My wife looked compa.s.sionately at him, and she began with a sympathy that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to have it known that you were her father?"
"You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep her from choosing for herself about it. I sha"n"t force myself on her. I expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to, hasn"t that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights too?"
His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she ought to have a chance to decide."
"I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake, _not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.
"The only way to find out is to ask her," I answered, non-committally, and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of interest and happiness. The parents" duty to the children is obvious and plain, but the child"s duty to its parents is something subtler and more spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try to shield people from fate? Isn"t that always wrong? One is fated to be born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the consequences of his father"s misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."
"Well, don"t try to be that sort of blessing to _your_ children, Basil,"
said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.
After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing it.
"I didn"t know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay with us," I said.
"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well have let him stay as not. Why shouldn"t we have offered him a bed for the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"
"Well, you must allow that the circ.u.mstances were peculiar!"
"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why, as he said, shouldn"t we stop punishing him?"
"I suppose we can"t. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal perdition, for h.e.l.l, in the human heart," I suggested.
"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil--"
"Oh, _I_ don"t claim it, exclusively!"
"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in--or out."
"Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate.
Still, I"m afraid there"s likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?"
She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace herself already for the work before us:
"Well, we must do this because we can"t help doing it, and because, whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me, Basil!"
"I? To Mrs. Hasketh"s?"
"Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had better not lose any time."
"To-morrow is Sunday."
"So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they"re there at all, yet."
She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.
V.
The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence, painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height of one"s shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.
There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.
Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something severe, something hopelessly forbidding.
I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and the Haskeths, before Tedham"s calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her husband come forward, in Tedham"s behalf, and do what hopelessly could be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only thing to be attempted was to show circ.u.mstances that might perhaps tend to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that, even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather dramatic; it was p.r.o.nounced not so much in relation to his particular offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given the full penalty. I was in court when it was p.r.o.nounced with great solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more than all the sentences I had ever heard p.r.o.nounced, wholly out of keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room, and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply said, "It was unjust," and we parted.
For several months after Tedham"s conviction, I did not think we ought to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased, but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.
That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham"s little girl, as she flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic, at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor Tedham"s own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of Tedham"s affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the acc.u.mulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to bear her husband"s name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."
My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won"t you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across me at her.
"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.
"Family well?"
"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be looking very well, too."
"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.
But that is about all."
"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"
"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.
She will be down in a moment."
"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."
The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said, "Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."
I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of antic.i.p.ation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not been light.
At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she must make all the positive movements.
After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, "Mrs. Hasketh, we have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn"t say that we haven"t come willingly."
"Is it about Mr. Tedham?" asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.
"Yes," said my wife. "I don"t know whether you had kept exact account of the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn"t. He is out, you know."
"Yes--at noon, yesterday. I wasn"t likely to forget the day, or the hour, or the minute." Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.
But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with, at least. "He has been to see us--"
"I presumed so," said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs.
March took the word again.
"I shall have to tell you why he came--why _we_ came. It was something that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and that you must have been expecting at once, if you say--"