The letter which Père Étienne posted for Northwick at Rimouski was
addressed to the editor of the _Boston Events_, and was published with
every advantage which scare-heading could invent. A young journalist
newly promoted to the management was trying to give the counting-room
proofs of his efficiency in the line of the _Events_' greatest
successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was
capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing,
not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative
value of the recognition of the fact that the _Events_ had been selected
by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The
_Abstract_, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully stabbed
its esteemed contemporary with an acknowledgment of its prime importance
as the organ of the American defaulters in Canada; other papers, after
questioning the document as a fake, made common cause in treating it as
a matter of little or no moment. In fact, there had been many
defalcations since Northwick's; the average of one a day in the
despatches of the Associated Press had been fully kept up, and several
of these had easily surpassed his in the losses involved, and in the
picturesqueness of the circumstances. People generally recalled with an
effort the supremely tragic claim of his case through the rumor of his
death in the railroad accident; those who distinctly remembered it
experienced a certain disgust at the man's willingness to shelter
himself so long in the doubt to which it had left not only the public,
but his own family, concerning his fate.
The evening after the letter appeared, Hilary was dining one of those
belated Englishmen who sometimes arrive in Boston after most houses are
closed for the summer on the Hill and the Back Bay. Mrs. Hilary and
Louise were already with Matt at his farm for a brief season before
opening their own house at the shore, and Hilary was living _en garçon_.
There were only men at the dinner, and the talk at first ran chiefly to
question of a sufficient incentive for Northwick's peculations; its
absence was the fact which all concurred in owning. In deference to his
guest's ignorance of the matter, Hilary went rapidly over it from the
beginning, and as he did so the perfectly typical character of the man
and of the situation appeared in clear relief. He ended by saying: "It
isn't at all a remarkable instance. There is nothing peculiar about it.
Northwick was well off and he wished to be better off. He had plenty of
other people's money in his hands which he controlled so entirely that
he felt as if it were his own. He used it and he lost it. Then he was
found out, and ran away. That's all."
"Then, as I understand," said the Englishman, with a strong impression
that he was making a joke, "this Mr. Northwick was _not_ one of your
most remarkable men."
Everybody laughed obligingly, and Hilary said, "He was one of our
_least_ remarkable men." Then, spurred on by that perverse impulse which
we Americans often have to make the worst of ourselves to an Englishman,
he added, "The defaulter seems to be taking the place of the self-made
man among us. Northwick's a type, a little differentiated from thousands
of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this
unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He's what the
commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now
that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to be rich
instead of great."
"Really?" said the Englishman.
Among Hilary's guests was Charles Bellingham, a bachelor of pronounced
baldness, who said he would come to meet Hilary's belated Englishman, in
quality of bear-leader to his cousin-in-law, old Bromfield Corey, a
society veteran of that period when even the swell in Boston must be an
intellectual man. He was not only old, but an invalid, and he seldom
left town in summer, and liked to go out to dinner whenever he was
asked. Bellingham came to the rescue of the national repute in his own
fashion. "I can't account for your not locking up your spoons, Hilary,
when you invited me, unless you knew where you could steal some more."
"Ah, it isn't quite like a gentleman's stealing a few spoons," old Corey
began, in the gentle way he had, and with a certain involuntary
sibilation through the gaps between his front teeth. "It's a much more
heroic thing than an ordinary theft; and I can't let you belittle it as
something commonplace because it happens every day. So does death; so
does birth; but they're not commonplace."
"They're not so frequent as defalcation with us, quite--especially
birth," suggested Bellingham.
"No," Corey went on, "every fact of this sort is preceded by the slow
and long decay of a moral nature, and that is of the most eternal and
tragical interest; and"--here Corey broke down in an old man's queer,
whimpering laugh, as the notion struck him--"if it's very common with
us, I don't know but we ought to be proud of it, as showing that we
excel all the rest of the civilized world in the proportion of decayed
moral natures to the whole population. But I wonder," he went on, "that
it doesn't produce more moralists of a sanative type than it has. Our
bad teeth have given us the best dentists in the world; our habit of
defalcation hasn't resulted yet in any ethical compensation. Sewell,
here, used to preach about such things, but I'll venture to say we shall
have no homily on Northwick from him next Sunday."
The Rev. Mr. Sewell suffered the thrust in patience. "What is the use?"
he asked, with a certain sadness. "The preacher's voice is lost in his
sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud
from twenty-eight pages illustrated."
"Perhaps _they_ are our moralists," Corey suggested.
"Perhaps," Sewell assented.
"By the way, Hilary," said Bellingham, "did you ever know who wrote that
article in the _Abstract_, when Northwick's crookedness first appeared?"
"Yes," said Hilary. "It was a young fellow of twenty-four or five."
"Come off!" said Bellingham, in a slang phrase then making its way into
merited favor. "What's become of him? I haven't seen anything else like
it in the _Abstract_."
"No, and I'm afraid you're not likely to. The fellow was a reporter on
the paper at the time; but he happened to have looked up the literature
of defalcation, and they let him say his say."
"It was a very good say."
"Better than any other he had in him. They let him try again on
different things, but he wasn't up to the work. So the managing editor
said--and he was a friend of the fellow's. He was too literary, I
believe."
"And what's become of him?" asked Corey.
"You might get _him_ to read to you," said Bellingham to the old man. He
added to the company, "Corey uses up a fresh reader every three months.
He takes them into his intimacy, and then he finds their society
oppressive."
"Why," Hilary answered with a little hesitation, "he was out of health,
and Matt had him up to his farm."
"Is he Matt's only beneficiary?" Corey asked, with a certain tone of
tolerant liking for Matt. "I thought he usually had a larger colony at
Vardley."
"Well, he has," said Hilary. "But when his mother and sister are
visiting him, he has to reduce their numbers. He can't very well turn
his family away."
"He might board them out," said Bellingham.
"Do you suppose," asked Sewell, as if he had not noticed the turn the
talk had taken, "that Northwick has gone to Europe?"
"I've no doubt he wishes me to suppose so," said Hilary, "and of course
we've had to cable the authorities to look out for him at Moville and
Liverpool, but I feel perfectly sure he's still in Canada, and expects
to make terms for getting home again. He must be horribly homesick."
"Yes?" Sewell suggested.
"Yes. Not because he's a man of any delicacy of feeling, or much real
affection for his family. I've no doubt he's fond of them, in a way, but
he's fonder of himself. You can see, all through his letter, that he's
trying to make interest for himself, and that he's quite willing to use
his children if it will tell on the public sympathies. He knows very
well that they're provided for. They own the place at Hatboro'; he
deeded it to them long before his crookedness is known to have begun;
and his creditors couldn't touch it if they wished to. If he had really
that fatherly affection for them, which he appeals to in others, he
wouldn't have left them in doubt whether he was alive or dead for four
or five months, and then dragged them into an open letter asking
forbearance in their name, and promising, for their sake, to right those
he had wronged. The thing is thoroughly indecent."
Since the fact of Northwick's survival had been established beyond
question by the publication of his letter, Hilary's mind in regard to
him had undergone a great revulsion. It relieved itself with a sharp
rebound from the oppressive sense of responsibility for his death, which
he seemed to have incurred in telling Northwick that the best thing for
him would be a railroad accident. Now that the man was not killed,
Hilary could freely declare, "He made a great mistake in not getting out
of the world, as many of us believed he had; I confess I had rather got
to believe it myself. But he ought at least to have had the grace to
remain dead to the poor creatures he had dishonored till he could repay
the people he had defrauded."
"Ah! I don't know about that," said Sewell.
"No? Why not?"
"Because it would be a kind of romantic deceit that he'd better not keep
up."
"He seems to have kept it up for the last four or five months," said
Hilary.
"That's no reason he should continue to keep it up," Sewell persisted.
"Perhaps he never knew of the rumor of his death."
"Ah, that isn't imaginable. There isn't a hole or corner left where the
newspapers don't penetrate, nowadays."
"Not in Boston. But if he were in hiding in some little French village
down the St. Lawrence--"
"Isn't that as romantic as the other notion, parson?" crowed old Corey.
"No, I don't think so," said the minister. "The cases are quite
different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the
wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to
leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save
their feelings, would be against nature; it would be purely histrionic;
a motive from the theatre; that is, perfectly false."
"Pretty hard on Hilary, who invented it," Bellingham suggested; and they
all laughed.
"I don't know," said Hilary. "The man seems to be posing in other ways.
You would think from his letter that he was a sort of martyr to
principle, and that he'd been driven off to Canada by the heartless
creditors whom he's going to devote his life to saving from loss, if he
can't do it in a few months or years. He may not be a conscious humbug,
but he's certainly a humbug. Take that pretence of his that he would
come back and stand his trial if he believed it would not result in
greater harm than good by depriving him of all hope of restitution!"
"Why, there's a sort of crazy morality in that," said Corey.
"Perhaps," said Bellingham, "the solution of the whole matter is that
Northwick is cracked."
"I've no doubt he's cracked to a certain extent," said Sewell, "as every
wrong-doer is. You know the Swedenborgians believe that insanity is the
last state of the wicked."
"I suppose," observed old Corey, thoughtfully, "you'd be very glad to
have him keep out of your reach, Hilary?"
"What a question!" said Hilary. "You're _as_ bad as my daughter. She
asked me the same thing."
"I wish I were no worse," said the old man.
"You speak of his children," said the Englishman. "Hasn't he a wife?"
"No. Two daughters. One an old maid, and the other a young girl, whom my
daughter knew at school," Hilary answered.
"I saw the young lady at your house once," said Bellingham, in a certain
way.
"Yes. She's been here a good deal, first and last."
"Rather a high-stepping young person, I thought," said Bellingham.
"She is a proud girl," Hilary admitted. "Rather imperious, in fact."
"Ah, what's the pride of a young girl?" said Corey. "Something that
comes from her love and goes to it; no separable quality; nothing that's
for herself."
"Well, I'm not sure of that," said Hilary. "In this case it seems to
have served her own turn. It's enabled her simply and honestly to deny
the fact that her father ever did anything wrong."
"That's rather fine," Corey remarked, as if tasting it.
"And what will it enable her to do, now that he's come out and confessed
the frauds himself?" the Englishman asked.
Hilary shrugged, for answer. He said to Bellingham, "Charles, I want you
to try some of these crabs. I got them for you."
"Why, this is touching, Hilary," said Bellingham, getting his fat head
round with difficulty to look at them in the dish the man was bringing
to his side. "But I don't know that I should have refused them, even if
they had been got for Corey."