Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in,
and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked,
with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like
some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental
suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom
exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of
the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine
shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very
interesting.
At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning
the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her
hand, where he had risen from his chair.
"I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham," she said; and I should have found my
astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so
completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, "Won't you come
out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March
came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these
Saturday afternoon tramps of his."
The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our
guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to
their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I
suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I
could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a
four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had
not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began,
mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have
been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was
the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.
The man's mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to
be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly
toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of
avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could
perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in
which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his
entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so.
They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that
whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very
carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that
did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger
Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot
make others feel the pathos I found in this.
After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with
us in the parlor.
My wife began at once to say, "Mr. March has told me why you wanted to
see me, Mr. Tedham."
"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure
his cause.
"I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs.
Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not
seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me."
Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily,
"Won't you try?"
"Yes," she answered, most unexpectedly to me, "I will try to see her.
But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your
daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come
from you, and for you."
"I thought," Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, "that
perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me."
"No, I couldn't do that," my wife said.
He went on as if he had not heard her: "If she did not know that the
inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my
daughter was with her."
There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but
coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something
like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my
surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his
suggestion in the way I had thought she would.
"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you
may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your
behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."
"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow.
So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.
Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she
said.
"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be
anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find
myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should
know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."
"But, of course, there is another point of view."
"My daughter's?"
"Mrs. Hasketh's."
"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the
child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time--the only
thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."
He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is
no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let
me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is
enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a
thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried
to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is
the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be
rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could
condone--"
"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly
people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have
got to reckon with the world at large."
"I _have_ reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the
reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"