Louise's father, in turning to look from her toward his son, felt
himself slightly pricked in the cheek by the pin that had transferred
itself from her neck-gear to his coat collar, and Matt went about
picking up the cloak, the arctics, the scarf and the glove. He laid the
cloak smoothly on the leathern lounge, and arranged the scarf and glove
on it, and set the arctics on the floor in a sort of normal relation to
it, and then came forward in time to relieve his father of the pin that
was pricking him, and that he was rolling his eyes out of his head to
get sight of.
"What in the devil is that?" he roared.
"Louise's pin," said Matt, as placidly as if that were quite the place
for it, and its function were to prick her father in the cheek. He went
and pinned it into her scarf, and then he said, "It's about Northwick, I
suppose."
"Yes," said his father, still furious from the pinprick. "I'm afraid the
miserable scoundrel is going to run away."
"Did you expect there was a chance of that?" asked Matt, quietly.
"Expect!" his father blustered. "I don't know what I expected. I might
have expected anything of him but common honesty. The position I took at
the meeting was that our only hope was to give him a chance. He made all
sorts of professions of ability to meet the loss. I didn't believe him,
but I thought that he might partially meet it, and that nothing was to
be gained by proceeding against him. You can't get blood out of a
turnip, even by crushing the turnip."
"That seems sound," said the son, with his reasonable smile.
"I didn't spare him, but I got the others to spare him. I told him he
was a thief."
"Oh!" said Matt.
"Why, wasn't he?" returned his father, angrily.
"Yes, yes. I suppose he might be called so." Matt admitted it with an
air of having his reservations, which vexed his father still more.
"Very well, sir!" he roared. "Then I called him so; and I think that it
will do him good to know it." Hilary did not repeat all of the violent
things he had said to Northwick, though he had meant to do so, being
rather proud of them; the tone of his son's voice somehow stopped him
for the moment. "I brought them round to my position, and we gave him
the chance he asked for."
"It was really the only thing you could do."
"Of course it was! It was the only business-like thing, though it won't
seem so when it comes out that he's gone to Canada. I told him I thought
the best thing for him would be a good, thorough, railroad accident on
his way home; and that if it were not for his family, for his daughter
who's been in and out here so much with Louise, I would like to see him
handcuffed, and going down the street with a couple of constables."
Matt made no comment upon this, perhaps because he saw no use in
criticising his father, and perhaps because his mind was more upon the
point he mentioned. "It will be hard for that pretty creature."
"It will be hard for a number of creatures, pretty and plain," said his
father. "It won't break any of us; but it will shake some of us up
abominably. I don't know but it may send one or two people to the wall,
for the time being."
"Ah, but that isn't the same thing at all. That's suffering; it isn't
shame. It isn't the misery that the sin of your father has brought on
you."
"Well, of course not!" said Hilary, impatiently granting it. "But Miss
Northwick always seemed to me a tolerably tough kind of young person. I
never quite saw what Louise found to like in her."
"They were at school together," said the son. "She's a sufficiently
offensive person, I fancy; or might be. But she sometimes struck me as a
person that one might be easily unjust to, for that very reason; I
suppose she has the fascination that a proud girl has for a girl like
Louise."
Hilary asked, with a divergence more apparent than real, "How is that
affair of hers with Jack Wilmington?"
"I don't know. It seems to have that quality of mystery that belongs to
all affairs of the kind when they hang fire. We expect people to get
married, and be done with it, though that may not really be the way to
be done with it."
"Wasn't there some scandal about him, of some kind?"
"Yes; but I never believed in it."
"He always struck me as something of a cub, but somehow he doesn't seem
the sort of a fellow to give the girl up because--"
"Because her father is a fraud?" Matt suggested. "No, I don't think he
is, quite. But there are always a great many things that enter into the
matter besides a man's feelings, or his principles, even. I can't say
what I think Wilmington would do. What steps do you propose to take next
in the matter?"
"I promised him he shouldn't be followed up, while he was trying to
right himself. If we find he's gone, we must give the case into the
hands of the detectives, I suppose." The disgust showed itself in
Hilary's face, which was an index to all his emotions, and his son said,
with a smile of sympathy:
"The apparatus of justice isn't exactly attractive, even when one isn't
a criminal. But I don't know that it's any more repulsive than the
apparatus of commerce, or business, as we call it. Some dirt seems to
get on everybody's bread by the time he's earned it, or on his money
even when he's made it in large sums as our class do."
The last words gave the father a chance to vent his vexation with
himself upon his son. "I wish you wouldn't talk that walking-delegate's
rant with me, Matt. If I let you alone in your nonsense, I think you may
fitly take it as a sign that I wish to be let alone myself."
"I beg your pardon," said the young man. "I didn't wish to annoy you."
"Don't do it, then." After a moment, Hilary added with a return to his
own sense of deficiency, "The whole thing's as thoroughly distasteful to
me as it can be. But I can't see how I could have acted otherwise than
I've done. I know I've made myself responsible, in a way, for
Northwick's getting off; but there was really nothing to do but to give
him the chance he asked for. His having abused it won't change that fact
at all; but I can't conceal from myself that I half-expected him to
abuse it."
He put this tentatively, and his son responded, "I suppose that
naturally inclines you to suppose he'll run away."
"Yes."
"But your supposition doesn't establish the fact."
"No. But the question is whether it doesn't oblige me to act as if it
had; whether I oughtn't, if I've got this suspicion, to take some steps
at once to find out whether Northwick's really gone or not, and to mix
myself actively up in the catchpole business of his pursuit, after I
promised him he shouldn't be shadowed in any way till his three days
were over."
"It's a nice question," said Matt, "or rather, it's a nasty one. Still,
you've only got your fears for evidence, and you must all have had your
fears before. I don't think that even a bad conscience ought to hurry
one into the catchpole business." Matt laughed again with that fondness
he had for his father. "Though as for any peculiar disgrace in
catchpoles as catchpoles, I don't see it. They're a necessary part of
the administration of justice, as we understand it, and have it; and I
don't see how a detective who arrests, say, a murderer, is not as
respectably employed as the judge who sentences him, or the hangman who
puts the rope round his neck. The distinction we make between them is
one of those tricks for shirking responsibility which are practised in
every part of the system. Not that I want you to turn catchpole. It's
all so sorrowful and sickening that I wish you hadn't any duty at all in
the matter. I suppose you feel at least that you ought to let the Board
know that you have your misgivings?"
"Yes," said Hilary, ruefully, with his double chin on his breast, "I
felt like doing it at once; but there was my word to _him_! And I wanted
to talk with you."
"It was just as well to let them have their night's rest. There isn't
really anything to be done." Matt rose from the low chair where he had
been sprawling, and stretched his stalwart arms abroad. "If the man was
going he's gone past recall by this time; and if he isn't gone, there's
no immediate cause for anxiety."
"Then you wouldn't do anything at present?"
"I certainly shouldn't. What could you do?"
"Yes, it might as well all go till morning, I suppose."
"Good night," the son said, suggestively, "I suppose there isn't really
anything more?"
"No, what could there be? You had better go to bed."
"And you, too, I hope, father."
"Oh, I shall go to bed--as a matter of form."
The son laughed. "I wish you could carry your formality so far as to go
to sleep, too. I shall."
"I sha'n't sleep," said the father, bitterly. "When things like this
happen, someone has to lie awake and think about them."
"Well, I dare say Northwick's doing that."
"I doubt it," said Hilary. "I suspect Northwick is enjoying a refreshing
slumber on the Montreal express somewhere near St. Albans about this
time."
"I doubt if his dreams are pleasant. After all, he's only going to a
larger prison if he's going into exile. He may be on the Montreal
express, but I guess he isn't sleeping," said Matt.
"Yes," his father admitted. "Poor devil! He'd much better be dead."