Yea, it becomes a man
To cherish memory, where he had delight,
For kindness is the natural birth of kindness.
Whose soul records not the great debt of joy,
Is stamped forever an ignoble man.
SOPHOCLES (_Ajax_).
As Rankin broke the news to Margaret--by degrees and very quietly--she
showed but little sign of feeling. Her face whitened and she moved
stiffly to the open window, where she could sit in the draught. As she
made Rankin tell her the whole story she simply grew stony, while she
sat with bloodless hands clinched together, as if she thus clutched at
her soul to save it from the madness of a terrible grief.
Suddenly she interrupted him.
"Dismiss your cab," she said. "I will walk back with you part of the
way."
When she turned toward him, the strained face was so white and the eyes
so wide and expressionless that he became afraid.
"Perhaps you would rather be alone," said he, doubtful about letting her
go into the street.
She seemed to divine what was in his mind, for she made him feel more at
ease by a gentler tone:
"Alone? No, no! Anything but that! The walk will do me good."
The cab was dismissed while she put on her hat, and as they walked
through the quiet streets toward the heart of the city, he went on with
all the particulars, which she seemed determined to hear. Several times
they met people who knew her and knew of her engagement to Hampstead,
and they were surprised to see her walking with--of all men--Maurice
Rankin. But she saw no one, gazing before her with the look which means
madness if the mind be not diverted. Suddenly, as they had to cross one
of the main arteries of the city, a sound fell upon Margaret's ear that
made her stop and grasp Rankin by the arm. Then the cry came again--from
a boy running toward them along the street:
"Special edition of the Evening News! All about Geoffrey Hampstead, the
bank robber!"
For a moment her grasp came near tearing a piece out of Rankin's arm.
But this was only when the blow struck her. She stopped the boy and
bought a paper. She gave him half a dollar and walked on.
"This will do to give them at home," she said simply. "I could not tell
them myself."
But the blow was too much for her. To hear the name of the man she
worshiped yelled through the streets as a bank robber's was more than
she felt able to bear. She must get home now. Another experience of this
kind, and something would happen.
"Good-by!" she said, as she stopped abruptly at the corner of a street.
Not a vestige of a tear had been seen in her eyes. "I will go home now.
You have been very kind. I forgive you for--"
She turned quickly, and Rankin stood and watched her as she passed
rapidly away.
* * * * *
No. 173 Tremaine Buildings had become slightly better furnished since
the opening of this story. Between the time when he made the cruise in
the Ideal and the events recorded in the preceding chapters, Rankin had
contributed somewhat to his comforts in an inexpensive way. In order to
buy his coal, which he did now with much satisfaction, he had still to
practice the strictest economy. But he took some pleasure in his
solitary existence. From time to time he bought different kinds of
preserves sold in pressed-glass goblets and jugs of various sizes. After
the jam was consumed the prize in glassware would be washed by Mrs.
Priest and added to his collection, and there was a keen sense of humor
in him when he added each terrible utensil to his stock. "A poor
thing--but mine own!" he would quote, as he bowed to an imaginary
audience and pointed with apologetic pride to a hideous pressed-glass
butter-bolt.
In buying packages of dusty, doctored, and detestable tea he acquired
therewith a collection of gift-spoons of different sizes, and also
knives, forks, and plates, which, if not tending to develop a taste for
high art, were useful. At a certain "seven-cent store" he procured, for
the prevailing price, articles in tinware, the utility of which was out
of all proportion to the cost.
Thus, when he sat down of an evening and surveyed a packing-box filled
with several sacks of coal, all paid for; when he viewed the collection
of glassware, the "family plate," and the very desirable cutlery; when
he gazed with pride upon his seven-cent treasures and his curtains of
chintz at ten cents a mile; when he considered that all these were his
very own, his sense of having possessions made him less communistic and
more conservative. Primitively, a Conservative was a being who owned
something, just as Darwin's chimpanzee in the "Zoo," who discovered how
to break nuts with a stone and hid the stone, was a Tory; the other
monkeys who stole it were necessarily Reformers.
About ten o'clock on the evening of the trial Rankin was sitting among
his possessions sipping some "gift-spoon" tea. Around him were three
evening papers and two special editions. The "startling developments"
and "unexpected changes" which had "transpired" at the Victoria Bank had
made the special editions sell off like cheap peaches, and Rankin was
enjoying the weakness--pardonable in youth and not unknown to
maturity--of reading each paper's account of himself and the trial. They
spoke of his "acuteness" and "foresight," and commented on his being
the sole means of recovering the forty-eight thousand dollars. One paper
must have jumped at a conclusion when it called him "a well-known and
promising young lawyer--one of the rising men at the bar."
"The tide has turned," he said. "Twenty cents a day is not going to
cover my total expenses after this. I feel it in my bones that the money
will come pouring in now." He was mechanically filling a pipe when a rap
at the door recalled him from his dream. A tall Scotchman, whom Rankin
recognized as the messenger of the Victoria Bank, handed him a letter
and then felt around for the stairs in the darkness, and descended
backward, on his hands and knees, for fear of accidents.
A pleasing letter from the manager of the Victoria Bank inclosed one of
the recovered thousand-dollar bills.
Rankin sat down. "I shall never," he said, with an air of resolve,
"steal any more coal! And now I'll have a cigar, three for a quarter,
and blow the expense!"
Two weeks afterward there came to him a copy of a resolution passed by
the bank directors, together with a notification that they had arranged
with the bank solicitors, Messrs. Godlie, Lobbyer, Dertewercke, and
Toylor, to have him taken in as a junior partner.
* * * * *
Immediately after Geoffrey was sentenced, Jack Cresswell was, of course,
discharged. A dozen hands were being held out to congratulate him, when
Detective Dearborn drew him through a side door into an empty room,
where they had a short talk about keeping the name of Nina Lindon from
the public, and then they departed together for Tremaine Buildings in a
cab, while the two valises in front looked, like their owner, none the
better for their vicissitudes. Dearborn felt that little could be said
to mend the trouble he had caused Jack, but he did all he could, and
there was certainly nothing hard-hearted in the care with which the
redoubtable detective assisted his former victim to bed. Mrs. Priest was
summoned, also a doctor. Jack was found to be worse than he thought, and
Patsey was ordered to remain within call in the next room, where he
consumed cigars at twelve dollars the hundred throughout the night.
The next day Mrs. Mackintosh and Margaret came down in a cab to Jack's
lonely quarters, and insisted upon his being moved to their house during
his illness. While unable to go home to his parents at Halifax he was
loath to give trouble to his friends, and made excuses, until he saw
that Margaret really wished him to come, and divined that his coming
might be a relief to her.
It was so. In the weeks that followed, whatever these two suffered in
the darkness and solitude of the nights, during the day-time they were
brave. The heart of each knew its own bitterness. In a short time Jack
found the comfort of speech in telling Margaret many things. Unavoidably
Geoffrey's name came up, for he was entangled in both their lives.
Little by little Jack's story came out, as he lay back weakly on his
couch, until, warmed by Margaret's sympathy, he told her all about Nina
and himself--so far as he knew the story--and in the presence of his
manifold troubles, and at the thought of his suffering when he
witnessed, as a captive, Nina's death, Margaret felt that she was in the
presence of one who had known even greater grief than her own. This was
good for her. After a while she was able to speak to Jack about
Geoffrey, and this brought them more and more together.
When he got well, his breach of duty in going away without notice was
overlooked, and he was taken back to his old post. There he worked on
as the years rolled by. Country managerships were offered to him, and
declined. He had nothing to make money for, and the only thing he really
enjoyed was Margaret's society, in which he would talk about Nina and
Geoffrey without restraint. For many years he remained ignorant that his
marriage with Nina was, after all, for New York State a valid one, since
marriage by simple contract, without religious ceremony, is sufficient
in that State. He never dreamed Geoffrey had been indirectly the cause
of his life's ruin, and always spoke of him as a man almost without
blame. However unreasonable, there are, among all the faulty emotions,
few more beautiful than a man's affection for a man. When it exists, it
is the least exacting attachment of his life.
Margaret listened to his superlatives about Geoffrey. She listened; but
as the years passed on she grew wiser. When walking in the open fields,
or perhaps beside the wide lake, an image would come to her in gladsome
colors, in matchless beauty--a Greek god with floating hair and full of
resolve and victory, and in her dreams she would see and talk with him,
and would find him grave and thoughtful and tender, and all that a man
could be. Then would come the rending of the heart. This was a thief who
had decoyed his friend, and, good or bad, was lost to her.
And thus time passed on. For two or three years she went nowhere. She
tried going into society, after Geoffrey's sentence, thinking to obtain
relief in change of thought, but the experiment was a failure. She found
that she had not the elasticity of temperament which can doff care and
don gayety as society demands. So she gave up the attempt for years, and
then went again only at her mother's solicitation. She said she had her
patients at the hospital, her studies with her father, her many books to
read, her long walks with Jack and Maurice Rankin, and what more did she
want?
She did not hear of Geoffrey. The six years of his imprisonment had
dragged themselves into the past, and she supposed he was free again, if
he had not died in the penitentiary. But nothing was heard of him, and
thus the time rolled on, while Margaret's mother secretly wept to see
her daughter's early bloom departing, while no hope of any happy married
life seemed possible to her.
Grave, pleasant, studious, thoughtful, as the years rolled by, she went
on with her hospital work. From the depths of the grief into which she
was plunged, she could discern some truths that might have remained
unknown if her life had continued sunny--just as at noonday from the
bottom of a deep pit or well the stars above us can be seen. To her the
bitterness of her life was medicinal. Speaking chemically, it was like
the acid of the unripe apple acting upon the starch in it to make a
sugar--thus to perfect a sweet maturity. She was one of the richly
endowed women in whom sensitiveness and strength combine peculiarly for
either superlative joy or sorrow, and hers was a grief which, for her,
nothing but tending the bed of sickness seemed to mitigate. Many a
bruised heart was healed, gladdened, and bewitched by the angel smile on
the sweet firm, full lips which could quiver with compassion. There are
some smiles, given for others, when grief has made thought for self
unbearable, which nothing but a descent into hell and glorious rising
again could produce.