I felt that, in the utterance of these words, I too had become excited.
My voice did not rise, but I knew that it had acquired an intenseness which I as quickly endeavored to suppress. But the father had already beheld the expression in my face, and perhaps the sudden change in my tones grated harshly upon his ear. I could see that his looks became more eager and inquiring. I could note a greater degree of apprehension and anxiety in his eyes. I subdued myself, though not without some effort.
"William Edgerton may be erring, sir--that I do not deny, for I have seen too little of him of late to say anything of his proceedings; but I am very confident when I say that excess in liquor can not be a vice of his; and as for gaming, I should fancy that he was the last person in the world likely to be tempted to the indulgence of such a practice."
The father shook his head mournfully.
"Why this shame?--this fear? Besides, Clifford, what we know of our son makes us equally sure that women have nothing to do with his excesses.
But these conjectures help us nothing. Clifford, I must look to you."
"What can I do for you, sir?"
"He is my son, my only son--the care of many sad, sleepless hours. It was his mother"s hope that he would be our solace in the weary and the sad ones. You can not understand yet how much the parent lives in the child--how many of his hopes settle there. William has already disappointed us in our ambition. He will be nothing that we hoped him to be; but of this I complain not. But that he should become base, Clifford; a night-prowler in the streets; a hanger-on of stews and gaming-houses; a brawler at an alehouse bar; a man to skulk through life and society; down-looking in his father"s sight; despised in that of the community--oh! these are the cruel, the dreadful apprehensions!"
"But you know not that he is any of these."
"True; but there is something grievously wrong when the son dares not meet the eye of a parent with manly fearlessness; when he looks without joyance at the face of a mother, and shrinks from her endearments as if he felt that he deserved them not. William Edgerton is miserable; that is evident enough. Now, misery does not always imply guilt; but, in his case, what else should it imply! He has had no misfortunes. He is independent; he is beloved by his parents, and by his friends; he has had no denial of the affections; in short, there is no way of accounting for his conduct or appearance, but by the supposition that he has fallen into vicious habits. Whatever these habits are, they are killing him.
He is a mere skeleton; his whole appearance is that of a man running a rapid course of dissipation which can only advance in shame, and terminate in death. Clifford, if I have ever served you in the hour of your need, serve me in this of mine. Save my son for me. Bring him back from his folly; restore him, if you can, to peace and purity. See him, will you not? Seek him out; see him; probe his secret; and tell me what can be done to rescue him before it be too late."
"Really, Mr. Edgerton, you confound me. What can I do?"
"I know not. Every thing, perhaps! I confess I can not counsel you. I can not even suggest how you should begin. You must judge for yourself.
You must think and make your approaches according to your own judgment.
Remember, that it is not in his behalf only. Think of the father, the mother! our hope, our all is at stake. I speak to you in the language of a child, Clifford. I am a child in this. This boy has been the apple of our eyes. It is our sight for which I seek your help. I know your good sense and sagacity. I know that you can trace out his secret when I should fail. My feelings would blind me to the truth. They might lead me to use language which would drive him from me. I leave it all to you. I know not who else can do for me half so well in a matter of this sort.
Will you undertake it?"
Could I refuse? This question was discussed in all its bearings, in a few lightning-like progresses of thought. I felt all its difficulties--antic.i.p.ated the annoyances to which it would subject me, and the degree of self-forbearance which it would necessarily require; yet, when I looked on the n.o.ble old gentleman who sat beside me--his gray hairs, his pleading looks, the recollection of the deep debt of grat.i.tude which I owed him--I put my hand in his; I could resist no longer.
"I will try!" was the brief answer which I made him.
"G.o.d bless, G.o.d speed you!" he exclaimed, squeezing my hand with a pressure that said everything, and we separated; he for his family, and I for that new task which I had undertaken. How different from my previous purpose! I was now to seek to save the person whom I had set forth that morning with the purpose (if I had any purpose) to destroy.
What a volume made up of contradictions and inconsistencies, strangely bound together, is the moral world of man!
CHAPTER x.x.xV.
APPLICATION OF "THE QUESTION."
But how to save him? How to approach him? How to keep down my own sense of wrong, my own feeling of misery, while representing the wishes and the feelings of that good old man--that venerable father? These were questions to afflict, to confound me! Still, I was committed; I must do what I had promised; undertake it at least; and the conviction that such a task was to be the severest trial of my manliness, was a conviction that necessarily helped to strengthen me to go through with it like a man.
What I had heard from Mr. Edgerton in relation to his son, though new, and somewhat surprising to myself, had not altered, in any respect, my impressions on the subject of his conduct toward, or with, my wife.
Indeed, it rather served to confirm them. I could have told the old man, that, in losing all traces of his son in the neighborhood of my dwelling the night when he pursued him, he had the most conclusive proofs that he had gone to no gaming-houses. But where did he go? That was a question for myself. Had he entered my premises, and hidden himself amidst the foliage where I had myself so often harbored, while my object had been the secret inspection of my household? Could it be that he had loitered there during the last few nights of my wife"s illness, in the vain hope of seeing me take my departure? This was the conclusion which I reached, and with it came the next thought that he would revisit the spot again that night. Ha! that thought! "Let him come!" I muttered to myself. "I will endeavor to be in readiness!"
But, surely, the father was grievously in error; his parental fear, alone, had certainly drawn the picture of his son"s reduced and miserable condition. I had seen nothing of this. I had observed that he was shy, incommunicative--seeking to avoid me, as, according to their showing, he had striven to avoid his parents. So far our experience had been the same. But I had totally failed to perceive the marks of suffering or of sin which the vivid feelings of the father on this subject had insisted were so apparent. I had seen in Edgerton only the false friend, the traitor, stealing like a serpent to my bower, to beguile from my side the only object which made it dear to me. I could see in him only the exulting seducer, confident in his ability, artful in his endeavors, winning in his accomplishments, and striving with practised industry of libertinism, in the prosecution of his cruel schemes. I could see the grace of his bearing, the ease of his manner, the symmetry of his person, the neatness of his costume, the superiority of his dancing, the insinuation of his address. I could see these only!
That he looked miserable--that he was thin to meagreness, I had not seen.
Yet, even were it so, what could this prove, as the father had conclusively shown, but guilt. Poverty could not trouble him--he had never been an unrequited lover. He had gone along the stream of society, indifferent to the lures of beauty, and with a bark that had always appeared studiously to keep aloof from the sh.o.r.es or shoals of matrimony. If he was miserable, his misery could only come from misconduct, not from misfortune. It was a misery engendered by guilt, and what was that guilt? I KNEW that he did not drink; and was not his course in regard to Kingsley, as narrated by that person on the night when we went to the gaming-house together--was not that sufficient to show that he was no gamester, unless he happened to be one of the most bare faced of all canting hypocrites, which I could not believe him to be. What remained, but that my calculations were right? It was guilt that was sinking him, body and soul, so that his eye no longer dared to look upward--so that his ear shrunk from the sounds of those voices which, even in the language of kindness, were still speaking to him in the severest language of rebuke. And whom did that guilt concern more completely than myself? Say that the father was to lose his son, his only son--what was my loss, what was my shame! and upon whom should the curse most fully and finally fall, if not upon the wrong-doer, though it so happened that the ruin of the guilty brought with it overthrow to the innocent scarcely less complete!
The extent of that guilt of Edgerton?
On this point all was a wilderness, vague, inconclusive, confused and crowded within my understanding. I believed that he had approached my wife with evil designs--I believed, without a doubt, that he had pa.s.sed the boundaries of propriety in his intercourse with her; but I believed not that she had fallen! No! I had an instinctive confidence in her purity, that rendered it apparently impossible that she should lapse into the grossness of illicit love. What, then, was my fear? That she did love him, though, struggling with the tendency of her heart, she had not yielded in the struggle. I believed that his grace, beauty, and accomplishments--his persevering attention--his similar tastes--had succeeded in making an impression upon her soul which had effectually eradicated mine. I believed that his attentions were sweet to her--that she had not the strength to reject them; and, though she may have proved herself too virtuous to yield, she had not been sufficiently strong to repulse him with virtuous resentment.
That Edgerton had not succeeded, did not lessen HIS offence. The attempt was an indignity that demanded atonement--that justified punishment equally severe with that which should have followed a successful prosecution of his purpose. Women are by nature weak. They are not to be tempted. He who, knowing their weakness, attempts their overthrow by that medium, is equally cowardly and criminal. I could not doubt that he had made this attempt; but now it seemed necessary that I should suspend my indignation, in obedience with what appeared to be a paramount duty.
A selfish reasoning now suggested compliance with this duty as a mean for procuring better intelligence than I already possessed. I need not say that the doubt was the pain in my bosom. I felt, in the words of the cold devil Iago, those "d.a.m.ned minutes" of him "who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves."
The shapeless character of my fears and suspicions did not by any means lessen their force and volume. On the contrary it caused them to loom out through the hazy atmosphere of the imagination, a.s.suming aspects more huge and terrible, in consequence of their very indistinctness; as the phantom shapes along the mountains of the Brocken, gathering and scowling in the morning or the evening twilight. To obtain more precise knowledge--to be able to subject to grasp and measure the uncertain phantoms which I feared--was, if not to reduce their proportions, at least to rid me of that excruciating suspense, in determining what to do, which was the natural result of my present ignorance.
With some painstaking, I was enabled to find and force an interview with Edgerton that very day. He made an effort to elude me--such an effort as he could make without allowing his object to be seen. But I was not to be baffled. Having once determined upon my course, I was a puritan in the inveteracy with which I persevered in it. But it required no small struggle to approach the criminal, and so utterly to subdue my own sense of wrong, my suspicions and my hostility, as to keep in sight no more than the wishes and fears of the father. I have already boasted of my strength in some respects, even while exposing my weaknesses in others.
That I could persuade Edgerton and my wife, equally, of my indifference, even at the moment when I was most agonized by my doubts of their purity, is a sufficient proof that I possessed a certain sort of strength. It was a moral strength, too, which could conceal the pangs inflicted by the vulture, even when it was preying upon the vitals of the best affections and the dearest hopes of the heart. It was necessary that I should put all this strength in requisition, as well to do what was required by the father, as to pierce, with keen eye, and considerate question, to the secret soul of the witness. I must a.s.sume the blandest manner of our youthful friendship; I must say kind things, and say them with a certain frank unconsciousness. I must use the language of a good fellow--a sworn companion--who is anxious to do justice to my friend"s father, and yet had no notion that my friend himself was doing the smallest thing to justify the unmeasured fears of the fond old man. Such was my cue at first. I am not so sure that I pursued it to the end; but of this hereafter.
My attention having been specially drawn to the personal appearance of William Edgerton, I was surprised, if not absolutely shocked, to see that the father had scarcely exaggerated the misery of his condition. He was the mere shadow of his former self. His limbs, only a year before, had been rounded even to plumpness. They were now sharp and angular. His skin was pale, his looks haggard; and that apprehensive shrinking of the eye, which had called forth the most keen expressions of fear and suspicion from the father"s lips, was the prominent characteristic which commanded my attention during our brief interview. His eye, after the first encounter, no longer rose to mine. Keenly did I watch his face, though for an instant only. A sudden hectic flush mantled its paleness.
I could perceive a nervous muscular movement about his mouth, and he slightly started when I spoke.
"Edgerton," I said, with tones of good-humored reproach, "there"s no finding you now-a-days. You have the invisible cap. What do you do with yourself? As for law, that seems destined to be a mourner so far as you are concerned. She sits like a widow in her weeds. You have abandoned her: do you mean to abandon your friends also?"
He answered, with a faint attempt to smile:--
"No; I have been to see you often, but you are never at home."
"Ah! I did not hear of it. But if you really wished to see a husband who has survived the honeymoon, I suspect that home is about the last place where you should seek for him. Julia did the honors, I trust?"
His eye stole upward, met mine, and sunk once more upon the floor. He answered faintly:--
"Yes, but I have not seen her for some days."
"Not since Mother Delaney"s party, I believe?"
The color came again into his cheeks, but instantly after was succeeded by a deadly paleness.
"What a bore these parties are! and such parties as those of Mrs.
Delaney are particularly annoying to me. Why the d--l couldn"t the old tabby halter her hobby without calling in her neighbors to witness the painful spectacle? You were there, I think?"
"Yes."
"I left early. I got heartily sick. You know I never like such places; and, as soon as they began dancing, I took advantage of the fuss and fiddle to steal off. It was unfortunate I did so, for Julia was taken sick, and has had a narrow chance for it. I thought I should have lost her."
All this was spoken in tones of the coolest imaginable indifference.
Edgerton was evidently surprised. He looked up with some curiosity in his glance, and more confidence; and, with accents that slightly faltered, he asked:--
"Is she well again? I trust she is better now."
"Yes!" I answered, with the same sang-froid. "But I"ve had a serious business of watching through the last three nights. Her peril was extreme. She lost her little one."
A visible shudder went through his frame.
"Tired to death of the walls of the house, which seems a dungeon to me, I dashed out this morning, at daylight, as soon as I found I could safely leave her; and, strolling down to the office, who should I find there but your father, perched at the desk, and seemingly inclined to resume all his former practice?"