Then the friends separated without a good-night, and dragged themselves home with the gait of mortally stricken men. At their homes their wives sprang up with an eager "Well?"--then saw the answer with their eyes and sank down sorrowing, without waiting for it to come in words. In both houses a discussion followed of a heated sort--a new thing; there had been discussions before, but not heated ones, not ungentle ones. The discussions to-night were a sort of seeming plagiarisms of each other.
Mrs. Richards said:
"If you had only waited, Edward--if you had only stopped to think; but no, you must run straight to the printing-office and spread it all over the world."
"It SAID publish it."
"That is nothing; it also said do it privately, if you liked. There, now--is that true, or not?"
"Why, yes--yes, it is true; but when I thought what a stir it would make, and what a compliment it was to Hadleyburg that a stranger should trust it so--"
"Oh, certainly, I know all that; but if you had only stopped to think, you would have seen that you COULDN"T find the right man, because he is in his grave, and hasn"t left chick nor child nor relation behind him; and as long as the money went to somebody that awfully needed it, and n.o.body would be hurt by it, and--and--"
She broke down, crying. Her husband tried to think of some comforting thing to say, and presently came out with this:
"But after all, Mary, it must be for the best--it must be; we know that.
And we must remember that it was so ordered--"
"Ordered! Oh, everything"s ORDERED, when a person has to find some way out when he has been stupid. Just the same, it was ORDERED that the money should come to us in this special way, and it was you that must take it on yourself to go meddling with the designs of Providence--and who gave you the right? It was wicked, that is what it was--just blasphemous presumption, and no more becoming to a meek and humble professor of--"
"But, Mary, you know how we have been trained all our lives long, like the whole village, till it is absolutely second nature to us to stop not a single moment to think when there"s an honest thing to be done--"
"Oh, I know it, I know it--it"s been one everlasting training and training and training in honesty--honesty shielded, from the very cradle, against every possible temptation, and so it"s ARTIFICIAL honesty, and weak as water when temptation comes, as we have seen this night. G.o.d knows I never had shade nor shadow of a doubt of my petrified and indestructible honesty until now--and now, under the very first big and real temptation, I--Edward, it is my belief that this town"s honesty is as rotten as mine is; as rotten as yours. It is a mean town, a hard, stingy town, and hasn"t a virtue in the world but this honesty it is so celebrated for and so conceited about; and so help me, I do believe that if ever the day comes that its honesty falls under great temptation, its grand reputation will go to ruin like a house of cards. There, now, I"ve made confession, and I feel better; I am a humbug, and I"ve been one all my life, without knowing it. Let no man call me honest again--I will not have it."
"I--Well, Mary, I feel a good deal as you do: I certainly do. It seems strange, too, so strange. I never could have believed it--never."
A long silence followed; both were sunk in thought. At last the wife looked up and said:
"I know what you are thinking, Edward."
Richards had the embarra.s.sed look of a person who is caught.
"I am ashamed to confess it, Mary, but--"
"It"s no matter, Edward, I was thinking the same question myself."
"I hope so. State it."
"You were thinking, if a body could only guess out WHAT THE REMARK WAS that Goodson made to the stranger."
"It"s perfectly true. I feel guilty and ashamed. And you?"
"I"m past it. Let us make a pallet here; we"ve got to stand watch till the bank vault opens in the morning and admits the sack... Oh dear, oh dear--if we hadn"t made the mistake!"
The pallet was made, and Mary said:
"The open sesame--what could it have been? I do wonder what that remark could have been. But come; we will get to bed now."
"And sleep?"
"No; think."
"Yes; think."
By this time the c.o.xes too had completed their spat and their reconciliation, and were turning in--to think, to think, and toss, and fret, and worry over what the remark could possibly have been which Goodson made to the stranded derelict; that golden remark; that remark worth forty thousand dollars, cash.
The reason that the village telegraph-office was open later than usual that night was this: The foreman of c.o.x"s paper was the local representative of the a.s.sociated Press. One might say its honorary representative, for it wasn"t four times a year that he could furnish thirty words that would be accepted. But this time it was different. His despatch stating what he had caught got an instant answer:
"Send the whole thing--all the details--twelve hundred words."
A colossal order! The foreman filled the bill; and he was the proudest man in the State. By breakfast-time the next morning the name of Hadleyburg the Incorruptible was on every lip in America, from Montreal to the Gulf, from the glaciers of Alaska to the orange-groves of Florida; and millions and millions of people were discussing the stranger and his money-sack, and wondering if the right man would be found, and hoping some more news about the matter would come soon--right away.
II
Hadleyburg village woke up world-celebrated--astonished--happy--vain.
Vain beyond imagination. Its nineteen princ.i.p.al citizens and their wives went about shaking hands with each other, and beaming, and smiling, and congratulating, and saying THIS thing adds a new word to the dictionary--HADLEYBURG, synonym for INCORRUPTIBLE--destined to live in dictionaries for ever! And the minor and unimportant citizens and their wives went around acting in much the same way. Everybody ran to the bank to see the gold-sack; and before noon grieved and envious crowds began to flock in from Brixton and all neighbouring towns; and that afternoon and next day reporters began to arrive from everywhere to verify the sack and its history and write the whole thing up anew, and make dashing free-hand pictures of the sack, and of Richards"s house, and the bank, and the Presbyterian church, and the Baptist church, and the public square, and the town-hall where the test would be applied and the money delivered; and d.a.m.nable portraits of the Richardses, and Pinkerton the banker, and c.o.x, and the foreman, and Reverend Burgess, and the postmaster--and even of Jack Halliday, who was the loafing, good-natured, no-account, irreverent fisherman, hunter, boys" friend, stray-dogs" friend, typical "Sam Lawson" of the town. The little mean, smirking, oily Pinkerton showed the sack to all comers, and rubbed his sleek palms together pleasantly, and enlarged upon the town"s fine old reputation for honesty and upon this wonderful endors.e.m.e.nt of it, and hoped and believed that the example would now spread far and wide over the American world, and be epoch-making in the matter of moral regeneration. And so on, and so on.
By the end of a week things had quieted down again; the wild intoxication of pride and joy had sobered to a soft, sweet, silent delight--a sort of deep, nameless, unutterable content. All faces bore a look of peaceful, holy happiness.
Then a change came. It was a gradual change; so gradual that its beginnings were hardly noticed; maybe were not noticed at all, except by Jack Halliday, who always noticed everything; and always made fun of it, too, no matter what it was. He began to throw out chaffing remarks about people not looking quite so happy as they did a day or two ago; and next he claimed that the new aspect was deepening to positive sadness; next, that it was taking on a sick look; and finally he said that everybody was become so moody, thoughtful, and absent-minded that he could rob the meanest man in town of a cent out of the bottom of his breeches pocket and not disturb his reverie.
At this stage--or at about this stage--a saying like this was dropped at bedtime--with a sigh, usually--by the head of each of the nineteen princ.i.p.al households:
"Ah, what COULD have been the remark that Goodson made?"
And straightway--with a shudder--came this, from the man"s wife:
"Oh, DON"T! What horrible thing are you mulling in your mind? Put it away from you, for G.o.d"s sake!"
But that question was wrung from those men again the next night--and got the same retort. But weaker.
And the third night the men uttered the question yet again--with anguish, and absently. This time--and the following night--the wives fidgeted feebly, and tried to say something. But didn"t.
And the night after that they found their tongues and responded--longingly:
"Oh, if we COULD only guess!"
Halliday"s comments grew daily more and more sparklingly disagreeable and disparaging. He went diligently about, laughing at the town, individually and in ma.s.s. But his laugh was the only one left in the village: it fell upon a hollow and mournful vacancy and emptiness. Not even a smile was findable anywhere. Halliday carried a cigar-box around on a tripod, playing that it was a camera, and halted all pa.s.sers and aimed the thing and said "Ready!--now look pleasant, please," but not even this capital joke could surprise the dreary faces into any softening.
So three weeks pa.s.sed--one week was left. It was Sat.u.r.day evening after supper. Instead of the aforetime Sat.u.r.day-evening flutter and bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and desolate. Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little parlour--miserable and thinking.
This was become their evening habit now: the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading, knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or paying neighbourly calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two or three weeks ago; n.o.body talked now, n.o.body read, n.o.body visited--the whole village sat at home, sighing, worrying, silent. Trying to guess out that remark.
The postman left a letter. Richards glanced listlessly at the superscription and the post-mark--unfamiliar, both--and tossed the letter on the table and resumed his might-have-beens and his hopeless dull miseries where he had left them off. Two or three hours later his wife got wearily up and was going away to bed without a good-night--custom now--but she stopped near the letter and eyed it awhile with a dead interest, then broke it open, and began to skim it over. Richards, sitting there with his chair tilted back against the wall and his chin between his knees, heard something fall. It was his wife. He sprang to her side, but she cried out:
"Leave me alone, I am too happy. Read the letter--read it!"
He did. He devoured it, his brain reeling. The letter was from a distant State, and it said: