"They are Christian gentlemen," said Rogers. "But I don"t purpose defending them; and I don"t purpose telling you what I shall or shall not do with the property when it is in my hands again. The question is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your figure? You have got nothing whatever to do with it after you"ve sold."
It was perfectly true. Any lawyer would have told him the same. He could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity, and every selfish interest of his nature joined with many obvious duties to urge him to consent. He did not see why he should refuse. There was no longer a reason. He was standing out alone for nothing, any one else would say.
He smoked on as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before the fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel, and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on either side.
But at last he said, "Well?"
"Well," answered Lapham, "you can"t expect me to give you an answer to-night, any more than before. You know that what you"ve said now hasn"t changed the thing a bit. I wish it had. The Lord knows, I want to be rid of the property fast enough." "Then why don"t you sell to me?
Can"t you see that you will not be responsible for what happens after you have sold?"
"No, I can"t see that; but if I can by morning, I"ll sell."
"Why do you expect to know any better by morning? You"re wasting time for nothing!" cried Rogers, in his disappointment. "Why are you so particular? When you drove me out of the business you were not so very particular."
Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for man who had once so selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about the rights of others.
"I guess nothing"s going to happen overnight," he answered sullenly.
"Anyway, I shan"t say what I shall do till morning."
"What time can I see you in the morning?"
"Half-past nine."
Rogers b.u.t.toned his coat, and went out of the room without another word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door after him.
His wife called down to him from above as he approached the room again, "Well?"
"I"ve told him I"d let him know in the morning."
"Want I should come down and talk with you?"
"No," answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his isolation brought, "you couldn"t do any good." He went in and shut the door, and by and by his wife heard him begin walking up and down; and then the rest of the night she lay awake and listened to him walking up and down. But when the first light whitened the window, the words of the Scripture came into her mind: "And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.... And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."
She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised his dull eyes after the first silence, and said, "I don"t know what I"m going to say to Rogers."
She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she saw her husband when she followed him with her eyes from the window, drag heavily down toward the corner, where he was to take, the horse-car.
He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found his letters already on his table. There was one, long and official-looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and Lapham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer of the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills. But he went mechanically through the verification of his prophetic fear, which was also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly at it.
Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham handed him the letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance, and seen the impossibility of negotiating any further now, even with victims so pliant and willing as those Englishmen.
"You"ve ruined me!" Rogers broke out. "I haven"t a cent left in the world! G.o.d help my poor wife!"
He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door which closed upon him. This was his reward for standing firm for right and justice to his own destruction: to feel like a thief and a murderer.
XXVI.
LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West Virginians in New York, saying their brother a.s.sented to their agreement; and it now remained for Lapham to fulfil his part of it. He was ludicrously far from able to do this; and unless he could get some extension of time from them, he must lose this chance, his only chance, to retrieve himself. He spent the time in a desperate endeavour to raise the money, but he had not raised the half of it when the banks closed.
With shame in his heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted so haughtily, and laid his plan before him. He could not bring himself to ask Bellingham"s help, but he told him what he proposed to do.
Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was an experiment, and that the price asked was enormous, unless a great success were morally certain. He advised delay, he advised prudence; he insisted that Lapham ought at least to go out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and works before he put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.
"That"s all well enough," cried Lapham; "but if I don"t clinch this offer within twenty-four hours, they"ll withdraw it, and go into the market; and then where am I?"
"Go on and see them again," said Bellingham. "They can"t be so peremptory as that with you. They must give you time to look at what they want to sell. If it turns out what you hope, then--I"ll see what can be done. But look into it thoroughly."
"Well!" cried Lapham, helplessly submitting. He took out his watch, and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four o"clock train. He hurried back to his office, and put together some papers preparatory to going, and despatched a note by his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he was starting for New York, and did not know just when he should get back.
The early spring day was raw and cold. As he went out through the office he saw the clerks at work with their street-coats and hats on; Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on her shoulders, and looked particularly comfortless as she operated her machine with her red fingers. "What"s up?" asked Lapham, stopping a moment.
"Seems to be something the matter with the steam," she answered, with the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have to work for a living.
"Well, take your writer into my room. There"s a fire in the stove there," said Lapham, pa.s.sing out.
Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office. She had pa.s.sed the day in a pa.s.sion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of trial and left him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It astounded her that such a thing should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt. But she had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the thing that had played her false; that she had kept her mind so long upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of roguery as the means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she owned her limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be right, and nothing else. She admired and revered him for going beyond her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.
She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she wished that those days were back again. She saw Corey at his desk, and she could not bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham"s room, and opening the door without knocking, shut it behind her.
Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating a typewriter. She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not personally interesting to them. It vexed the wife that any one else should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl"s indifference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one corner, and Lapham"s office coat, looking intensely like him to his wife"s familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs.
Lapham liked even less than the girl"s good looks this domestication of her garments in her husband"s office. She began to ask herself excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out of her unreasonableness.
"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?" she sharply asked of the girl.
"I couldn"t say exactly," replied the girl, without looking round.
"Has he been out long?"
"I don"t know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the clock, without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working her machine.
"Well, I can"t wait any longer," said the wife abruptly. "When Colonel Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs. Lapham wants to see him."
The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham with a red and startled face, which she did not lift to confront her.
"Yes--yes--I will," she faltered.
The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an irritation about this girl which she could not quell or account for. She found her husband"s message, and it seemed intolerable that he should have gone to New York without seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the mysterious business could be that took him away so suddenly. She said to herself that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never mentioned that girl there in his office, she forgot how much she had left herself out of his business life. That was another curse of their prosperity.
Well, she was glad the prosperity was going; it had never been happiness. After this she was going to know everything as she used.
She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned; and if there had been anything for her to do in that miserable house, as she called it in her thought, she might have succeeded. But again the curse was on her; there was nothing to do; and the looks of that girl kept coming back to her vacancy, her disoccupation. She tried to make herself something to do, but that beauty, which she had not liked, followed her amid the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which Irene had seen to putting away in the fall. Who was the thing, anyway?
It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump up in that frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named herself?
After dark, that evening, when the question had worn away its poignancy from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lapham was left at the door by a messenger who said there was no answer. "A note for me?" she said, staring at the unknown, and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of the superscription. Then she opened it and read: "Ask your husband about his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and Well-wisher," who signed the note, gave no other name.
Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand. Her brain reeled; she tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham came back the second morning, it had become, with lessening intervals of sanity and release, a demoniacal possession. She pa.s.sed the night without sleep, without rest, in the frenzy of the cruellest of the pa.s.sions, which covers with shame the unhappy soul it possesses, and murderously l.u.s.ts for the misery of its object. If she had known where to find her husband in New York, she would have followed him; she waited his return in an ecstasy of impatience. In the morning he came back, looking spent and haggard. She saw him drive up to the door, and she ran to let him in herself.
"Who is that girl you"ve got in your office, Silas Lapham?" she demanded, when her husband entered.
"Girl in my office?"