Milikin & Ayres, Att'ys for Plff.
Halleck read this advertisement again and again, with a dull, mechanical
action of the brain. He saw the familiar names, but they were hopelessly
estranged by their present relation to each other; the legal jargon reached
no intelligence in him that could grasp its purport.
When his daze began to yield, he took evidence of his own reality by some
such tests as one might in waking from a long faint. He looked at his
hands, his feet; he rose and looked at his face in the glass. Turning
about, he saw the paper where he had left it on the table; it was no
illusion. He picked up the cover from the floor, and scanned it anew,
trying to remember the handwriting on it, to make out who had sent this
paper to him, and why. Then the address seemed to grow into something
different under his eye: it ceased to be his name; he saw now that the
paper was directed to Mrs. B. Hubbard, and that by a series of accidents
and errors it had failed to reach her in its wanderings, and by a final
blunder had fallen into his hands.
Once solved, it was a very simple affair, and he had now but to carry it to
her; that was very simple, too. Or he might destroy it; this was equally
simple. Her words repeated themselves once more: “I have given up. He is
dead.” Why should he break the peace she had found, and destroy her last
sad illusion? Why should he not spare her the knowledge of this final
wrong, and let the merciful injustice accomplish itself? The questions
seemed scarcely to have any personal concern for Halleck; his temptation
wore a heavenly aspect. It softly pleaded with him to forbear, like
something outside of himself. It was when he began to resist it that he
found it the breath in his nostrils, the blood in his veins. Then the mask
dropped, and the enemy of souls put forth his power against this weak
spirit, enfeebled by long strife and defeat already acknowledged.
At the end Halleck opened his door, and called, “Olive, Olive!” in a voice
that thrilled the girl with strange alarm where she sat in her own room.
She came running, and found him clinging to his doorpost, pale and
tremulous. “I want you--want you to help me,” he gasped. “I want to show
you something--Look here!”
He gave her the paper, which he had kept behind him, clutched fast in his
hand as if he feared it might somehow escape him at last, and staggered
away to a chair.
His sister read the notice. “Oh, Ben!” She dropped her hands with the paper
in them before her, a gesture of helpless horror and pity, and looked at
him. “Does _she_ know it? Has she seen it?”
“No one knows it but you and I. The paper was left here for me by mistake.
I opened it before I saw that it was addressed to her.”
He panted forth these sentences in an exhaustion that would have terrified
her, if she had not been too full of indignant compassion for Marcia to
know anything else. She tried to speak.
“Don't you understand, Olive? This is the notice that the law requires she
shall have to come and defend her cause, and it has been sent by the clerk
of the court, there, to the address that villain must have given in the
knowledge that it could reach her only by one chance in ten thousand.”
“And it has come to you! Oh, Ben! Who sent it to _you_?” The brother and
sister looked at each other, but neither spoke the awestricken thought that
was in both their hearts. “Ben,” she cried in a solemn ecstasy of love and
pride, “I would rather be you this minute than any other man in the world!”
“Don't!” pleaded Halleck. His head dropped, and then he lifted it by a
sudden impulse. “Olive!”--But the impulse failed, and he only said, “I
want you to go to Atherton with me. We mustn't lose time. Have Cyrus get a
carriage. Go down and tell them we're going out. I'll be ready as soon as
you are.”
But when she called to him from below that the carriage had come and she
was waiting, he would have refused to go with her if he durst. He no longer
wished to keep back the fact, but he felt an invalid's weariness of it, a
sick man's inadequacy to the farther demands it should make upon him. He
crept slowly down the stairs, keeping a tremulous hold upon the rail; and
he sank with a sigh against the carriage cushions, answering Olive's eager
questions and fervid comments with languid monosyllables.
They found the Athertons at coffee, and Clara would have them come to the
dining-room and join them. Halleck refused the coffee, and while Olive told
what had happened he looked listlessly about the room, aware of a perverse
sympathy with Bartley, from Bartley's point of view: Bartley might never
have gone wrong if he had had all that luxury; and why should he not have
had it, as well as Atherton? What right had the untempted prosperity of
such a man to judge the guilt of such men as himself and Bartley Hubbard?
Olive produced the newspaper from her lap, where she kept both hands upon
it, and opened it to the advertisement in dramatic corroboration of what
she had been telling Atherton. He read it and passed it to Clara.
“When did this come to you?”
Olive answered for him. “This evening,--just now. Didn't I say that?”
“No,” said Atherton; and he added to Halleck, gently: “I beg your pardon.
Did you notice the dates?”
“Yes,” answered Halleck, with cold refusal of Atherton's tone of
reparation.
“The cause is set for hearing on the 11th,” said Atherton. “This is the
8th. The time is very short.”
“It's long enough,” said Halleck, wearily.
“Oh, telegraph!” cried Clara. “Telegraph them instantly that she never
dreamt of leaving him! Abandonment! Oh, if they only knew how she had been
slaving her lingers off for the last two years to keep a home for him to
come back to, they'd give _her_ the divorce!”
Atherton smiled and turned to Halleck: “Do you know what their law is, now?
It was changed two years ago.”
“Yes,” said Halleck, replying to the question Atherton had asked and the
subtler question he had looked, “I have read up the whole subject since I
came home. The divorce is granted only upon proof, even when the defendant
fails to appear, and if this were to go against us,”--he instinctively
identified himself with Marcia's cause,--“we can have the default set
aside, and a new trial granted, for cause shown.”
The women listened in awe of the legal phrases; but when Atherton rose, and
asked, “Is your carriage here?” his wife sprang to her feet.
“Why, where are you going?” she demanded, anxiously.
“Not to Indiana, immediately,” answered her husband. “We're first going to
Clover Street, to see Squire Gaylord and Mrs. Hubbard. Better let me take
the paper, dear,” he said, softly withdrawing it from her hands.
“Oh, it's a cruel, cruel law!” she moaned, deprived of this moral support.
“To suppose that such a notice as this is sufficient! Women couldn't have
made such a law.”
“No, women only profit by such laws after they're made: they work both
ways. But it's not such a bad law, as divorce laws go. We do worse, now, in
some New England States.”
They found the Squire alone in the parlor, and, with a few words of
explanation, Atherton put the paper in his hands, and he read the notice in
emotionless quiet. Then he took off his spectacles, and shut them in their
case, which he put back into his waistcoat pocket. “This is all right,” he
said. He cleared his throat, and, lifting the fierce glimmer of his eyes to
Atherton's, he asked, drily, “What is the law, at present?”
Atherton briefly recapitulated the points as he had them from Halleck.
“That's good,” said the old man. “We will fight this, gentlemen.” He rose,
and from his gaunt height looked down on both of them, with his sinuous
lips set in a bitter smile. “Bartley must have been disappointed when he
found a divorce so hard to get in Indiana. He must have thought that the
old law was still in force there. He's not the fellow to swear to a lie if
he could help it; but I guess he expects to get this divorce by perjury.”
Marcia was putting little Flavia to bed. She heard the talking below;
she thought she heard Bartley's name. She ran to the stairs, and came
hesitantly down, the old wild hope and wild terror fluttering her pulse and
taking her breath. At sight of the three men, apparently in council, she
crept toward them, holding out her hands before her like one groping his
way. “What--what is it?” She looked from Atherton's face to her father's;
the old man stopped, and tried to smile reassuringly; he tried to speak;
Atherton turned away.
It was Halleck who came forward, and took her wandering hands. He held them
quivering in his own, and said gravely and steadily, using her name for the
first time in the deep pity which cast out all fear and shame, “Marcia, we
have found your husband.”
“Dead?” she made with her lips.
“He is alive,” said Halleck. “There is something in this paper for you to
see,--something you _must_ see--”
“I can bear anything if he is not dead. Where--what is it? Show it to me--”
The paper shook in the hands which Halleck released; her eyes strayed
blindly over its columns; he had to put his finger on the place before she
could find it. Then her tremor ceased, and she seemed without breath or
pulse while she read it through. She fetched a long, deep sigh, and passed
her hand over her eyes, as if to clear them; staying herself unconsciously
against Halleck's breast, and laying her trembling arm along his arm till
her fingers knit themselves among his fingers, she read it a second time
and a third. Then she dropped the paper, and turned to look up at him.
“Why!” she cried, as if she had made it out at last, while an awful, joyful
light of hope flashed into her face. “_It is a mistake_! Don't you see? He
thinks that I never came back! He thinks that I meant to abandon him. That
I--that I--But you _know_ that I came back,--you came back _with_ me! Why,
I wasn't gone an hour,--a _half_-hour, hardly. Oh, Bartley, poor Bartley!
He thought I could leave him, and take his child from him; that I could
be so wicked, so heartless--Oh, no, no, no! Why, I only stayed away that
little time because I was _afraid_ to go back! Don't you remember how I
told you I was afraid, and wanted you to come in with me?” Her exaltation
broke in a laugh. “But we can explain it now, and it will be all right. He
will see--he will understand--I will tell him just how it was--Oh, Flavia,
Flavia, we've found papa, we've found papa! Quick!”
She whirled away toward the stairs, but her father caught her by the arm.
“Marcia!” he shouted, in his old raucous voice, “You've got to understand!
This”--he hesitated, as if running over all terms of opprobrium in his
mind, and he resumed as if he had found them each too feeble--“_Bartley_
hasn't acted under any mistake.”
He set the facts before her with merciless clearness, and she listened with
an audible catching of the breath at times, while she softly smoothed her
forehead with her left hand. “I don't believe it,” she said when he had
ended. “Write to him, tell him what I say, and you will see.”
The old man uttered something between a groan and a curse. “Oh, you poor,
crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid
of you, and that he's just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks
he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and so he
accuses you of that, but he'd just as soon accuse you of anything else.
_Write_ to him? You've got to _go_ to him! You've got to go out there and
fight him in open court, with facts and witnesses. Do you suppose Bartley
Hubbard wants any explanation from you? Do you think he's been waiting
these two years to hear that you didn't really abandon him, but came back
to this house an hour after you left it, and that you've waited for him
here ever since? When he knows that, will he withdraw this suit of his and
come home? He'll want the proof, and the way to do is to go out there and
let him have it. If I had him on the stand for five minutes,” said the
old man between his set teeth,--“_just five minutes_,--I'd undertake to
convince him from his own lips that he was wrong about you! But I am afraid
he wouldn't mind a letter! You think I say so because I hate him; and you
don't believe me. Well, ask either of these gentlemen here whether I'm
telling you the truth.”
She did not speak, but, with a glance at their averted faces, she sank into
a chair, and passed one hand over the other, while she drew her breath in
long, shuddering respirations, and stared at the floor with knit brows and
starting eyes, like one stifling a deadly pang. She made several attempts
to speak before she could utter any sound; then she lifted her eyes to her
father's: “Let us--let us--go--home! Oh, let us go home! I will give
him up. I _had_ given him up already; I told you,” she said, turning to
Halleck, and speaking in a slow, gentle tone, “only an hour ago, that he
was dead. And this--this that's happened, it makes no difference. Why did
you bring the paper to me when you knew that I thought he was dead?”
“God knows I wished to keep it from you.”
“Well, no matter now. Let him go free if he wants to. I can't help it.”
“You _can_ help it,” interrupted her father. “You've got the facts on your
side, and you've got the witnesses!”
“Would you go out with me, and tell him that I never meant to leave him?”
she asked simply, turning to Halleck. “You--and Olive?”
“We would do anything for you, Marcia!”
She sat musing, and drawing her hands one over the other again, while her
quivering breath came and went on the silence. She let her hands fall
nervelessly on her lap. “I can't go; I'm too weak; I couldn't bear the
journey. No!” She shook her head. “I can't go!”
“Marcia,” began her father, “it's your _duty_ to go!”
“Does it say in the law that I have to go, if I don't choose?” she asked of
Halleck.
“No, you certainly need not go, if you don't choose!”
“Then I will stay. Do you think it's my duty to go?” she asked, referring
her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the
silence by which they tried to leave her free. “I don't care for my duty,
any more. I don't want to keep him, if it's so that he--left me--and--and
meant it--and he doesn't--care for me any--more.”
“Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he
doesn't care for you now.”
“Then let him go, and let us go home.”
“Very well!” said the old man. “We will go home, then, and before the
week's out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist.”
“Bigamist?” Marcia leaped to her feet.
“Yes, bigamist! Don't you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out
there before he began this suit?”
The languor was gone from Marcia's limbs. As she confronted her father, the
wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His was dark and
wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood
back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and
the hoarded hate in the old man's soul seemed to speak in Marcia's thick
whisper, “I will go.”