"I don"t know yet what I shall do," I replied, rising.
"Well," he advised kindly, "before you blow your brains out or do anything else that"s a waste of good material, come and see me again."
"Thank you," I responded. "And, Mr. Blodgett, as a favor, I ask that all I have told you, and even my presence in New York, shall be confidential between us."
"Nonsense!" he growled. "I shall tell Maizie all about it."
"Miss Walton least of any," I begged.
"Why don"t you insist, too, that Mrs. Blodgett, who intends that I shall inform her nightly of everything I know, sha"n"t be told?" he queried.
"It grieves me to be a marplot of connubial confidences," I rejoined, responding to his smile, "but this must be between us."
"Have your own way," he acceded, and then laughed. "I"ll have a good time over it, for I"ll let Mrs. Blodgett see there is a secret, and she"ll go crazy trying to worm it out of me."
He shook my hand again, and I felt ashamed to think that his voice and manner had once made me hold him in contempt.
I went back to the hotel, and thought over the past, seeing how blind I had been. Now for the first time everything became clear. I understood the trip to Europe and our remaining there, why my mother had left us, why Mr. Walton had been permitted to take you from us without protest, why we had not mingled with Americans, and my father"s motives in making me write under a pen name, in registering me at hotels by it, and in giving that name to your servant. Now it was obvious why he never signed his articles, and why he appealed to me to let him aid me to make a reputation: it was his endeavor to atone to me for the wrong he had done.
Good-night, my love.
IX
_February 28._ Many times in the last three years I have begun a letter to you, for the thought that you, like the rest of the world, may rank my father with other embezzlers stings me almost to desperation. Each time it has been to tear the attempted justification--or I should say, extenuation--into fragments, long before it was completed. In all my trials I have come to realize that nothing I can say can stand him in stead; for whatever I urge is open to suspicion, not merely because it is my interest to condone his act, but still more because it inevitably becomes an indirect justification of myself, and therefore, in a sense, a plea for pardon.
At moments, too, when with you, I have had to exercise the greatest self-control not to tell you what I feel. If I were only some one else than Donald Maitland, so that I might say to you:--
"You should know that your guardian was incapable of the lowness the world imputes to him! I am not trying to belittle the sin, but to distinguish the motive. His wrong was no mean attempt to enrich himself at the expense of one he loved, for his nature was wholly unmercenary, and his transgression originated, not through greed, but through lack of it. Like all men of true intellect, he was heedless in money matters, and I am conscious that there was in him, as there is in me, the certain weakness which is almost inevitable with mind cultivation,--an engulfing, as it were, of the big principles of right and wrong in the complexities and the refinements of cultivated thought. His birthright was scholarship, but in place of the life he was fitted for he was forced into Wall Street, and toiled there without sympathy or apt.i.tude for his work. Do you not remember how, aside from our companionship, his books were his one great pleasure? The wealth of mind he gave to us tells the story of how he must have neglected his office in favor of his library. Yet though this preference might have made him a poor man, I cannot think his studies would ever have led him into dishonesty. I have never had the heart to trace the history of his act, but Mr. Blodgett tells me that shortly after his marriage he first began to speculate, and knowing as I do my mother"s extravagance and my father"s love for her, I can understand the motive. The inevitable result came presently, and, as a temporary expedient, a small part of your property was used.
Then a desperate attempt was made to recover this by the risking of a larger portion, and after that there was nothing left but confession or flight. I wish he had spoken, but the weakness that produced the first wrong accounts for the second, and I believe his chief thought was of me, and how I might be saved from the consequences of his guilt. Unless you have put him wholly out of your heart, you must appreciate that it was no sordid scheme to cheat you, but a surrender to the love strong enough to overcome his honesty. You must know that he loved you too well to wrong you willingly, and I think with pain of what I am sure he must have suffered in his shame at having robbed you. Do you not remember the sadness in his face in those later years, and his tenderness to both of us? Can you not see that his kindness, his patience, and his care of us were his endeavored atonement?"
Oh, Maizie, I ask nothing for myself, but if you could be brought to think of him, to love him, as you once did, my greatest grief would be ended.
Bitter as my misery was after Mr. Blodgett"s revelation, there was still some sweetness to make it bearable. For years I had thought of you as heartless and forgetful, and even in my love had hated and despised you at moments, as only love can hate and despise. The world thinks that animosity is always strongest against enemies, though daily it sees the intensest feuds between those nations and individuals who are most closely related, and never learns that the deepest hatred comes from love. Now I knew that you had cause for slighting my letters and gift, and the knowledge of my injustice and the thought that you were more lovable than ever were the silver lining to my cloud of shame.
My first meeting with you was a pure chance, yet it shaped my life. For three weeks after my call on Mr. Blodgett I pondered and vacillated over what I should do, without reaching any decision. At the end of that time I went to his office again.
"Mr. Blodgett has asked two or three times if you hadn"t called," the boy informed me; adding, as he opened the door to the private office, "He told me, if you ever came again, sir, to show you right in."
I pa.s.sed through the doorway, and then faltered, for you were sitting beside the banker, overlooking a paper that he was commenting upon.
Could I have escaped unnoticed, I should have done so; but you both glanced up as I entered.
The moment you saw me you rose, with an exclamation of recognition and surprise, which meant to me that you knew your old friend in spite of the changes. Do you wonder that, not foreseeing what was to come, I stood there as if turned to stone? My manner evidently made you question your own eyes, for you asked, "Is not this Dr. Hartzmann?"
"Of course it is!" cried Mr. Blodgett, with a quickness and heartiness which proved that your question was almost as great a relief to him as it was to me.
"I did not think, Miss Walton," I replied, steadying my voice as best I could, "that you saw my face clearly enough that evening, to recollect it?"
"The moonlight was so strong," you explained, "that I should have known you anywhere."
"Then your eyes are better than mine," a.s.serted Mr. Blodgett. "I accused the doctor of using blondine, to atone for my not recognizing him, though I must confess he will have to use a good deal more if he wants to be thought anything but Italian."
"Then you have met before?" you questioned.
"Yes," replied Mr. Blodgett. "I was going to tell you when we got through with that mortgage. I knew you would be interested to hear that the doctor was in New York. Seems like Tangier, doesn"t it?"
"In reminiscence," I a.s.sented, merely to gain time.
"None of your rickety ruins," chuckled Mr. Blodgett.
"But more ruin," you said.
"And more danger," I added, pointing out of the window at the pa.s.sers-by in Wall Street. "Nowhere in my travels, even among races that have to go armed, have I ever seen so many anxious and careworn faces."
"Most of them look worried," suggested Mr. Blodgett, "only because they are afraid they"ll take more than three minutes to eat their lunch."
For a moment you spoke with Mr. Blodgett on business, and then offered me your hand in farewell, saying, "I am very glad, Dr. Hartzmann, for this chance reunion. Mr. Blodgett and I have often spoken of the mysterious Oriental who fell in--and out--of our knowledge so strangely."
"I have wished to meet you, Miss Walton," I responded warmly, "to thank you for your kindness and help to me when"--
"That was nothing, Dr. Hartzmann," you interrupted, in evident deprecation of my thanks. "Indeed, I have always felt that we were in a measure responsible for your accident, and that we made but a poor return by the little we did. Good-morning."
Mr. Blodgett took you to your carriage, and when he returned he gave a whistle. "Well!" he exclaimed. "I haven"t gone through such a ten-second scare since I proposed to my superior moiety."
"I ought"--I began.
But he went on: "There"s nothing frightens me so much as a wrought-up woman. Dynamite or volcanoes aren"t a circ.u.mstance to her, because they have limits; but woman!"
I laughed and said, "The Hindoos have a paradox to the effect that women fear mice, mice fear men, and men fear women."
"She got so much better and longer look at you in Tangier than I did that I don"t wonder she recognized Dr. Hartzmann when I didn"t. But why did she stop there in her recollections?"
"It appeared incomprehensible to me for a moment, yet, as a fact, her knowing me as Donald Maitland would have been the greater marvel of the two. When she knew me, I was an undersized, pallid, stooping lad of seventeen. In the ten years since, my hair and skin have both darkened greatly, I have grown a mustache, and my voice has undergone the change that comes with manhood, as well as that which comes by speaking foreign tongues. Your very question as to whether I was of Eastern birth tells the whole story, for such a doubt would seem absurd to one who remembered the boy of ten years ago. Then, too, Miss Walton, having recognized me as Dr. Hartzmann, was, as it were, disarmed of all suspicion by having no question-mark in her mind as to my exact ident.i.ty."
Mr. Blodgett nodded his head in a.s.sent. "And you don"t know it all," he informed me. "I"m going to be frank, doctor, and acknowledge that I"ve expressed a pretty low opinion of you to her more than once. If Maizie were asked what man in this world she"d be least likely to meet in my office on a friendly footing, she would probably think of you. Your presence here was equivalent to saying that you weren"t Donald Maitland, let alone the fact that I greeted you as Dr. Hartzmann, and that she could never dream of my having a reason to deceive her in your ident.i.ty."
"Such a chain of circ.u.mstances almost makes one believe in kismet," I sighed. Then I laughed, and added, "How easy it is to show that one need not be scared--after the danger is all over!"
"That isn"t the only scare I owe to you," muttered Mr. Blodgett. "I didn"t take your address because I told you to come again. Why didn"t you?"
"I am here."
"Yes. But for three weeks I"ve been worrying over what you were doing with yourself, and not knowing that you hadn"t cut your throat."
"I am sorry to have troubled you. I stayed away to save troubling you."