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A Modern Instance

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"Oh, well," she said, "I am glad of it. You will do better by yourself; and
I know you can earn just as much by writing on the different papers."

Bartley knew better than this, but he said, "Yes, I shall not be in a hurry
to take another engagement just yet. But, Marsh," he added, "I was afraid
you would blame me,--think I had been reckless, or at fault--"

"No," she answered after a little pause, "I shall not do that any more. I
have been thinking all these things over, while I was away from you, and
I'm going to do differently, after this. I shall believe that you've acted
for the best,--that you've not meant to do wrong in anything,--and I shall
never question you or doubt you any more."

"Isn't that giving me rather too _much_ rope?" asked Bartley, with
lightness that masked a vague alarm lest the old times of exaction should
be coming back with the old times of devotion.

"No; I see where my mistake has always been. I've always asked too much,
and expected too much, even when I didn't ask it. Now, I shall be satisfied
with what you don't do, as well as what you do."

"I shall try to live up to my privileges," said Bartley, with a sigh of
relief. He gave her a kiss, and then he unclasped Kinney's nugget from his
watch-chain, and fastened it on the baby's necklace, which lay in a box
Marcia had just taken from her trunk. She did not speak; but Bartley felt
better to have the thing off him; Marcia's gentleness, the tinge of sadness
in her tone, made him long to confess himself wrong in the whole matter,
and justly punished by Ricker's contempt and Witherby's dismissal. But he
did not believe that he could trust her to forgive him, and he felt himself
unable to go through all that without the certainty of her forgiveness.

As she took the things out of her trunk, and laid them away in this drawer
and that, she spoke of events in the village, and told who was dead, who
was married, and who had gone away. "I stayed longer than I expected, a
little, because father seemed to want me to. I don't think mother's so well
as she used to be, I--I'm afraid she seems to be failing, somehow."

Her voice dropped to a lower key, and Bartley said, "I'm sorry to hear
that. I guess she isn't failing. But of course she's getting on, and every
year makes a difference."

"Yes, that must be it," she answered, looking at a bundle of collars she
had in her hand, as if absorbed in the question as to where she should put
them.

Before they slept that night she asked, "Bartley, did you hear about Hannah
Morrison?"

"No. What about her?"

"She's gone--gone away. The last time she was seen was in Portland.
They don't know what's become of her. They say that Henry Bird is about
heart-broken; but everybody knows she never cared for him. I hated to write
to you about it."

Bartley experienced so disagreeable a sensation that he was silent for a
time. Then he gave a short, bitter laugh. "Well, that's what it was bound
to come to, sooner or later, I suppose. It's a piece of good luck for
Bird."

Bartley went about picking up work from one paper and another, but not
securing a basis on any. In that curious and unwholesome leniency which
corrupt natures manifest, he and Witherby met at their next encounter on
quite amicable terms. Bartley reported some meetings for the Events, and
experienced no resentment when Witherby at the office introduced him to the
gentleman with whom he had replaced him. Of course Bartley expected that
Witherby would insinuate things to his disadvantage, but he did not mind
that. He heard of something of the sort being done in Ricker's presence,
and of Ricker's saying that in any question of honor and veracity between
Witherby and Hubbard he should decide for Hubbard. Bartley was not very
grateful for this generous defence; he thought that if Ricker had not been
such an ass in the first place there would have been no trouble between
them, and Witherby would not have had that handle against him.

He was enjoying himself very well, and he felt entitled to the comparative
rest which had not been of his seeking. He wished that Halleck would come
back, for he would like to ask his leave to put that money into some other
enterprise. His credit was good, and he had not touched the money to pay
any of his accumulated bills; he would have considered it dishonorable to
do so. But it annoyed him to have the money lying idle. In his leisure he
studied the stock market, and he believed that he had several points which
were infallible. He put a few hundreds--two or three--of Halleck's money
into a mining stock which was so low that it _must_ rise. In the mean time
he tried a new kind of beer,--Norwegian beer, which he found a little
lighter even than tivoli. It was more expensive, but it was _very_ light,
and it was essential to Bartley to drink the lightest beer he could find.

He stayed a good deal at home, now, for he had leisure, and it was a much
more comfortable place since Marcia had ceased to question or reproach
him. She did not interfere with some bachelor habits he had formed, in
her absence, of sleeping far into the forenoon; he now occasionally did
night-work on some of the morning papers, and the rest was necessary; he
had his breakfast whenever he got up, as if he had been at a hotel. He
wondered upon what new theory she was really treating him; but he had
always been apt to accept what was comfortable in life without much
question, and he did not wonder long. He was immensely good-natured now.
In his frequent leisure he went out to walk with Marcia and Flavia, and
sometimes he took the little girl alone. He even went to church with them
one Sunday, and called at the Hallecks as often as Marcia liked. The young
ladies had returned, but Ben Halleck was still away. It made Bartley smile
to hear his wife talking of Halleck with his mother and sisters, and
falling quite into the family way of regarding him as if he were somehow a
saint and martyr.

Bartley was still dabbling in stocks with Halleck's money; some of it had
lately gone to pay an assessment which had unexpectedly occurred in place
of a dividend. He told Marcia that he was holding the money ready to return
to Halleck when he came back, or to put it into some other enterprise where
it would help to secure Bartley a new basis. They were now together more
than they had been since the first days of their married life in Boston;
but the perfect intimacy of those days was gone; he had his reserves, and
she her preoccupations,--with the house, with the little girl, with her
anxiety about her mother. Sometimes they sat a whole evening together, with
almost nothing to say to each other, he reading and she sewing. After an
evening of this sort, Bartley felt himself worse bored than if Marcia had
spent it in taking him to task as she used to do. Once he looked at her
over the top of his paper, and distinctly experienced that he was tired of
the whole thing.

But the political canvass was growing more interesting now. It was almost
the end of October, and the speech-making had become very lively. The
Democrats were hopeful and the Republicans resolute, and both parties were
active in getting out their whole strength, as the saying is, at such
times. This was done not only by speech-making, but by long nocturnal
processions of torch-lights; by day, as well as by night, drums throbbed
and horns brayed, and the feverish excitement spread its contagion through
the whole population. But it did not affect Bartley. He had cared nothing
about the canvass from the beginning, having an equal contempt for
the bloody shirt of the Republicans and the reform pretensions of the
Democrats. The only thing that he took an interest in was the betting; he
laid his wagers with so much apparent science and sagacity that he had
a certain following of young men who bet as Hubbard did. Hubbard, they
believed, had a long head; he disdained bets of hats, and of barrels of
apples, and ordeals by wheelbarrow; he would bet only with people who could
put up their money, and his followers honored him for it; when asked where
he got his money, being out of place, and no longer instant to do work that
fell in his way, they answered from a ready faith that he had made a good
thing in mining stocks.

In her heart, Marcia probably did not share this faith. But she faithfully
forbore to harass Bartley with her doubts, and on those evenings when he
found her such dull company she was silent because if she spoke she must
express the trouble in her mind. Women are more apt to theorize their
husbands than men in their stupid self-absorption ever realize. When a man
is married, his wife almost ceases to be exterior to his consciousness; she
afflicts or consoles him like a condition of health or sickness; she
is literally part of him in a spiritual sense, even when he is rather
indifferent to her; but the most devoted wife has always a corner of
her soul in which she thinks of her husband as _him_; in which she
philosophizes him wholly aloof from herself. In such an obscure fastness
of her being, Marcia had meditated a great deal upon Bartley during her
absence at Equity,--meditated painfully, and in her sort prayerfully, upon
him. She perceived that he was not her young dream of him; and since it
appeared to her that she could not forego that dream and live, she could
but accuse herself of having somehow had a perverse influence upon him. She
knew that she had never reproached him except for his good, but she saw too
that she had always made him worse, and not better. She recurred to what he
said the first night they arrived in Boston: "I believe that, if you have
faith in me, I shall get along; and when you don't, I shall go to the bad."
She could reason to no other effect, than that hereafter, no matter what
happened, she must show perfect faith in him by perfect patience. It was
hard, far harder than she had thought. But she did forbear; she did use
patience.

The election day came and went. Bartley remained out till the news of
Tilden's success could no longer be doubted, and then came home jubilant.
Marcia seemed not to understand. "I didn't know you cared so much for
Tilden," she said, quietly. "Mr. Halleck is for Hayes; and Ben Halleck was
coming home to vote."

"That's all right: a vote in Massachusetts makes no difference. I'm for
Tilden, because I have the most money up on him. The success of that
noble old reformer is worth seven hundred dollars to me in bets." Bartley
laughed, rubbed her cheeks with his chilly hands, and went down into
the cellar for some beer. He could not have slept without that, in his
excitement; but he was out very early the next morning, and in the raw damp
of the rainy November day he received a more penetrating chill when he saw
the bulletins at the newspaper offices intimating that a fair count might
give the Republicans enough Southern States to elect Hayes. This appeared
to Bartley the most impudent piece of political effrontery in the whole
history of the country, and among those who went about denouncing
Republican chicanery at the Democratic club-rooms, no one took a loftier
tone of moral indignation than he. The thought that he might lose so much
of Halleck's money through the machinations of a parcel of carpet-bagging
tricksters filled him with a virtue at which he afterwards smiled when he
found that people were declaring their bets off. "I laid a wager on the
popular result, not on the decision of the Returning Boards," he said in
reclaiming his money from the referees. He had some difficulty in getting
it back, but he had got it when he walked homeward at night, after having
been out all day; and there now ensued in his soul a struggle as to what he
should do with this money. He had it all except the three hundred he had
ventured on the mining stock, which would eventually he worth everything he
had paid for it. After his frightful escape from losing half of it on
those bets, he had an intense longing to be rid of it, to give it back
to Halleck, who never would ask him for it, and then to go home and tell
Marcia everything, and throw himself on her mercy. Better poverty, better
disgrace before Halleck and her, better her condemnation, than this life
of temptation that he had been leading. He saw how hideous it was in the
retrospect, and he shuddered; his good instincts awoke, and put forth their
strength, such as it was; tears came into his eyes; he resolved to write to
Kinney and exonerate Ricker, he resolved humbly to beg Ricker's pardon. He
must leave Boston; but if Marcia would forgive him, he would go back with
her to Equity, and take up the study of the law in her father's office
again, and fulfil all her wishes. He would have a hard time to overcome the
old man's prejudices, but he deserved a hard time, and he knew he should
finally succeed. It would be bitter, returning to that stupid little town,
and he imagined the intrusive conjecture and sarcastic comment that would
attend his return; but he believed that he could live this down, and he
trusted himself to laugh it down. He already saw himself there, settled in
the Squire's office, reinstated in public opinion, a leading lawyer of the
place, with Congress open before him whenever he chose to turn his face
that way.

He had thought of going first to Halleck, and returning the money, but he
was willing to give himself the encouragement of Marcia's pleasure, of her
forgiveness and her praise in an affair that had its difficulties and
would require all his manfulness. The maid met him at the door with little
Flavia, and told him that Marcia had gone out to the Hallecks', but had
left word that she would soon return, and that then they would have supper
together. Her absence dashed his warm impulse, but he recovered himself,
and took the little one from the maid. He lighted the gas in the parlor,
and had a frolic with Flavia in kindling a fire in the grate, and making
the room bright and cheerful. He played with the child and made her laugh;
he already felt the pleasure of a good conscience, though with a faint
nether ache in his heart which was perhaps only his wish to have the
disagreeable preliminaries to his better life over as soon as possible. He
drew two easy-chairs up at opposite corners of the hearth, and sat down in
one, leaving the other for Marcia; he had Flavia standing on his knees, and
clinging fast to his fingers, laughing and crowing while he danced her up
and down, when he heard the front door open, and Marcia burst into the
room.

She ran to him and plucked the child from him, and then went back as far as
she could from him in the room, crying, "Give _me_ the child!" and facing
him with the look he knew. Her eyes were dilated, and her visage white with
the transport that had whirled her far beyond the reach of reason. The
frail structure of his good resolutions dropped to ruin at the sight, but
he mechanically rose and advanced upon her till she forbade him with a
muffled shriek of "Don't _touch_ me! So!" she went on, gasping and catching
her breath, "it was _you_! I might have known it! I might have guessed it
from the first! _You_! Was _that_ the reason why you didn't care to have me
hurry home this summer? Was that--was that--" She choked, and convulsively
pressed her face into the neck of the child, which began to cry.

Bartley closed the doors, and then, with his hands in his pockets,
confronted her with a smile of wicked coolness. "Will you be good enough to
tell me what you're talking about?"

"Do you pretend that you don't know? I met a woman at the bottom of the
street just now. Do you know who?"

"No; but it's very dramatic. Go on!"

"It was Hannah Morrison! She reeled against me; and when I--such a fool as
I was!--pitied her, because I was on my way home to you, and was thinking
about you and loving you, and was so happy in it, and asked her how she
came to that, she _struck_ me, and told me to--to--ask my--husband!"

The transport broke in tears; the denunciation had turned to entreaty in
everything but words; but Bartley had hardened his heart now past all
entreaty. The idiotic penitent that he had been a few moments ago, the
soft, well-meaning dolt, was so far from him now as to be scarce within the
reach of his contempt. He was going to have this thing over once for all;
he would have no mercy upon himself or upon her; the Devil was in him, and
uppermost in him, and the Devil is fierce and proud, and knows how to make
many base emotions feel like a just self-respect. "And did you believe a
woman like that?" he sneered.

"Do I believe a man like this?" she demanded, with a dying flash of her
fury. "You--you don't dare to deny it."

"Oh, no, I don't deny it. For one reason, it would be of no use. For all
practical purposes, I admit it. What then?"

"What then?" she asked, bewildered. "Bartley; You don't mean it!"

"Yes, I do. I mean it. I _don't_ deny it. What then? What are you going to
do about it?" She gazed at him in incredulous horror. "Come! I mean what I
say. What will you do?"

"Oh, merciful God! what shall I do?" she prayed aloud.

"That's just what I'm curious to know. When you leaped in here, just now,
you must have meant to do something, if I couldn't convince you that the
woman was lying. Well, you see that I don't try. I give you leave to
believe whatever she said. What then?"

"Bartley!" she besought him in her despair. "Do you drive me from you?"

"Oh, no, certainly not. That isn't my way. You have driven me from you, and
I might claim the right to retaliate, but I don't. I've no expectation that
you'll go away, and I want to see what else you'll do. You would have me,
before we were married; you were tolerably shameless in getting me; when
your jealous temper made you throw me away, you couldn't live till you got
me back again; you ran after me. Well, I suppose you've learnt wisdom,
now. At least you won't try _that_ game again. But what _will_ you do?" He
looked at her smiling, while he dealt her these stabs one by one.

She set down the child, and went out to the entry where its hat and cloak
hung. She had not taken off her own things, and now she began to put on the
little one's garments with shaking hands, kneeling before it. "I will never
live with you again, Bartley," she said.

"Very well. I doubt it, as far as you're concerned; but if you go away now,
you certainly _won't_ live with me again, for I shall not let you come
back. Understand that."

Each had most need of the other's mercy, but neither would have mercy.

"It isn't for what you won't deny. I don't believe that. It's for what
you've said now." She could not make the buttons and the button-holes of
the child's sack meet with her quivering fingers; he actually stooped down
and buttoned the little garment for her, as if they had been going to take
the child out for a walk between them. She caught it up in her arms, and,
sobbing "Good by, Bartley!" ran out of the room.

"Recollect that if you go, you don't come back," he said. The outer door
crashing to behind her was his answer.

He sat down to think, before the fire he had built for her. It was blazing
brightly now, and the whole room had a hideous cosiness. He could not
think, he must act. He went up to their room, where the gas was burning
low, as if she had lighted it and then frugally turned it down as her wont
was. He did not know what his purpose was, but it developed itself. He
began to pack his things in a travelling-bag which he took out of the
closet, and which he had bought for her when she set out for Equity in the
summer; it had the perfume of her dresses yet.

When this was finished, he went down stairs again and being now strangely
hungry he made a meal of such things as he found set out on the tea-table.
Then he went over the papers in his secretary; he burnt some of them, and
put others into his bag.

After all this was done he sat down by the fire again, and gave Marcia a
quarter of an hour longer in which to return. He did not know whether he
was afraid that she would or would not come. But when the time ended, he
took up his bag and went out of the house. It began to rain, and he went
back for an umbrella: he gave her that one chance more, and he ran up into
their room. But she had not come back. He went out again, and hurried away
through the rain to the Albany Depot, where he bought a ticket for Chicago.
There was as yet nothing definite in his purpose, beyond the fact that he
was to be rid of her: whether for a long or short time, or forever, he did
not yet know; whether he meant ever to communicate with her, or seek or
suffer a reconciliation, the locomotive that leaped westward into the dark
with him knew as well as he.

Yet all the mute, obscure forces of habit, which are doubtless the
strongest forces in human nature, were dragging him back to her. Because
their lives had been united so long, it seemed impossible to sever them,
though their union had been so full of misery and discord; the custom of
marriage was so subtile and so pervasive, that his heart demanded her
sympathy for what he was suffering in abandoning her. The solitude into
which he had plunged stretched before him so vast, so sterile and hopeless,
that he had not the courage to realize it; he insensibly began to give it
limits: he would return after so many months, weeks, days.

He passed twenty-four hours on the train, and left it at Cleveland for the
half-hour it stopped for supper. But he could not eat; he had to own to
himself that he was beaten, and that he must return, or throw himself into
the lake. He ran hastily to the baggage-car, and effected the removal of
his bag; then he went to the ticket-office, and waited at the end of a long
queue for his turn at the window. His turn came at last, and he confronted
the nervous and impatient ticket-agent, without speaking.

"Well, sir, what do you want?" demanded the agent. Then, with rising
temper, "What is it? Are you deaf? Are you dumb? You can't expect to stand
there all night!"

The policeman outside the rail laid his hand on Bartley's shoulder: "Move
on, my friend."

He obeyed, and reeled away in a fashion that confirmed the policeman's
suspicions. He searched his pockets again and again; but his porte-monnaie
was in none of them. It had been stolen, and Halleck's money with the rest.
Now he could not return; nothing remained for him but the ruin he had
chosen.




XXXII.


Halleck prolonged his summer vacation beyond the end of October. He had
been in town from time to time and then had set off again on some new
absence; he was so restless and so far from well during the last of these
flying visits, that the old people were glad when he wrote them that
he should stay as long as the fine weather continued. He spoke of an
interesting man whom he had met at the mountain resort where he was
staying; a Spanish-American, attached to one of the Legations at
Washington, who had a scheme for Americanizing popular education in his own
country. "He has made a regular set at me," Halleck wrote, "and if I had
not fooled away so much time already on law and on leather, I should like
to fool away a little more on such a cause as this." He did not mention the
matter again in his letters; but the first night after his return, when
they all sat together in the comfort of having him at home again, he asked
his father, "What should you think of my going to South America?"

The old man started up from the pleasant after-supper drowse into which he
was suffering himself to fall, content with Halleck's presence, and willing
to leave the talk to the women folk. "I don't know what you mean, Ben?"

"I suppose it's my having the matter so much in mind that makes me feel as
if we had talked it over. I mentioned it in one of my letters."

"Yes," returned his father; "but I presumed you were joking."

Halleck frowned impatiently; he would not meet the gaze of his mother and
sisters, but he addressed himself again to his father. "I don't know that I
was in earnest." His mother dropped her eyes to her mending, with a faint
sigh of relief. "But I can't say," he added, "that I was joking, exactly.
The man himself was very serious about it." He stopped, apparently to
govern an irritable impulse, and then he went on to set the project of his
Spanish-American acquaintance before them, explaining it in detail.

At the end, "That's good," said his father, "but why need _you_ have gone,
Ben?"

The question seemed to vex Halleck; he did not answer at once. His mother
could not bear to see him crossed, and she came to his help against herself
and his father, since it was only supposing the case. "I presume," she
said, "that we could have looked at it as a missionary work."

"It isn't a missionary work, mother," answered Halleck, severely, "in any
sense that you mean. I should go down there to teach, and I should be
paid for it. And I want to say at once that they have no yellow-fever nor
earthquakes, and that they have not had a revolution for six years. The
country's perfectly safe every way, and so wholesome that it will be a good
thing for me. But I shouldn't expect to convert anybody."

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