If it had not been for the boisterous indignation of the president,
Northwick might have come away from the meeting, after the exposure of
his defalcations, with an unimpaired personal dignity. But as it was, he
felt curiously shrunken and shattered, till the prevailing habit of his
mind enabled him to piece himself together again and resume his former
size and shape. This happened very quickly; he had conceived of himself
so long as a man employing funds in his charge in speculations sometimes
successful and sometimes not, but at all times secured by his personal
probity and reliability. He had in fact more than once restored all that
he had taken, and he had come to trust himself in the course of these
transactions as fully as he was trusted by the men who were ignorant of
his irregularities. He was somehow flattered by the complete confidence
they reposed in him, though he really felt it to be no more than his
due; he had always merited and received the confidence of men associated
with him in business, and he had come to regard the funds of the
corporation as practically his own. In the early days of his connection
with the company, it largely owed its prosperity to his wise and careful
management; one might say that it was not until the last, when he got so
badly caught by that drop in railroads, that he had felt anything wrong
in his convertible use of its money. It was an informality; he would not
have denied that, but it was merely an informality. Then his losses
suddenly leaped beyond his ability to make them good; then, for the
first time, he began to practice that system in keeping the books which
the furious president called juggling with them. Even this measure he
considered a justifiable means of self-defence pending the difficulties
which beset him, and until he could make his losses good by other
operations. From time to time he was more fortunate; and whenever he
dramatized himself in an explanation to the directors, as he often did,
especially of late, he easily satisfied them as to the nature of his
motives and the propriety of his behavior, by calling their attention to
these successful deals, and to the probability, the entire probability,
that he could be at any moment in a position to repay all he had
borrowed of the company. He called it borrowing, and in his long habit
of making himself these loans and returning them, he had come to have a
sort of vague feeling that the company was privy to them; that it was
almost an understood thing. The president's violence was the first
intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness
that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose
discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning's
paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the
papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some
novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the
presence of the directors, he had refused to admit it to himself; but
after they adjourned, and he was left alone, he realized the truth. He
was like those fools, exactly like them, in what they had done, and in
the way of doing it; he was like them in motive and principle. All of
them had used others' money in speculation, expecting to replace it, and
then had not been able to replace it, and then had skipped, as the
newspapers said.
Whether he should complete the parallel, and skip, too, was a point
which he had not yet acknowledged to himself that he had decided. He
never had believed that it need come to that; but, for an instant, when
the president said he could wish him nothing better on his way home than
a good railroad accident, it flashed upon him that one of the three
alternatives before him was to skip. He had the choice to kill himself,
which was supposed to be the gentlemanly way out of his difficulties,
and would leave his family unstained by his crime; that matter had
sometimes been discussed in his presence, and every one had agreed that
it was the only thing for a gentleman to do after he had pilfered people
of money he could not pay back. There was something else that a man of
other instincts and weaker fibre might do, and that was to stand his
trial for embezzlement, and take his punishment. Or a man, if he was
that kind of a man, could skip. The question with Northwick was whether
he was that kind of man, or whether, if he skipped, he would be that
kind of man; whether the skipping would make him that kind of man.
The question was a cruel one for the self-respect which he had so
curiously kept intact. He had been respectable ever since he was born;
if he was born with any instinct it was the instinct of respectability,
the wish to be honored for what he seemed. It was all the stronger in
him, because his father had never had it; perhaps an hereditary trait
found expression in him after passing over one generation; perhaps an
antenatal influence formed him to that type. His mother was always
striving to keep the man she had married worthy of her choice in the
eyes of her neighbors; but he had never seconded her efforts. He had
been educated a doctor, but never practised medicine; in carrying on the
drug and book business of the village, he cared much more for the
literary than the pharmaceutical side of it; he liked to have a circle
of cronies about the wood-stove in his store till midnight, and discuss
morals and religion with them; and one night, when denying the plenary
inspiration of the Scriptures, he went to the wrong jar for an
ingredient of the prescription he was making up; the patient died of his
mistake. The disgrace and the disaster broke his wife's heart; but he
lived on to a vague and colorless old age, supported by his son in a
total disoccupation. The elder Northwick used sometimes to speak of his
son and his success in the world; not boastfully, but with a certain
sarcasm for the source of his bounty, as a boy who had always
disappointed him by a narrowness of ambition. He called him Milt, and he
said he supposed now Milt was the most self-satisfied man in
Massachusetts; he implied that there were better things than material
success. He did not say what they were, and he could have found very few
people in that village to agree with him; or to admit that the treasurer
of the Ponkwasset Mills had come in anywise short of the destiny of a
man whose father had started him in life with the name of John Milton.
They called him Milt, too, among themselves, and perhaps here and there
a bolder spirit might have called him so to his face if he had ever come
back to the village. But he had not. He had, as they had all heard, that
splendid summer place at Hatboro', where he spent his time when he was
not at his house in Boston; and when they verified the fact of his
immense prosperity by inquiry of some of the summer-folks who knew him
or knew about him, they were obscurely flattered by the fact; just as
many of us are proud of belonging to a nation in which we are enriched
by the fellow-citizenship of many manifold millionnaires. They did not
blame Northwick for never coming to see his father, or for never having
him home on a visit; they daily saw what old Northwick was, and how
little he was fitted for the society of a man whose respectability, even
as it was reflected upon them, was so dazzling. Old Northwick had never
done anything for Milt; he had never even got along with him; the fellow
had left him, and made his own way; and the old man had no right to
talk; if Milt was ever of a mind to cut off his rations, the old man
would soon see.