On his way home from the station, Elbridge Newton began to have some
anxieties. He had no longer occasion for any about Northwick, he was
safe on his way back to Canada; and Elbridge's anxieties were for
himself. He was in the cold fit after his act of ardent generosity. He
had no desire to entangle himself with the law by his act of incivism in
helping Northwick to escape, and he thought it might be well to put
himself on the safe side by seeing Putney about it, and locking the
stable after the horse was stolen.
He drove round by the lawyer's house, and stopped at his gate just as
Putney pushed his lawn-mower up to it, in his exercise of the instrument
before breakfast.
Elbridge leaned out of the carryall, and asked, in a low confidential
voice, "If J. Milton Northwick was to come back here, on the sly, say,
to see his family, and I was to help him git off again, would I be
li'ble?"
"Why?" asked Putney.
"Because I just done it," said Elbridge, desperately.
"Just done it?" shouted Putney. "Why, confound you!" He suddenly brought
his voice down. "Do you mean to tell me the fellow's been back here, and
you didn't let me know?"
"I hadn't any orders to do it," Elbridge weakly urged.
"Orders, the devil!" Putney retorted. "I'd 'a' given a hundred dollars
to see that man and talk with him. Come, now; tell me all you know about
it! Don't miss a thing!" After a few words from Newton, he broke out:
"Found him in the house! And I was down there prowling round the place
myself not three hours before! Go on! Great Scott! Just think of it!"
Putney was at one of those crises of his life when his drink-devil was
besetting him with sore temptation, and for the last twenty-four hours
he had been fighting it with the ruses and pretences which he had
learned to employ against it, but he felt that he was losing the game,
though he was playing for much greater stakes than usual. He had held
out so long since his last spree, that if he lost now he would defeat
hopes that were singularly precious and sacred to him: the hopes that
those who loved him best, and distrusted him most, and forgave him
soonest, had begun to cherish. It would not break his wife's heart; she
was used to his lapses; but it would wring it more cruelly than usual if
he gave way now.
When the fiend thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew
that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and
made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he
boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the
Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation,
and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards
the place where they lived, as if there might be rescue for him in the
mere vicinity of those women who had appealed to him in their distress,
as to a faithful enemy. His professional pride, his personal honor, were
both involved in the feeling that he must not fail them; their implicit
reliance had been a source of strength to him. He was always hoping for
some turn of affairs which would enable him to serve them, or rather to
serve Adeline; for he cared little for Suzette, or only secondarily; and
since Pinney had gone upon his mission to Canada he was daily looking
for this chance to happen. He must keep himself for that, and not
because of them alone, but because those dearest to him had come tacitly
to connect his resistance of the tempter with his zeal for the interests
of his clients. With no more reasoned motives than these he had walked
over the Northwick place, calling himself a fool for supposing that some
virtue should enter into him out of the ground there, and yet finding a
sort of relief, in the mere mechanical exercise, the novelty of
exploring by night the property grown so familiar to him by day, and so
strangely mixed up with the great trial and problem of his own
usefulness.
He listened by turns, with a sinking and a rising heart, as Newton now
dug the particulars of his adventure out of himself. At the end, he
turned to go into the house.
"Well, what do you say, Squire Putney?" Elbridge called softly after
him.
"Say?"
"You know: about what I done."
"Keep your mouth shut about what you 'done.' I should like to see you
sent to jail, though, for what you didn't do."
Elbridge felt a consolatory quality in Putney's resentment, and Putney,
already busy with the potentialities of the future, was buoyed up by the
strong excitement of what had actually happened rather than finally cast
down by what he had missed. He took three cups of the blackest coffee at
breakfast, and he said to the mute, anxious face of his wife, "Well,
Ellen, I seem to be pulling through, somehow."