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A Modern Instance

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Her father came to see her as soon as he thought it best after Atherton's
letter; and the old man had to endure talk of Bartley to which all her
former praises were as refreshing shadows of defamation. She required him
to agree with everything she said, and he could not refuse; she reproached
him for being with herself the cause of all Bartley's errors, and he had to
bear it without protest. At the end he could say nothing but "Better come
home with me, Marcia," and he suffered in meekness the indignation with
which she rebuked him: "I will stay in Bartley's house till he comes back
to me. If he is dead, I will die here."

The old man had satisfied himself that Bartley had absconded in his own
rascally right mind, and he accepted with tacit grimness the theory of the
detectives that he had not gone to Europe alone. He paid back the money
which Bartley had borrowed from Halleck, and he set himself as patiently
as he could to bear with Marcia's obstinacy. It was a mania which must be
indulged for the time, and he could only trust to Atherton to keep
him advised concerning her. When he offered her money at parting, she
hesitated. But she finally took it, saying, "Bartley will pay it back,
every cent, as soon as he gets home. And if," she added, "he doesn't get
back soon, I will take some other boarders and pay it myself."

He could see that she was offended with him for asking her to go home. But
she was his girl; he only pitied her. He shook hands with her as usual, and
kissed her with the old stoicism; but his lips, set to fierceness by the
life-long habit of sarcasm, trembled as he turned away. She was eager to
have him go; for she had given him Miss Strong's room, and had taken the
girl into her own, and Bartley would not like it if he came back and found
her there.

Bartley's disappearance was scarcely a day's wonder with people outside
his own circle in that time of anxiety for a fair count in Louisiana and
Florida, and long before the Returning Boards had partially relieved the
tension of the public mind by their decision he had quite dropped out of
it. The reporters who called at his house to get the bottom facts in the
case, adopted Marcia's theory, given them by Miss Strong, and whatever were
their own suspicions or convictions, paragraphed him with merciful brevity
as having probably wandered away during a temporary hallucination. They
spoke of the depression of spirits which many of his friends had observed
in him, and of pecuniary losses, as the cause. They mentioned his possible
suicide only to give the report the authoritative denial of his family; and
they added, that the case was in the hands of the detectives, who believed
themselves in possession of important clews. The detectives in fact
remained constant to their original theory, that Bartley had gone to
Europe, and they were able to name with reasonable confidence the person
with whom he had eloped. But these were matters hushed up among the force
and the press. In the mean time, Bartley had been simultaneously seen at
Montreal and Cincinnati, at about the same time that an old friend had
caught a glimpse of him on a train bound westward from Chicago.

So far as the world was concerned, the surmise with which Marcia saved
herself from final despair was the only impression that even vaguely
remained of the affair. Her friends, who had compassionately acquiesced in
it at first, waited for the moment when they could urge her to relinquish
it and go home to her father; but while they waited, she gathered strength
to establish herself immovably in it, and to shape her life more and more
closely about it. She had no idea, no instinct, but to stay where he had
left her till he came back. She opposed this singly and solely against
all remonstrance, and treated every suggestion to the contrary as an
instigation to crime. Her father came from time to time during the winter
to see her, but she would never go home with him even for a day. She put
her plan in force; she took other boarders: other girl students like Miss
Strong, whom her friends brought her when they found that it was useless
to oppose her and so began to abet her; she worked hard, and she actually
supported herself at last in a frugal independence. Her father consulted
with Atherton and the Hallecks; he saw that she was with good and faithful
friends, and he submitted to what he could not help. When the summer came,
he made a last attempt to induce her to go home with him. He told her that
her mother wished to see her. She would not understand. "I'll come," she
said, "if mother gets seriously sick. But I can't go home for the summer.
If I hadn't been at home last summer, _he_ would never have got into that
way, and _it_ would never have happened."

She went home at last, in obedience to a peremptory summons; but her mother
was too far gone to know her when she came. Her quiet, narrow life had
grown colder and more inward to the end, and it passed without any apparent
revival of tenderness for those once dear to her; the funeral publicity
that followed seemed a final touch of the fate by which all her preferences
had been thwarted in the world.

Marcia stayed only till she could put the house in order after they had
laid her mother to rest among the early reddening sumacs under the hot
glare of the August sun; and when she came away, she brought her father
with her to Boston, where he spent his days as he might, taking long and
aimless walks, devouring heaps of newspapers, rusting in idleness, and
aging fast, as men do in the irksomeness of disuse.

Halleck's father was beginning to show his age, too; and Halleck's mother
lived only in her thoughts of him, and her hopes of his return; but he
did not even speak of this in his letters to them. He said very little of
himself, and they could merely infer that the experiment to which he had
devoted himself was becoming less and less satisfactory. Their sense of
this added its pang to their unhappiness in his absence.

One day Marcia said to Olive Halleck, "Has any one noticed that you are
beginning to look like your sisters?"

"_I've_ noticed it," answered the girl. "I always _was_ an old maid, and
now I'm beginning to show it."

Marcia wondered if she had not hurt Olive's feelings; but she would never
have known how to excuse herself; and latterly she had been growing more
and more like her father in certain traits. Perhaps her passion for Bartley
had been the one spring of tenderness in her nature, and, if ever it were
spent, she would stiffen into the old man's stern aridity.




XXXVI.


It was nearly two years after Atherton's marriage that Halleck one day
opened the door of the lawyer's private office, and, turning the key in the
lock, limped forward to where the latter was sitting at his desk. Halleck
was greatly changed: the full beard that he had grown scarcely hid the
savage gauntness of his face; but the change was not so much in lines and
contours as in that expression of qualities which we call looks.

"Well, Atherton!"

"Halleck! _You_!"

The friends looked at each other; and Atherton finally broke from his amaze
and offered his hand, with an effect, even then, of making conditions. But
it was Halleck who was the first to speak again.

"How _is_ she? Is she well? Is she still here? Have they heard anything
from him yet?"

"No," said Atherton, answering the last question with the same provisional
effect as before.

"Then he is _dead_. That's what I knew; that's what I _said_! And here I
am. The fight is over, and that's the end of it. I'm beaten."

"You look it," said Atherton, sadly.

"Oh, yes; I look it. That's the reason I can afford to be frank, in coming
back to my friends. I knew that with this look in my face I should make my
own welcome; and it's cordial even beyond my expectations."

"I'm not glad to see you, Halleck," said Atherton. "For your own sake I
wish you were at the other end of the world."

"Oh, I know that. How are my people? Have you seen my father lately? Or my
mother? Or--Olive?" A pathetic tremor shook his voice.

"Why, haven't _you_ seen them yet?" demanded Atherton.

Halleck laughed cynically. "My dear friend, my steamer arrived this
morning, and I'm just off the New York train. I've hurried to your office
in all the impatience of friendship. I'm very lucky to find you here so
late in the day! You can take me home to dinner, and let your domestic
happiness preach to me. Come, I rather like the notion of that!"

"Halleck," said Atherton, without heeding his banter, "I wish you would go
away again! No one knows you are here, you say, and no one need ever know
it."

Halleck set his lips and shook his head, with a mocking smile. "I'm
surprised at you, Atherton, with your knowledge of human nature. I've
come to stay; you must know that. You must know that I had gone through
everything before I gave up, and that I haven't the strength to begin the
struggle over again. I tell you I'm beaten, and I'm glad of it; for there
is rest in it. You would waste your breath, if you talked to me in the old
way; there's nothing in me to appeal to, any more. If I was wrong--But I
don't admit, any more, that I was wrong: by heaven, I was _right_!"

"You _are_ beaten, Halleck," said Atherton sorrowfully. He pushed himself
back in his chair, and clasped his hands together behind his head, as his
habit was in reasoning with obstinate clients. "What do you propose to do?"

"I propose to stay."

"What for?"

"What for? Till I can prove that he is dead."

"And then?"

"Then I shall be free to ask her." He added angrily, "You know what I've
come back for: why do you torment me with these questions? I did what I
could; I ran away. And the last night I saw her, I thrust her back into
that hell she called her home, and I told her that no man could be her
refuge from that devil, her husband,--when she had begged me in her
mortal terror to go in with her, and save her from him. _That_ was the
recollection I had to comfort me when I tried to put her out of my
mind,--out of my soul! When I heard that he was gone, I respected her days
of mourning. God knows how I endured it, now it's over; but I did endure
it. I waited, and here I am. And you ask me to go away again! Ah!" He
fetched his breath through his set teeth, and struck his fist on his knee.
"He is _dead_! And now, if she will, she can marry me. Don't look at me as
if I had killed him! There hasn't been a time in these two infernal years
when I wouldn't have given my life to save his--for _her_ sake. I know
that, and that gives me courage, it gives me hope."

"But if he isn't dead?"

"Then he has abandoned her, and she has the right to be free: she can get a
divorce!"

"Oh," said Atherton, compassionately, "has that poison got into you,
Halleck? You might ask her, if she were a widow, to marry you; but how will
you ask her, if she's still a wife, to get a divorce and then marry you?
How will you suggest that to a woman whose constancy to her mistake has
made her sacred to you?" Halleck seemed about to answer; but he only
panted, dry-lipped and open-mouthed, and Atherton continued: "You would
have to corrupt her soul first. I don't know what change you've made in
yourself during these two years; you look like a desperate and defeated
man, but you don't look like _that_. You don't _look_ like one of those
scoundrels who lure women from their duty, ruin homes, and destroy society,
not in the old libertine fashion in which the seducer had at least the
grace to risk his life, but safely, smoothly, under the shelter of our
infamous laws. Have you really come back here to give your father's honest
name, and the example of a man of your own blameless life, in support of
conditions that tempt people to marry with a mental reservation, and that
weaken every marriage bond with the guilty hope of escape whenever a fickle
mind, or secret lust, or wicked will may dictate? Have you come to join
yourself to those miserable spectres who go shrinking through the world,
afraid of their own past, and anxious to hide it from those they hold dear;
or do you propose to defy the world, to help form within it the community
of outcasts with whom shame is not shame, nor dishonor, dishonor? How will
you like the society of those uncertain men, those certain women?"

"You are very eloquent," said Halleck, "but I ask you to observe that these
little abstractions don't interest me. I've a concrete purpose, and I
can't contemplate the effect of other people's actions upon American
civilization. When you ask me to believe that I oughtn't to try to rescue a
woman from the misery to which a villain has left her, simply because some
justice of the peace consecrated his power over her, I decline to be such a
fool. I use my reason, and I see who it was that defiled and destroyed that
marriage, and I know that she is as free in the sight of God as if he had
never lived. If the world doesn't like my open shame, let it look to its
own secret shame,--the marriages made and maintained from interest, and
ambition, and vanity, and folly. I will take my chance with the men and
women who have been honest enough to own their mistake, and to try to
repair it, and I will preach by my life that marriage has no sanctity but
what love gives it, and that when love ceases marriage ceases, before
heaven. If the laws have come to recognize that, by whatever fiction, so
much the better for the laws!" Halleck rose.

"Well, then," cried Atherton, rising, too, "you shall meet me on your own
ground! This poor creature is constant in every breath she draws to the
ruffian who has abandoned her. I must believe, since you say it, that you
are ready to abet her in getting a divorce, even one of those divorces
that are 'obtained without publicity, and for any cause,'"--Halleck
winced,--"that you are willing to put your sisters to shame before the
world, to break your mother's heart, and your father's pride,--to insult
the ideal of goodness that she herself has formed of you; but how will you
begin? The love on her part, at least, hasn't ceased: has the marriage?"

"She shall tell me," answered Halleck. He left Atherton without another
word, and in resentment that effaced all friendship between them, though
after this parting they still kept up its outward forms, and the Athertons
took part in the rejoicings with which the Hallecks celebrated Ben's
return. His meeting with the lawyer was the renewal of the old conflict on
terms of novel and hopeless degradation. He had mistaken for peace that
exhaustion of spirit which comes to a man in battling with his conscience;
he had fancied his struggle over, and he was to learn now that its anguish
had just begun. In that delusion his love was to have been a law to itself,
able to loose and to bind, and potent to beat down all regrets, all doubts,
all fears, that questioned it; but the words with which Marcia met him
struck his passion dumb.

"Oh, I am so glad you have come lack!" she said. "Now I know that we can
find him. You were such friends with him, and you understood him so well,
that you will know just what to do. Yes, we shall find him now, and we
should have found him long ago if you had been here. Oh, if you had never
gone away! But I can never be grateful enough for what you said to me that
night when you would not come in with me. The words have rung in my ears
ever since; they showed that you had faith in him, more faith than I had,
and I've made them my rule and my guide. No one has been my refuge from
him, and no one ever shall be. And I thank you--yes, I thank you on my
bended knees--for making me go into the house alone; it's my one comfort
that I had the strength to come back to him, and let him do anything he
would to me, after I had treated him so; but I've never pretended it was
my own strength. I have always told everybody that the strength came from
you!"

Halleck had brought Olive with him; she and Marcia's father listened to
these words with the patience of people who had heard them many times
before; but at the end Olive glanced at Halleck's downcast face with fond
pride in the satisfaction she imagined they must give him. The old man
ruminated upon a bit of broom straw, and absently let the little girl catch
by his hands, as she ran to and fro between him and her mother while her
mother talked. Halleck made a formless sound in his throat, for answer, and
Marcia went on.

"I've got a new plan now, but it seems as if father took a pleasure in
discouraging _all_ my plans. I _know_ that Bartley's shut up, somewhere, in
some asylum, and I want them to send detectives to all the asylums in the
United States and in Canada,--you can't tell how far off he would wander
in that state,--and inquire if any stray insane person has been brought to
them. Doesn't it seem to you as if that would be the right way to find him?
I want to talk it all over with you, Mr. Halleck, for I know _you_ can
sympathize with me; and if need be I will go to the asylums myself; I will
walk to them, I will crawl to them on my knees! When I think of him shut up
there among those raving maniacs, and used as they use people in some of
the asylums--Oh, oh, oh, oh!"

She broke out into sobs, and caught her little girl to her breast. The
child must have been accustomed to her mother's tears; she twisted her head
round, and looked at Halleck with a laughing face.

Marcia dried her eyes, and asked, with quivering lips, "Isn't she like
him?"

"Yes," replied Halleck huskily.

"She has his long eyelashes exactly, and his hair and complexion, hasn't
she?"

The old man sat chewing his broom straw in silence; but when Marcia left
the room to get Bartley's photograph, so that Halleck might see the child's
resemblance to him, her father looked at Halleck from under his beetling
brows: "I don't think we need trouble the _asylums_ much for Bartley
Hubbard. But if it was to search the States prisons and the jails, the
rum-holes and the gambling-hells, or if it was to dig up the scoundrels who
have been hung under assumed names during the last two years, I should have
some hopes of identifying him."

Marcia came back, and the old man sat in cast-iron quiet, as if he had
never spoken; it was clear that whatever hate he felt for Bartley he spared
her; and that if he discouraged her plans, as she said, it was because they
were infected by the craze in which she canonized Bartley.

"You see how she is," said Olive, when they came away.

"Yes, yes, yes," Halleck desolately assented.

"Sometimes she seems to me just like a querulous, vulgar, middle-aged woman
in her talk; she repeats herself in the same scolding sort of way; and
she's so eager to blame somebody besides Bartley for Bartley's wickedness
that, when she can't punish herself, she punishes her father. She's
merciless to that wretched old man, and he's wearing his homesick life
out here in the city for her sake. You heard her just now, about his
discouraging her plans?"

"Yes," said Halleck, as before.

"She's grown commoner and narrower, but it's hardly her fault, poor thing,
and it seems terribly unjust that she should be made so by what she has
suffered. But that's just the way it has happened. She's so undisciplined,
that she couldn't get any good out of her misfortunes; she's only got harm:
they've made her selfish, and there seems to be nothing left of what she
was two years ago but her devotion to that miserable wretch. You mustn't
let it turn you against her, Ben; you mustn't forget what she might have
been. She had a rich nature; but how it's been wasted, and turned back upon
itself! Poor, untrained, impulsive, innocent creature,--my heart aches for
her! It's been hard to bear with her at times, terribly hard, and you'll
find it so, Ben. But you _must_ bear with her. The awfulest thing about
people in trouble is that they are such _bores_; they tire you to death.
But you'll only have to stand her praises of what Bartley was, and we had
to stand them, and her hopes of what you would be if you were only at home,
besides. I don't know what all she expects of you; but you must try not to
disappoint her; she worships the ground you tread on, and I really think
she believes you can do anything you will, just because you're good."

Halleck listened in silence. He was indeed helpless to be otherwise than
constant. With shame and grief in his heart, he could only vow her there
the greater fealty because of the change he found in her.

He was doomed at every meeting to hear her glorify a man whom he believed a
heartless traitor, to plot with her for the rescue from imaginary captivity
of the wretch who had cruelly forsaken her. He actually took some of the
steps she urged; he addressed inquiries to the insane asylums, far and
near; and in these futile endeavors, made only with the desire of failure,
his own reason seemed sometimes to waver. She insisted that Atherton should
know all the steps they were taking; and his sense of his old friend's
exact and perfect knowledge of his motives was a keener torture than even
her father's silent scorn of his efforts, or the worship in which his own
family held him for them.




XXXVII.


Halleck had come home in broken health, and had promised his family, with
the self-contempt that depraves, not to go away again, since the change had
done him no good. There was no talk for the present of his trying to do
anything but to get well; and for a while, under the strong excitement, he
seemed to be better. But suddenly he failed; he kept his room, and then he
kept his bed; and the weeks stretched into months before he left it.

When the spring weather came, he was able to go out again, and he spent
most of his time in the open air, feeling every day a fresh accession of
strength. At the end of one long April afternoon, he walked home with
a light heart, whose right to rejoice he would not let his conscience
question. He had met Marcia in the Public Garden, where they sat down on a
bench and talked, while her father and the little girl wandered away in the
restlessness of age and the restlessness of childhood.

"We are going home to Equity this summer," she said, "and perhaps we shall
not come back. No, we shall not come back. _I have given up_. I have
waited, hoping--hoping. But now I know that it is no use waiting any
longer: _he is dead_." She spoke in tearless resignation, and the peace of
accepted widowhood seemed to diffuse itself around her.

Her words repeated themselves to Halleck, as he walked homeward. He found
the postman at the door with a newspaper, which he took from him with a
smile at its veteran appearance, and its probable adventures in reaching
him. The wrapper seemed to have been several times slipped off, and then
slit up; it was tied with a string, now, and was scribbled with rejections
in the hands of various Hallocks and Halletts, one of whom had finally
indorsed upon it, "Try 97 Rumford Street." It was originally addressed, as
he made out, to "Mr. B. Halleck, Boston, Mass.," and he carried it to his
room before he opened it, with a careless surmise as to its interest for
him. It proved to be a flimsy, shabbily printed country newspaper, with an
advertisement marked in one corner.

State of Indiana, Tecumseh County

In Tecumseh Circuit Court, April Term, 1879.

BARTLEY J. HUBBARD

vs.

MARCIA G. HUBBARD.

Divorce. No. 5793.

It appearing by affidavit this day filed in the office of the Clerk of
the Tecumseh Circuit Court, that Marcia G. Hubbard, defendant in the
above entitled action for divorce on account of abandonment and gross
neglect of duty, is a non-resident of the State of Indiana, notice of
the pendency of such action is therefore hereby given said defendant
above named, and that the same will be called for answer on the 11th
day of April, 1879, the same being the 3d judicial day of the April
term of said court, for said year, which said term of said court will
begin on the first Monday in April, 1879, and will be held at the Court
House, in the town of Tecumseh, in said County and State, said 11th day
of April, 1879, being the time fixed by said plaintiff by indorsement
on his complaint, at which said time said defendant is required to
answer herein.

Witness my hand and the seal of the said Court, this 4th day of March,
1879.

AUGUSTUS H. HAWKINS,

Clerk.

SEAL

Milikin & Ayres, Att'ys for Plff.

Halleck read this advertisement again and again, with a dull, mechanical
action of the brain. He saw the familiar names, but they were hopelessly
estranged by their present relation to each other; the legal jargon reached
no intelligence in him that could grasp its purport.

When his daze began to yield, he took evidence of his own reality by some
such tests as one might in waking from a long faint. He looked at his
hands, his feet; he rose and looked at his face in the glass. Turning
about, he saw the paper where he had left it on the table; it was no
illusion. He picked up the cover from the floor, and scanned it anew,
trying to remember the handwriting on it, to make out who had sent this
paper to him, and why. Then the address seemed to grow into something
different under his eye: it ceased to be his name; he saw now that the
paper was directed to Mrs. B. Hubbard, and that by a series of accidents
and errors it had failed to reach her in its wanderings, and by a final
blunder had fallen into his hands.

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