LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West Virginians in New
York, saying their brother assented to their agreement; and it now
remained for Lapham to fulfil his part of it. He was ludicrously far
from able to do this; and unless he could get some extension of time
from them, he must lose this chance, his only chance, to retrieve
himself. He spent the time in a desperate endeavour to raise the
money, but he had not raised the half of it when the banks closed.
With shame in his heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted
so haughtily, and laid his plan before him. He could not bring himself
to ask Bellingham's help, but he told him what he proposed to do.
Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was an experiment, and that
the price asked was enormous, unless a great success were morally
certain. He advised delay, he advised prudence; he insisted that
Lapham ought at least to go out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and
works before he put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.
"That's all well enough," cried Lapham; "but if I don't clinch this
offer within twenty-four hours, they'll withdraw it, and go into the
market; and then where am I?"
"Go on and see them again," said Bellingham. "They can't be so
peremptory as that with you. They must give you time to look at what
they want to sell. If it turns out what you hope, then--I'll see what
can be done. But look into it thoroughly."
"Well!" cried Lapham, helplessly submitting. He took out his watch,
and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four o'clock train. He
hurried back to his office, and put together some papers preparatory to
going, and despatched a note by his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he
was starting for New York, and did not know just when he should get
back.
The early spring day was raw and cold. As he went out through the
office he saw the clerks at work with their street-coats and hats on;
Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on her shoulders, and looked
particularly comfortless as she operated her machine with her red
fingers. "What's up?" asked Lapham, stopping a moment.
"Seems to be something the matter with the steam," she answered, with
the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have
to work for a living.
"Well, take your writer into my room. There's a fire in the stove
there," said Lapham, passing out.
Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office. She had passed
the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the
mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no
longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of
trial and left him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame
and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the
real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him
hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It astounded her that such a thing
should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good
woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her
husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and
wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt. But she
had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his
own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the
thing that had played her false; that she had kept her mind so long
upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man
that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation
for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of
roguery as the means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him
if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the
harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she owned her
limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished
the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her
intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be
right, and nothing else. She admired and revered him for going beyond
her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had
determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and
would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.
She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her
heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of
the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she
wished that those days were back again. She saw Corey at his desk, and
she could not bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need
not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham's room, and opening the door
without knocking, shut it behind her.
Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband
was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating
a typewriter. She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the
scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not
personally interesting to them. It vexed the wife that any one else
should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once
been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl's
indifference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one
corner, and Lapham's office coat, looking intensely like him to his
wife's familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs.
Lapham liked even less than the girl's good looks this domestication of
her garments in her husband's office. She began to ask herself
excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to
come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out
of her unreasonableness.
"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?" she sharply asked of
the girl.
"I couldn't say exactly," replied the girl, without looking round.
"Has he been out long?"
"I don't know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the clock,
without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working her machine.
"Well, I can't wait any longer," said the wife abruptly. "When Colonel
Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs. Lapham wants to see him."
The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham with a red
and startled face, which she did not lift to confront her.
"Yes--yes--I will," she faltered.
The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an irritation
about this girl which she could not quell or account for. She found
her husband's message, and it seemed intolerable that he should have
gone to New York without seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the
mysterious business could be that took him away so suddenly. She said
to herself that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little
too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never mentioned that
girl there in his office, she forgot how much she had left herself out
of his business life. That was another curse of their prosperity.
Well, she was glad the prosperity was going; it had never been
happiness. After this she was going to know everything as she used.
She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned; and if
there had been anything for her to do in that miserable house, as she
called it in her thought, she might have succeeded. But again the
curse was on her; there was nothing to do; and the looks of that girl
kept coming back to her vacancy, her disoccupation. She tried to make
herself something to do, but that beauty, which she had not liked,
followed her amid the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which
Irene had seen to putting away in the fall. Who was the thing, anyway?
It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump up in that
frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named herself?
After dark, that evening, when the question had worn away its poignancy
from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lapham was left at the door by a
messenger who said there was no answer. "A note for me?" she said,
staring at the unknown, and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of
the superscription. Then she opened it and read: "Ask your husband
about his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and Well-wisher," who signed
the note, gave no other name.
Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand. Her brain reeled; she
tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham came back the second
morning, it had become, with lessening intervals of sanity and release,
a demoniacal possession. She passed the night without sleep, without
rest, in the frenzy of the cruellest of the passions, which covers with
shame the unhappy soul it possesses, and murderously lusts for the
misery of its object. If she had known where to find her husband in
New York, she would have followed him; she waited his return in an
ecstasy of impatience. In the morning he came back, looking spent and
haggard. She saw him drive up to the door, and she ran to let him in
herself.
"Who is that girl you've got in your office, Silas Lapham?" she
demanded, when her husband entered.
"Girl in my office?"
"Yes! Who is she? What is she doing there?"
"Why, what have you heard about her?"
"Never you mind what I've heard. Who is she? IS IT MRS. M. THAT YOU
GAVE THAT MONEY TO? I want to know who she is! I want to know what a
respectable man, with grown-up girls of his own, is doing with such a
looking thing as that in his office? I want to know how long she's been
there? I want to know what she's there at all for?"
He had mechanically pushed her before him into the long, darkened
parlour, and he shut himself in there with her now, to keep the
household from hearing her lifted voice. For a while he stood
bewildered, and could not have answered if he would, and then he would
not. He merely asked, "Have I ever accused you of anything wrong,
Persis?"
"You no need to!" she answered furiously, placing herself against the
closed door.
"Did you ever know me to do anything out of the way?"
"That isn't what I asked you."
"Well, I guess you may find out about that girl yourself. Get away
from the door."
"I won't get away from the door."
She felt herself set lightly aside, and her husband opened the door and
went out. "I WILL find out about her," she screamed after him. "I'll
find out, and I'll disgrace you. I'll teach you how to treat me----"
The air blackened round her: she reeled to the sofa and then she found
herself waking from a faint. She did not know how long she had lain
there, she did not care. In a moment her madness came whirling back
upon her. She rushed up to his room; it was empty; the closet-doors
stood ajar and the drawers were open; he must have packed a bag hastily
and fled. She went out and wandered crazily up and down till she found
a hack. She gave the driver her husband's business address, and told
him to drive there as fast as he could; and three times she lowered the
window to put her head out and ask him if he could not hurry. A
thousand things thronged into her mind to support her in her evil will.
She remembered how glad and proud that man had been to marry her, and
how everybody said she was marrying beneath her when she took him. She
remembered how good she had always been to him, how perfectly devoted,
slaving early and late to advance him, and looking out for his
interests in all things, and sparing herself in nothing. If it had not
been for her, he might have been driving stage yet; and since their
troubles had begun, the troubles which his own folly and imprudence had
brought on them, her conduct had been that of a true and faithful wife.
Was HE the sort of man to be allowed to play her false with impunity?
She set her teeth and drew her breath sharply through them when she
thought how willingly she had let him befool her, and delude her about
that memorandum of payments to Mrs. M., because she loved him so much,
and pitied him for his cares and anxieties. She recalled his
confusion, his guilty looks.
She plunged out of the carriage so hastily when she reached the office
that she did not think of paying the driver; and he had to call after
her when she had got half-way up the stairs. Then she went straight to
Lapham's room, with outrage in her heart. There was again no one there
but that type-writer girl; she jumped to her feet in a fright, as Mrs.
Lapham dashed the door to behind her and flung up her veil.
The two women confronted each other.
"Why, the good land!" cried Mrs. Lapham, "ain't you Zerrilla Millon?"
"I--I'm married," faltered the girl "My name's Dewey, now."
"You're Jim Millon's daughter, anyway. How long have you been here?"
"I haven't been here regularly; I've been here off and on ever since
last May."
"Where's your mother?"
"She's here--in Boston."
Mrs. Lapham kept her eyes on the girl, but she dropped, trembling, into
her husband's chair, and a sort of amaze and curiosity were in her
voice instead of the fury she had meant to put there.
"The Colonel," continued Zerrilla, "he's been helping us, and he's got
me a type-writer, so that I can help myself a little. Mother's doing
pretty well now; and when Hen isn't around we can get along."
"That your husband?"
"I never wanted to marry him; but he promised to try to get something
to do on shore; and mother was all for it, because he had a little
property then, and I thought may be I'd better. But it's turned out
just as I said and if he don't stay away long enough this time to let
me get the divorce,--he's agreed to it, time and again,--I don't know
what we're going to do." Zerrilla's voice fell, and the trouble which
she could keep out of her face usually, when she was comfortably warmed
and fed and prettily dressed, clouded it in the presence of a
sympathetic listener. "I saw it was you, when you came in the other
day," she went on; "but you didn't seem to know me. I suppose the
Colonel's told you that there's a gentleman going to marry me--Mr.
Wemmel's his name--as soon as I get the divorce; but sometimes I'm
completely discouraged; it don't seem as if I ever could get it."
Mrs. Lapham would not let her know that she was ignorant of the fact
attributed to her knowledge. She remained listening to Zerrilla, and
piecing out the whole history of her presence there from the facts of
the past, and the traits of her husband's character. One of the things
she had always had to fight him about was that idea of his that he was
bound to take care of Jim Millon's worthless wife and her child because
Millon had got the bullet that was meant for him. It was a perfect
superstition of his; she could not beat it out of him; but she had made
him promise the last time he had done anything for that woman that it
should BE the last time. He had then got her a little house in one of
the fishing ports, where she could take the sailors to board and wash
for, and earn an honest living if she would keep straight. That was
five or six years ago, and Mrs. Lapham had heard nothing of Mrs. Millon
since; she had heard quite enough of her before; and had known her idle
and baddish ever since she was the worst little girl at school in
Lumberville, and all through her shameful girlhood, and the married
days which she had made so miserable to the poor fellow who had given
her his decent name and a chance to behave herself. Mrs. Lapham had no
mercy on Moll Millon, and she had quarrelled often enough with her
husband for befriending her. As for the child, if the mother would put
Zerrilla out with some respectable family, that would be ONE thing; but
as long as she kept Zerrilla with her, she was against letting her
husband do anything for either of them. He had done ten times as much
for them now as he had any need to, and she had made him give her his
solemn word that he would do no more. She saw now that she was wrong
to make him give it, and that he must have broken it again and again
for the reason that he had given when she once scolded him for throwing
away his money on that hussy--
"When I think of Jim Millon, I've got to; that's all."
She recalled now that whenever she had brought up the subject of Mrs.
Millon and her daughter, he had seemed shy of it, and had dropped it
with some guess that they were getting along now. She wondered that
she had not thought at once of Mrs. Millon when she saw that memorandum
about Mrs. M.; but the woman had passed so entirely out of her life,
that she had never dreamt of her in connection with it. Her husband
had deceived her, yet her heart was no longer hot against him, but
rather tenderly grateful that his deceit was in this sort, and not in
that other. All cruel and shameful doubt of him went out of it. She
looked at this beautiful girl, who had blossomed out of her knowledge
since she saw her last, and she knew that she was only a blossomed
weed, of the same worthless root as her mother, and saved, if saved,
from the same evil destiny, by the good of her father in her; but so
far as the girl and her mother were concerned, Mrs. Lapham knew that
her husband was to blame for nothing but his wilful, wrong-headed,
kind-heartedness, which her own exactions had turned into deceit. She
remained a while, questioning the girl quietly about herself and her
mother, and then, with a better mind towards Zerrilla, at least, than
she had ever had before, she rose up and went out. There must have
been some outer hint of the exhaustion in which the subsidence of her
excitement had left her within, for before she had reached the head of
the stairs, Corey came towards her.
"Can I be of any use to you, Mrs. Lapham? The Colonel was here just
before you came in, on his way to the train."
"Yes,--yes. I didn't know--I thought perhaps I could catch him here.
But it don't matter. I wish you would let some one go with me to get a
carriage," she begged feebly.
"I'll go with you myself," said the young fellow, ignoring the
strangeness in her manner. He offered her his arm in the twilight of
the staircase, and she was glad to put her trembling hand through it,
and keep it there till he helped her into a hack which he found for
her. He gave the driver her direction, and stood looking a little
anxiously at her.
"I thank you; I am all right now," she said, and he bade the man drive
on.
When she reached home she went to bed, spent with the tumult of her
emotions and sick with shame and self-reproach. She understood now, as
clearly as if he had told her in as many words, that if he had
befriended those worthless jades--the Millons characterised themselves
so, even to Mrs. Lapham's remorse--secretly and in defiance of her, it
was because he dreaded her blame, which was so sharp and bitter, for
what he could not help doing. It consoled her that he had defied her,
deceived her; when he came back she should tell him that; and then it
flashed upon her that she did not know where he was gone, or whether he
would ever come again. If he never came, it would be no more than she
deserved; but she sent for Penelope, and tried to give herself hopes of
escape from this just penalty.
Lapham had not told his daughter where he was going; she had heard him
packing his bag, and had offered to help him; but he had said he could
do it best, and had gone off, as he usually did, without taking leave
of any one.
"What were you talking about so loud, down in the parlour," she asked
her mother, "just before he came up. Is there any new trouble?"
"No; it was nothing."
"I couldn't tell. Once I thought you were laughing." She went about,
closing the curtains on account of her mother's headache, and doing
awkwardly and imperfectly the things that Irene would have done so
skilfully for her comfort.
The day wore away to nightfall, and then Mrs. Lapham said she MUST
know. Penelope said there was no one to ask; the clerks would all be
gone home, and her mother said yes, there was Mr. Corey; they could
send and ask him; he would know.
The girl hesitated. "Very well," she said, then, scarcely above a
whisper, and she presently laughed huskily. "Mr. Corey seems fated to
come in, somewhere. I guess it's a Providence, mother."
She sent off a note, inquiring whether he could tell her just where her
father had expected to be that night; and the answer came quickly back
that Corey did not know, but would look up the book-keeper and inquire.
This office brought him in person, an hour later, to tell Penelope that
the Colonel was to be at Lapham that night and next day.
"He came in from New York, in a great hurry, and rushed off as soon as
he could pack his bag," Penelope explained, "and we hadn't a chance to
ask him where he was to be to-night. And mother wasn't very well,
and----"
"I thought she wasn't looking well when she was at the office to-day.
And so I thought I would come rather than send," Corey explained in his
turn.
"Oh, thank you!"
"If there is anything I can do--telegraph Colonel Lapham, or anything?"
"Oh no, thank you; mother's better now. She merely wanted to be sure
where he was."
He did not offer to go, upon this conclusion of his business, but hoped
he was not keeping her from her mother. She thanked him once again,
and said no, that her mother was much better since she had had a cup of
tea; and then they looked at each other, and without any apparent
exchange of intelligence he remained, and at eleven o'clock he was
still there. He was honest in saying he did not know it was so late;
but he made no pretence of being sorry, and she took the blame to
herself.
"I oughtn't to have let you stay," she said. "But with father gone,
and all that trouble hanging over us----"
She was allowing him to hold her hand a moment at the door, to which
she had followed him.
"I'm so glad you could let me!" he said, "and I want to ask you now
when I may come again. But if you need me, you'll----"
A sharp pull at the door-bell outside made them start asunder, and at a
sign from Penelope, who knew that the maids were abed by this time, he
opened it.
"Why, Irene!" shrieked the girl.
Irene entered with the hackman, who had driven her unheard to the door,
following with her small bags, and kissed her sister with resolute
composure. "That's all," she said to the hackman. "I gave my checks
to the expressman," she explained to Penelope.
Corey stood helpless. Irene turned upon him, and gave him her hand.
"How do you do, Mr. Corey?" she said, with a courage that sent a thrill
of admiring gratitude through him. "Where's mamma, Pen? Papa gone to
bed?"
Penelope faltered out some reply embodying the facts, and Irene ran up
the stairs to her mother's room. Mrs. Lapham started up in bed at her
apparition.
"Irene Lapham."
"Uncle William thought he ought to tell me the trouble papa was in; and
did you think I was going to stay off there junketing, while you were
going through all this at home, and Pen acting so silly, too? You ought
to have been ashamed to let me stay so long! I started just as soon as
I could pack. Did you get my despatch? I telegraphed from Springfield.
But it don't matter, now. Here I am. And I don't think I need have
hurried on Pen's account," she added, with an accent prophetic of the
sort of old maid she would become, if she happened not to marry.
"Did you see him?" asked her mother. "It's the first time he's been
here since she told him he mustn't come."
"I guess it isn't the last time, by the looks," said Irene, and before
she took off her bonnet she began to undo some of Penelope's mistaken
arrangements of the room.
At breakfast, where Corey and his mother met the next morning before
his father and sisters came down, he told her, with embarrassment which
told much more, that he wished now that she would go and call upon the
Laphams.
Mrs. Corey turned a little pale, but shut her lips tight and mourned in
silence whatever hopes she had lately permitted herself. She answered
with Roman fortitude: "Of course, if there's anything between you and
Miss Lapham, your family ought to recognise it."
"Yes," said Corey.
"You were reluctant to have me call at first, but now if the affair is
going on----"
"It is! I hope--yes, it is!"
"Then I ought to go and see her, with your sisters; and she ought to
come here and--we ought all to see her and make the matter public. We
can't do so too soon. It will seem as if we were ashamed if we don't."
"Yes, you are quite right, mother," said the young man gratefully, "and
I feel how kind and good you are. I have tried to consider you in this
matter, though I don't seem to have done so; I know what your rights
are, and I wish with all my heart that I were meeting even your tastes
perfectly. But I know you will like her when you come to know her.
It's been very hard for her every way--about her sister,--and she's
made a great sacrifice for me. She's acted nobly."
Mrs. Corey, whose thoughts cannot always be reported, said she was sure
of it, and that all she desired was her son's happiness.
"She's been very unwilling to consider it an engagement on that
account, and on account of Colonel Lapham's difficulties. I should
like to have you go, now, for that very reason. I don't know just how
serious the trouble is; but it isn't a time when we can seem
indifferent."
The logic of this was not perhaps so apparent to the glasses of fifty
as to the eyes of twenty-six; but Mrs. Corey, however she viewed it,
could not allow herself to blench before the son whom she had taught
that to want magnanimity was to be less than gentlemanly. She
answered, with what composure she could, "I will take your sisters,"
and then she made some natural inquiries about Lapham's affairs. "Oh,
I hope it will come out all right," Corey said, with a lover's vague
smile, and left her. When his father came down, rubbing his long hands
together, and looking aloof from all the cares of the practical world,
in an artistic withdrawal, from which his eye ranged over the
breakfast-table before he sat down, Mrs. Corey told him what she and
their son had been saying.
He laughed, with a delicate impersonal appreciation of the predicament.
"Well, Anna, you can't say but if you ever were guilty of supposing
yourself porcelain, this is a just punishment of your arrogance. Here
you are bound by the very quality on which you've prided yourself to
behave well to a bit of earthenware who is apparently in danger of
losing the gilding that rendered her tolerable."
"We never cared for the money," said Mrs. Corey. "You know that."
"No; and now we can't seem to care for the loss of it. That would be
still worse. Either horn of the dilemma gores us. Well, we still have
the comfort we had in the beginning; we can't help ourselves; and we
should only make bad worse by trying. Unless we can look to Tom's
inamorata herself for help."
Mrs. Corey shook her head so gloomily that her husband broke off with
another laugh. But at the continued trouble of her face, he said,
sympathetically: "My dear, I know it's a very disagreeable affair; and
I don't think either of us has failed to see that it was so from the
beginning. I have had my way of expressing my sense of it, and you
yours, but we have always been of the same mind about it. We would
both have preferred to have Tom marry in his own set; the Laphams are
about the last set we could have wished him to marry into. They ARE
uncultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I'm not able to
believe that poverty will improve them. Still, it may. Let us hope
for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how. I'm sure YOU
will behave well, and I shall try. I'm going with you to call on Miss
Lapham. This is a thing that can't be done by halves!"
He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters.