"Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you could find me anything to eat, dear? I"m perfectly famishing, and it doesn"t seem as if I could stir a step till I"ve had a bite of something."
She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham"s case; perhaps we even saw it in a more hopeful light.
VII.
The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with, "Why, what has happened?"
"Nothing," I said; "I had a sort of presentiment that something had happened here."
"Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment for your pains, if that"s what you hurried home for."
I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, "That wretched Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more."
"That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day," said my wife. "You don"t suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had anything to do with him."
A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore.
I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham"s head the notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape after my day"s work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how perfectly right in the affair Tedham"s simple, selfish instinct had been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: _Lascia fare Iddio, ch" e un buon vecchio_. We had not been willing to let G.o.d alone, or to trust his leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act upon than the love of his child, which G.o.d had put into the man"s heart, and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.
There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth.
I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of b.u.t.toning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round at her as gayly as I could with the collar-b.u.t.toning grimace on my face.
"All right, I"ll be down in a minute. You just go and talk to him till--"
"_Him_?" she gasped back; and I have never been quite sure of her syntax to this day. "_Them!_ It"s Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I saw them through the window coming up the walk."
"Good Lord! You don"t suppose it"s Tedham"s daughter?"
"How do I know? Oh, how _could_ you be dressing at a time like this!"
It did seem to me rather heinous, and I did not try to defend myself, even when she added, from her access of nervousness, in something like a whimper, "It seems to me you"re _always_ dressing, Basil!"
"I"ll be right with you, my dear," I answered, penitently; and, in fact, by the time the maid brought up the Haskeths" cards I was ready to go down. We certainly needed each other"s support, and I do not know but we descended the stairs hand in hand, and entered the parlor leaning upon each other"s shoulders. The Haskeths, who were much more deeply concerned, were not apparently so much moved. We shook hands with them, and then Mrs. Hasketh said to us in succession, "My niece, Mrs. March; Mr. March, my niece."
The young girl had risen, and stood veiled before us, and a sort of heart-breaking appeal expressed itself in the gentle droop of her figure, which did the whole office of her hidden face. The Haskeths were dressed, as became their years, in a composite fashion of no particular period; but I noticed at once, with the fondness I have for what is pretty in the modes, that Miss Tedham wore one of the latest costumes, and that she was not only a young girl, but a young lady, with all that belongs to the outward seeming of one of the gentlest of the kind. It struck me as the more monstrous, therefore, that she should be involved in the coil of her father"s inexpiable offence, which entangled her whether he stayed or whether he went. It was well enough that the Haskeths should still be made miserable through him; it belonged to their years and experience; they would soon end, at any rate, and it did not matter whether their remnant of life was dark or bright. But this child had a right to a long stretch of unbroken sunshine. As I stood and looked at her I felt the heart-burning, the indefinable indignation that we feel in the presence of death when it is the young and fair who have died. Here is a miscalculation, a mistake. It ought not to have been.
I thought that my wife, in the effusion of sympathy, would have perhaps taken the girl in her arms; but probably she knew that the dropped veil was a sign that there was to be no embracing. She put out her hand, and the girl took it with her gloved hand; but though the outward forms of their greeting were so cold, I fancied an instant understanding and kindness between them.
"My niece," Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, "came home this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her."
My wife said, "Oh, yes," and after a moment, a very painful moment, in which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.
"Mrs. March," she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic kind of embarra.s.sment, "we have come--Fay wanted we should come and ask if you knew about her father--"
"Why, didn"t he come to you last night?" my wife began.
"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, "But we thought--we thought--you might know where he was. And Fay--Did he tell you what he was going to do?"
"Yes," my wife gasped back.
The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate--conscience, soul--whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful innocence.
"Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!"
I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time, "Why, I"ve been expecting him to come in at any moment;" and this was true enough.
"I guess he"s not very far off," said old Hasketh. "I don"t believe but what he"ll turn up." Within the comfort these words were outwardly intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man"s nature, which was more to me than the explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted Tedham"s decision, and he might very well have done this without impugning anything but the weakness of his will.
My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory of the case that could be openly urged. "Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn"t you understand him so, my dear?"
I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, "Yes, certainly," and we began to rea.s.sure one another more and more. We talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did, that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old c.o.c.kpit and shone on by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard his daughter saying, "I can"t understand why he shouldn"t have come to us, or should have put it off. He couldn"t think I didn"t wish to see him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him soon. "I don"t know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"
"I don"t say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting humility. "I"m sure there isn"t any one in the whole world that I would bless the sight of half as much."
"I could have come before, if I"d known where he was; or, if I had only known, I might have been here Sat.u.r.day!" She broke into a piteous lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn"t--he couldn"t--have thought I didn"t _want_ to see him!"
It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing"s emotion; women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the best we could; and we don"t dare to let her know that Tedham isn"t coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried to make believe it might be well if he didn"t; but she had to drop _that_; it set the girl wild. She hasn"t got anything but the one idea: that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if he"s taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than Tedham did, and he"s flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it"s so.
I"m afraid," Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, "that Mrs. Hasketh is going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up.
I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can"t be made to work, and I don"t suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it"s essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn"t an accident in any particular, and if she"s his daughter it"s because she was meant to be, and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that"s the way Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now."
A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why, Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.
The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever fully say.
VIII.
It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back after ten years, it would be difficult."
"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to be out of it, and I don"t wish to see any of them ever again."
"Why, I don"t know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"
"What has he got to do with it?"
"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the rest.i.tution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent record--elsewhere--it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the actuary."
"Basil! You didn"t allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"
"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."
This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence against society.
His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous.
But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds to let G.o.d manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself to accept him.
During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of further blackening her father"s character (for so I understood her insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him for her sake.
They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience, an infinite compa.s.sion encompa.s.sing our whole being like a sea, where every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle in the water.