V.

The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden

trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter

old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence,

painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height

of one's shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed

X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set

with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out

people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did.

There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far

back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the

trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk.

Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I

should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but

now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something

severe, something hopelessly forbidding.

I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and

the Haskeths, before Tedham's calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh

did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her

husband come forward, in Tedham's behalf, and do what hopelessly could

be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only

thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend

to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had

confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the

company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that,

even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to

be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was

of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather

dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular

offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like

him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for

many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given

the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great

solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have

read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more

than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of

keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room,

and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and

as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a

kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend

of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply

said, "It was unjust," and we parted.

For several months after Tedham's conviction, I did not think we ought

to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we

ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased,

but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did.

That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham's little girl, as she

flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in

black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we

stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain

gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic,

at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor

Tedham's own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this

heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his

daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was

not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of

Tedham's affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the

accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had

returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little

thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long

ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was

intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then

spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to

bear her husband's name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham

tried to make of giving her up to them. "And if I can help it," she had

ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, "she shall not hear him

mentioned again, or see him as long as I live."

My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank

into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid

took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we

could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and

peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind

at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the

shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell

us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, "Won't

you let me take your hat?" as such people do, in expression of a vague

hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble

centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He

drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, "It is

quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March," and he looked across

me at her.

"Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many," she answered.

"Family well?"

"Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be

looking very well, too."

"Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was.

But that is about all."

"I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?"

"Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong.

She will be down in a moment."

"Oh, I shall be so glad to see her."

The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the

beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted

by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of

nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the

stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said,

"Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh."

I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of

anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so

like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of

time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and

go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no

other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a

frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened

countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and

that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the

induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at

all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not

been light.

At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the

effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly

joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he

and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with

her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her

part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she

must make all the positive movements.

After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force

of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, "Mrs. Hasketh, we

have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn't

say that we haven't come willingly."

"Is it about Mr. Tedham?" asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that

she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed

rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her

to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.

"Yes," said my wife. "I don't know whether you had kept exact account of

the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn't. He is out, you know."

"Yes--at noon, yesterday. I wasn't likely to forget the day, or the

hour, or the minute." Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the

severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.

But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with,

at least. "He has been to see us--"

"I presumed so," said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs.

March took the word again.

"I shall have to tell you why he came--why _we_ came. It was something

that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused

outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we

could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and

that you must have been expecting at once, if you say--"

"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his

daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of

those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.

"It is something that we didn't mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and

I won't say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he

will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your

message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that

she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham's

partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation

of Mrs. Hasketh's position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.

"Oh, don't go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn't

help coming, and I don't blame you at all. I don't blame Mr. Tedham

even. I didn't suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that's all

long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March,

and I don't feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used

to judge _him_. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don't

presume I've got very much love for him now, but I don't want to punish

him any more. That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but

it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm

afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever _he_ has. It

seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."

I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted

to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife's sense of

humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."

Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on,

and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word,

"that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had,

and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might

overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is

different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he

succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You

could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because

you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over,

and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I

looked at it."

"And I assure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,"

said my wife.

"So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,"

the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was

arguing it with herself, "and did what I could to make her forget him, I

think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and

whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the

time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr.

Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and

when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had

expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show

it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when

he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put

myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got

him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the

same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as

he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as

well as we did. There was nobody for her to look to but us, and he knew

that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he _had_ no family but

his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there

was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how

much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be

allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be

prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her

affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring

myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very

fond of her, I don't deny that; I don't think it was any merit in him to

love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was

willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I

couldn't bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down,

all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I

_was_ weak! But I couldn't, I simply couldn't. She was only between

seven and eight when it happened--"

"I thought she was older," I ventured to put in, remembering my

impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.

"No," said Mrs. Hasketh, "she always appeared rather old for her age,

and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the

trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery

to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was

taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn't ask

about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that

way about--how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of

it; and by and by she didn't speak of it. She had some of his lightness,

and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes.

Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for

life, and that was the reason she didn't speak of him; she had given him

up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn't my duty to take her to see

him--where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them

through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I

might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn't take

her. You may be sure I wasn't anxious for the responsibility of _not_

doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham."

I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a

condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I

had no doubt she was telling the truth.

"You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or

how much they have understood," she continued, repeating herself, as she

did throughout, "and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with

Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course

I let her--"

My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence,

which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.

"I presume he told you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "he showed us the letter."

"Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned

me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she

seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really

began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played

with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing

it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four

years and let our place here."

"I didn't know you were gone," I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his

throat to explain:

"I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec."

"It shows what a rush our life is," I philosophized, with the

implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have

noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact

was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences

concerning the severity of Tedham's sentence in coming out of the

court-room together.

"_I_ hadn't any interest in Canada, except to get the child away," said

Mrs. Hasketh. "Sometimes it seemed strange _we_ should be in Canada, and

not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going

to a convent school there as externes--outside pupils, you know," Mrs.

Hasketh explained to my wife. "She got very fond of one of them--she is

a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm

_affections_--and when her little girl friend went into the convent to

go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and--we let her.

That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come

back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent.

Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it

seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don't

mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw

that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take

the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what

right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was

hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy

thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father's shame

might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and

make her a good and useful woman; and that's much more than being a

happy one, Mrs. March; we can't any of us be truly happy, no matter

what's done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her

alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to

decide." She suddenly addressed herself to us both: "What would _you_

have done?"

My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from

old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far

simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham's

emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us

to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at

all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to

take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards

him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so

fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying

conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was

silent; my wife said: "I don't know _what_ I should have done, Mrs.

Hasketh;" and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:

"If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father's, I was

punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn't know

how to begin; I presume that's the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never

did begin; but now I've got to. The time's come, and I presume it's as

easy now as it ever could be; easier. He's out and it's over, as far as

the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I'll prepare

her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it."

"Do you mean that he can see her _here_?" my wife asked.

"Yes," said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.

"At once? To-day?"

"No," Mrs. Hasketh faltered. "I didn't want him to see her just the

first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She's

visiting at some friends in Providence; but she'll be back to-morrow. He

can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But

if he was anything of a man he wouldn't want to."

"I'm afraid," I ventured, "he isn't anything of _that_ kind of man."