The local opinion scarcely did justice to old Northwick's imperfect
discharge of a father's duties; his critics could not have realized how
much some capacities, if not tastes, which Northwick had inherited,
contributed to that very effect of respectability which they revered.
The early range of books, the familiarity with the mere exterior of
literature, restricted as it was, helped Northwick later to pass for a
man of education, if not of reading, with men who were themselves less
read than educated. The people whom his ability threw him with in Boston
were all Harvard men, and they could not well conceive of an
acquaintance, so gentlemanly and quiet as Northwick, who was not college
bred, too. By unmistakable signs, which we carry through life, they knew
he was from the country, and they attributed him to a freshwater
college. They said, "You're a Dartmouth man, Northwick, I believe," or,
"I think you're from Williams," and when Northwick said no, they forgot
it, and thought that he was a Bowdoin man; the impression gradually
fixed itself that he was from one or other of those colleges. It was
believed in like manner, partly on account of his name, that he was from
one of those old ministerial families that you find up in the hills,
where the whole brood study Greek while they are sugaring off in the
spring; and that his own mother had fitted him for college. There was,
in fact, something clerical in Northwick's bearing; and it was felt by
some that he had studied for the ministry, but had gone into business to
help his family. The literary phase of the superstition concerning him
was humored by the library which formed such a striking feature of his
house in Boston, as well as his house in Hatboro'; at Hatboro' it was
really vast, and was so charming and so luxurious that it gave the idea
of a cultivated family; they preferred to live in it, and rarely used
the drawing-room, which was much smaller, and was a gold and white
sanctuary on the north side of the house, only opened when there was a
large party of guests, for dancing. Most people came and went without
seeing it, and it remained shut up, as much a conjecture as the memory
of Northwick's wife. She was supposed to have been taken from him early,
to save him and his children from the mortifying consequences of one of
those romantic love-affairs in which a conscientious man had sacrificed
himself to a girl he was certain to outgrow. None of his world knew that
his fortunes had been founded upon the dowry she brought him, and upon
the stay her belief in him had always been. She was a church-member, as
such women usually are, but Northwick was really her religion; and as
there is nothing that does so much to sanctify a deity as the blind
devotion of its worshippers, Northwick was rendered at times worthy of
her faith by the intensity of it. In his sort he returned her love; he
was not the kind of man whose affections are apt to wander, perhaps
because they were few and easily kept together; perhaps because he was
really principled against letting them go astray. He was not merely true
in a passive way, but he was constant in the more positive fashion. When
they began to get on in the world, and his business talent brought him
into relations with people much above them socially, he yielded to her
shrinking from the opportunities of social advancement that opened to
them, and held aloof with her. This kept him a country person in his
experiences much longer than he need have remained; and tended to that
sort of defensive secretiveness which grew more and more upon him, and
qualified his conduct in matters where there was no question of his
knowledge of the polite world. It was not until after his wife's death,
and until his daughters began to grow up into the circles where his
money and his business associations authorized them to move, that he
began to see a little of that world. Even then he left it chiefly to his
children; for himself he continued quite simply loyal to his wife's
memory, and apparently never imagined such a thing as marrying again.
He rose from the chair where he had sat looking up into her pictured
face, and went to open the safe near the window. But he stopped in
stooping over to work the combination, and glanced out across his
shoulder into the night. The familiar beauty of the scene tempted him to
the window for what, all at once, he felt might be his last look, though
the next instant he was able to argue the feeling down, and make his
meditated act work into his schemes of early retrieval and honorable
return. He must have been thinking there before the fire a long time,
for now the moon had risen, and shone upon the black bulk of firs to the
southward, and on the group of outbuildings. These were in a sort the
mechanism that transacted the life of his house, ministering to all its
necessities and pleasures. Under the conservatories, with their long
stretches of glass, catching the moon's rays like levels of water, was
the steam furnace that imparted their summer climate, through heavy
mains carried below the basement, to every chamber of the mansion; a
ragged plume of vapor escaped from the tall chimney above them, and
dishevelled itself in diaphanous silver on the night-breeze. Beyond the
hot-houses lay the cold graperies; and off to the left rose the stables;
in a cosy nook of this low mass Northwick saw the lights of the
coachman's family-rooms; beyond the stables were the cow-barn and the
dairy, with the farmer's cottage; it was a sort of joke with Northwick's
business friends that you could buy butter of him sometimes at less than
half it cost him, and the joke flattered Northwick's sense of baronial
consequence with regard to his place. It was really a farm in extent,
and it was mostly a grazing farm; his cattle were in the herd-books, and
he raised horses, which he would sell now and then to a friend; they
were so distinctly varied from the original stock as to form almost a
breed of themselves; they numbered scores in his stalls and pastures.
The whole group of the buildings was so great that it was like a sort of
communal village. In the silent moonlight Northwick looked at it as if
it were an expansion or extension of himself, so personally did it seem
to represent his tastes, and so historical was it of the ambitions of
his whole life; he realized that it would be like literally tearing
himself from it, when he should leave it. That would be the real pang;
his children could come to him, but not his home. But he reminded
himself that he was going only for a time, until he could rehabilitate
himself, and come back upon the terms he could easily make when once he
was on his feet again. He thought how fortunate it was that in the
meanwhile this property could not be alienated; how fortunate it was
that he had originally deeded it to his wife in the days when he had the
full right to do so, and she had willed it to their children by a
perfect entail. The horses and the cattle might go, and probably must
go; and he winced to think of it, but the land, and the house,--all but
the furniture and pictures,--were the children's and could not be
touched. The pictures were his, and would have to go with the horses and
cattle; but ten or twelve thousand dollars would replace them, and he
must add that sum to his other losses, and bear it as well as he could.
After all, when everything was said and done, he was the chief loser. If
he was a thief, as that man said, he could show that he had robbed
himself of two dollars for every dollar that he had robbed anybody else
of; if now he was going to add to his theft by carrying off the
forty-three thousand dollars of the company's which he found himself
possessed of, it was certainly not solely in his own interest. It was to
be the means of recovering all that had gone before it, and that the
very men whom it would enable him to repay finally in full, supposed it
to have gone with.
Northwick felt almost a glow of pride in clarifying this point to his
reason. The additional theft presented itself almost in the light of a
duty; it really was his duty to make reparation to those he had injured,
if he had injured any one, and it was his first duty to secure the means
of doing it. If that money, which it might almost be said was left
providentially in his hands, were simply restored now to the company, it
would do comparatively no good at all, and would strip him of every hope
of restoring the whole sum he had borrowed. He arrived at that word
again, and reinforced by it, he stooped again to work the combination of
his safe, and make sure of the money, which he now felt an insane
necessity of laying his hands on; but he turned suddenly sick, with a
sickness at the heart or at the stomach, and he lifted himself, and took
a turn about the room.
He perceived that in spite of the outward calm which it had surprised
him to find in himself, he was laboring under some strong inward stress,
and he must have relief from it if he was to carry this business
through. He threw up the window and stood with his hand on the sash,
quivering in the strong in-rush of the freezing air. But it strengthened
him, and when he put down the window after a few moments, his faintness
passed altogether. Still, he thought he would not go through that
business at once; there was time enough; he would see his girls and tell
them that he was obliged to leave by an early train in the morning.
He took off his shoes, and put on his slippers and his house-coat, and
went to the stair-landing outside, and listened to the voices in the
library below. He could hear only women's voices, and he inferred that
the young man who had been dining with his daughters was gone. He went
back into his bedroom, and looked at the face of an unmasked thief in
his glass. It was not to get that aspect of himself, though, that he
looked; it was to see if he was pale or would seem ill to his children.