When Pinney came back from the little turn he took, Northwick was still
holding the unopened letter in his hand. He stood looking at it in a
kind of daze, and he was pale, and seemed faint.
"Why, Mr. Northwick," said Pinney, "why don't you read your letter? If
it hadn't been yours, don't I know that you'd have given it back to me
at once?"
"It isn't that," said the man, who was so much older and frailer than
Pinney had expected to find him. "But--are they well? Is it--bad news?"
"No!" Pinney exulted. "They're first-rate. You needn't be afraid to read
the letter!" Pinney's exultation came partly from his certainty that it
was really Northwick, and partly from the pleasure he felt in reassuring
him; he sympathized with him as a father. His pleasure was not marred by
the fact that he knew nothing of the state of Northwick's family, and
built his assertion upon the probability that the letter would contain
nothing to alarm or afflict him, "Like a glass of water?" he suggested,
seeing Northwick sit inert and helpless on the steps of the inn-porch,
apparently without the force to break the seal of the letter. "Or a
little brandy?" Pinney handed him the neat leather-covered flask his
wife had reproached him for buying when they came away from home; she
said he could not afford it; but he was glad he had got it, now, and he
unscrewed the stopple with pride in handing it to Northwick. "You look
sick."
"I haven't been very well," Northwick admitted, and he touched the
bottle with his lips. It revived him, and Pinney now saw that if he
would leave him again, he would open the letter. There was little in it
but the tender assurance Suzette gave him of their love, and the anxiety
of Adeline and herself to know how and where he was. She told him that
he was not to feel troubled about them; that they were well, and unhappy
only for him; but he must not think they blamed him, or had ever done
so. As soon as they were sure they could reach him, she said, they would
write to him again. Adeline wrote a few lines with her name, to say that
for some days past she had not been quite well; but that she was better
and had nothing to wish for but to hear from him.
When Pinney came back a second time, he found Northwick with the letter
open in his hand.
"Well, sir," he said, with the easy respectfulness toward Northwick that
had been replacing, ever since he talked with Matt Hilary, the
hail-fellow manner he used with most men, and that had now fully
established itself, "You've got some noble scenery about here." He meant
to compliment Northwick on the beauty of the landscape, as people
ascribe merit to the inhabitants of a flourishing city.
Northwick, by his silence, neither accepted nor disclaimed the credit of
the local picturesqueness; and Pinney ventured to add, "But you seem to
take it out in nature, Mr. Northwick. The place is pretty quiet, sir."
Northwick paid no heed to this observation, either; but after sitting
mute so long that Pinney began to doubt whether he was ever going to
speak at all, he began to ask some guarded and chary questions as to how
Pinney had happened to find him. Pinney had no unwillingness to tell,
and now he gave him the letter of Père Étienne, with a eulogy of the
priest's regard for Northwick's interest and safety. He told him how
Markham's talk had caught his attention, and Northwick tacitly
recognized the speculator. But when Pinney explained that it was the
postmark on his letter to the _Events_ that gave him the notion of going
to Rimouski, he could see that Northwick was curious to know the effect
of that letter with the public. At first he thought he would let him
ask; but he perceived that this would be impossible for Northwick, and
he decided to say, "That letter was a great sensation, Mr. Northwick."
The satisfaction that lighted up Northwick's eyes caused Pinney to add,
"I guess it set a good many people thinking about you in a different
way. It showed that there was something to be said on both sides, and I
believe it made friends for you, sir. Yes, sir." Pinney had never
believed this till the moment he spoke, but then it seemed so probable
he had that he easily affirmed it. "I don't believe, Mr. Northwick," he
went on, "but what this trouble could be patched up, somehow, so that
you could come back, if you wanted to, give 'em time to think it over a
little."
As soon as he said this, the poison of that ulterior purpose which his
wife had forbidden him, began to work in Pinney's soul. He could not
help feeling what a grand thing it would be if he could go back with
Northwick in his train, and deliver him over, a captive of moral
suasion, to his country's courts. Whatever the result was, whether the
conviction or the acquittal of Northwick, the process would be the
making of Pinney. It would carry him to such a height in the esteem of
those who knew him, that he could choose either career, and whether as a
reporter or a detective, it would give his future the distinction of one
of the most brilliant pieces of work in both sorts. Pinney tried his
best to counteract the influence of these ideas by remembering his
promises to his wife; but it was difficult to recall his promises with
accuracy in his wife's absence; and he probably owed his safety in this
matter more to Northwick's temperament than to any virtue of his own.
"I think I understand how that would be," said the defaulter coldly; and
he began very cautiously to ask Pinney the precise effect of his letter
as Pinney had gathered it from print and hearsay. It was not in Pinney's
nature to give any but a rose-colored and illusory report of this; but
he felt that Northwick was sizing him up while he listened, and knew
just when and how much he was lying. This heightened Pinney's respect
for him, and apparently his divination of Pinney's character had nothing
to do with Northwick's feeling toward him. So far as Pinney could make
out it was friendly enough, and as their talk went on he imagined a
growing trustfulness in it. Northwick kept his inferences and
conclusions to himself. His natural reticence had been intensified by
the solitude of his exile; it stopped him short of any expression
concerning Pinney's answers; and Pinney had to construct Northwick's
opinions from his questions. His own cunning was restlessly at work
exploring Northwick's motives in each of these, and it was not at fault
in the belief it brought him that Northwick clearly understood the
situation at home. He knew that the sensation of his offence and flight
were past, and that so far as any public impulse to punish him was
concerned, he might safely go back. But he knew that the involuntary
machinery of the law must begin to operate upon him as soon as he came
within its reach; and he could not learn from Pinney that anything had
been done to block its wheels. The letter from his daughters threw no
light upon this point; it was an appeal for some sign of life and love
from him; nothing more. They, or the friends who were advising them, had
not thought it best to tell him more than that they were well, and
anxious to hear from him; and Pinney really knew nothing more about
them. He had not been asked to Hatboro' to see them before he started,
and with all the will he had to invent comfortable and attractive
circumstances for them, he was at a disadvantage for want of material.
The most that he could conjecture was that Mr. Hilary's family had not
broken off their friendly relations with them. He had heard old Hilary
criticised for it, and he told Northwick so.
"I guess he's been standing by you, Mr. Northwick, as far as he
consistently could," he said; and Northwick ventured to reply that he
expected that. "It was young Hilary who brought me the letter, and
talked the whole thing up with me," Pinney added.
Northwick had apparently not expected this; but he let no more than the
fact appear. He kept silent for a time; then he said, "And you don't
know anything about the way they're living?"
"No, I don't," said Pinney, with final candor. "But I should say they
were living along there about as usual. Mr. Hilary didn't say but what
they were. I guess you haven't got any cause to be uneasy on that score.
My idea is, Mr. Northwick, that they wanted to leave you just as free as
they could about themselves. They wanted to find out your whereabouts in
the land of the living, first of all. You know that till that letter of
yours came out, there were a good many that thought you were killed in
that accident at Wellwater, the day you left home."
Northwick started. "What accident? What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Why, didn't you know about it? Didn't you see the accounts? They had a
name like yours amongst the missing, and people who thought you were not
in it, said it was a little job you had put up. There was a despatch
engaging a Pullman seat signed, T. W. Northwick--"
"Ah! I knew it!" said Northwick. "I knew that I must have signed my real
name!"
"Well, of course," said Pinney, soothingly, "a man is apt to do that,
when he first takes another. It's natural."
"I never heard of the accident. I saw no papers for months. I wouldn't;
and then I was sick--They must have believed I was dead!"
"Well, sir," said Pinney, "I don't know that that follows. My wife and
myself talked that up a good deal at the time, and we concluded that it
was about an even thing. You see it's pretty hard to believe that a
friend is dead, even when you've seen him die; and I don't understand
how people that lose friends at a distance can ever quite realize that
they're gone. I guess that even if the ladies went upon the theory of
the accident, there was always a kind of a merciful uncertainty about
it, and that was my wife's notion, too. But that's neither here nor
there, now, Mr. Northwick. Here you are, alive and well, in spite of all
theories to the contrary--though _they_ must have been pretty well
exploded by your letter to the _Events_--and the question is what answer
are you going to let me take back to your family? You want to send some
word, don't you? My instructions were not to urge you at all, and I
won't. But if I was in your place, I know what _I_ should do."
Northwick did not ask him what it was he would do. He fell into a deep
silence which it seemed to Pinney he would never break; and his face
became such a blank that all Pinney's subtlety was at fault. It is
doubtful, indeed, if there was anything definite or directed in the mute
misery of Northwick's soul. It was not a sharp anguish, such as a finer
soul's might have been, but it was a real misery, of a measure and a
quality that he had not felt before. Now he realized how much he must
have made his children suffer. Perhaps it wrung him the more keenly
because it seemed to be an expression of the divine displeasure, which
he flattered himself he had appeased, and was a fatal consequence of his
guilt. It was a terrible suggestion of the possibility that, after all,
Providence might not have been a party to the understanding between
them, and that his good-will toward those he had wronged had gone for
nothing. He had blamed himself for not having tried to retrieve himself
and make their losses good. It was no small part of his misery now to
perceive that anything he might have done would have gone for nothing in
this one-sided understanding. He fetched a long, unconscious sigh.
"Why, it's all over, now, Mr. Northwick," said Pinney, with a certain
amusement at the simple-heartedness of this sigh, whose cause he did not
misinterpret. "The question is now about your getting back to them."
"Getting back? You know I can't go back," said Northwick, with bitter
despair, and an openness that he had not shown before.
Far beneath and within the senses that apprehend the obvious things,
Pinney felt the unhappy man beginning to cling to him. He returned,
joyously, "I don't know about that. Now, see here, Mr. Northwick, you
believe that I'm here as your friend, don't you? That I want to deal in
good faith with you?" Northwick hesitated, and Pinney pursued, "Your
daughter's letter ought to be a guaranty of that!"
"Yes," Northwick admitted, after another hesitation.
"Well, then, what I'm going to say is in your interest, and you've got
to believe that I have some authority for saying it. I can't tell you
just how much, for I don't know as I know myself exactly. But _I_ think
you can get back if you work it right. Of course, you can't get back for
nothing. It's going to cost you something. It's going to cost you all
you've brought with you,"--Pinney watched Northwick's impassive face for
the next change that should pass upon it; he caught it, and added--"and
more. But I happen to know that the balance will be forthcoming when
it's needed. I can't say _how_ I know it, for I don't exactly _know_ how
I know it. But I do know it; and you know that _it's_ for you to take
the first step. You must say how much money you brought with you, and
where it is, and how it can be got at. I should think," said Pinney,
with a drop in his earnestness, and as if the notion had just occurred
to him, "you would want to see that place of yours again."
Northwick gave a gasp in the anguish of homesickness the words brought
upon him. In a flash of what was like a luminous pang, he saw it all as
it looked the night he left it in the white landscape under the high,
bare wintry sky. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said,
with a kind of severity.
"No," Pinney admitted, "I don't suppose any one can begin to appreciate
it as you do. But I was there, just after you skipped--"
"Then I _was_ the kind of man who would skip," Northwick swiftly
reflected--
"And I must say I would take almost any chance of getting back to a
place like that. Why," he said, with an easy, caressing cordiality, "you
can't have any idea how completely the thing's blown over. Why, sir,
I'll bet you could go back to Hatboro' now, and be there twenty-four
hours before anybody would wake up enough to make trouble for you. Mind,
I don't say that's what we want you to do. We couldn't make terms for
you half as well, with you on the ground. We want you to keep your
distance for the present, and let your friends work for you. Like a
candidate for the presidency," Pinney added, with a smile. "Hello! Who's
this?"
A little French maid, barefooted, black-eyed, curly-headed, shyly
approached Northwick, and said, "Diner, Monsieur."
"That means dinner," Northwick gravely interpreted. "I will ask you to
join me."
"Oh, thank you, I shall be very glad," said Pinney rising with him. They
had been sitting on the steps of a structure that Pinney now noticed was
an oddity among the bark-sheathed cabins of the little hamlet. "Why,
what's this?"
"It's the studio of an American painter who used to come here. He hasn't
been here for several years."
"I suppose you expect to light out if he comes," Pinney suggested, in
the spirit of good fellowship towards Northwick now thoroughly
established in him.
"He couldn't do me any harm, if he wanted to," answered Northwick, with
unresentful dignity.
"No," Pinney readily acquiesced, "and I presume you'd be glad to hear a
little English, after all the French you have around."
"The landlord speaks a little; and the priest. He is a friend of Father
Étienne."
"Oh, I see," said Pinney. He noticed that Northwick walked slowly and
weakly; he ventured to put his hand under his elbow, and Northwick did
not resent the help offered him.
"I had a very severe sickness during the latter part of the winter," he
explained, "and it pulled me down a good deal."
"At Rimouski, I presume?" said Pinney.
"No," said Northwick, briefly.