs.
Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them--she is a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm _affections_--and when her little girl friend went into the convent to go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and--we let her.
That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent.
Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don"t mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father"s shame might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and make her a good and useful woman; and that"s much more than being a happy one, Mrs. March; we can"t any of us be truly happy, no matter what"s done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would _you_ have done?"
My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from old Hasketh a.s.sured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham"s emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so fiercely, but whose pa.s.sion had worn itself down to the underlying conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was silent; my wife said: "I don"t know _what_ I should have done, Mrs.
Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:
"If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father"s, I was punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn"t know how to begin; I presume that"s the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never did begin; but now I"ve got to. The time"s come, and I presume it"s as easy now as it ever could be; easier. He"s out and it"s over, as far as the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I"ll prepare her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it."
"Do you mean that he can see her _here_?" my wife asked.
"Yes," said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.
"At once? To-day?"
"No," Mrs. Hasketh faltered. "I didn"t want him to see her just the first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She"s visiting at some friends in Providence; but she"ll be back to-morrow. He can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But if he was anything of a man he wouldn"t want to."
"I"m afraid," I ventured, "he isn"t anything of _that_ kind of man."
VI.
"Now, how unhandsome life is!" I broke out, at one point on our way home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then dropped it, and then taken it up again. "It"s so graceless, so tasteless! Why didn"t Tedham die before the expiration of his term and solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man"s nature, he would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love, and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do the thing heroically--and I wouldn"t have denied him that satisfaction--he would have walked into that pool in the old c.o.c.kpit and lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That would truly have put an end to the evil he began."
"I wouldn"t be--impious, Basil," said my wife, with a moment"s hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, "Yes, it seems as if that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn"t really seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn"t expiated his sin yet, as fully as he thinks he has."
"And then," I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn"t all. Suppose that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?"
"Basil!" cried my wife, "that is cruel of you! You _knew_ I was keeping away from that point, and it seems as if you tried to make it as afflicting as you could--the whole affair."
"Well, I don"t believe it"s as bad as that. Probably she hasn"t met any one in that way; at any rate, it"s pure conjecture on my part, and my conjecture doesn"t make it so."
"It doesn"t unmake it, either, for you to say that now," my wife lamented.
"Well, well! Don"t let"s think about it, then. The case is bad enough as it stands, Heaven knows, and we"ve got to grapple with it as soon as we get home. We shall find Tedham waiting for us, I dare say, unless something has happened to him. I wonder if anything can have been good enough to happen to Tedham, overnight."
I got a little miserable fun out of this, but my wife would not laugh; she would not be placated in any way; she held me in a sort responsible for the dilemma I had conjectured, and inculpated me in some measure for that which had really presented itself.
When we reached home she went directly to her room and had a cup of tea sent to her there, and the children and I had rather a solemn time at the table together. A Sunday tea-table is solemn enough at the best, with its ghastly subst.i.tution of cold dishes or thin sliced things for the warm abundance of the week-day dinner; with the gloom of Mrs.
March"s absence added, this was a very funereal feast indeed.
We went on quite silently for a while, for the children saw I was preoccupied; but at last I asked, "Has anybody called this afternoon?"
"I don"t know exactly whether it was a call or not," said my daughter, with a nice feeling for the social proprieties which would have amused me at another time. "But that strange person who was here last night, was here again."
"Oh!"
"He said he would come in the evening. I forgot to tell you. Papa, what kind of person is he?"
"I don"t know. What makes you ask?"
"Why, we think he wasn"t always a workingman. Tom says he looks as if he had been in some kind of business, and then failed."
"What makes you think that, Tom?" I asked the boy.
"Oh, I don"t know. He speaks so well."
"He always spoke well, poor fellow," I said with a vague amus.e.m.e.nt. "And you"re quite right, Tom. He was in business once and he failed--badly."