XII

The affair had been mixed up with tea and lunch, and there was now the suggestion of a gay return to the Northwick place and an hour or two more in that pleasant company of pretty and lively women, which Wade loved almost as well as he loved righteousness. He knew that there was such a thing as death in the world; he had often already seen its strange, peaceful face; he had just stood by an open grave; but at the moment, his youth denied it all, and he swung along over the hard-packed roadway thinking of the superb beauty of Suzette Northwick, and the witchery of Louise Hilary's face. It was like her, to come at once to her friend in this anxiety; and he believed a strength in her to help bear the worst, the worst that now seemed so remote and impossible.

He did not find Matt Hilary in the station; but he pushed through to the platform outside and saw him at a little distance standing between two of the tracks, and watching a group of men there who were replacing some wornout rails with new ones.

"Matt!" he called to him, and Matt turned about and said, "Hello, Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide, free-handed rhythmical swing of his hammer.

"Beautiful! Isn't it?" said Matt. "I never see any sort of manual labor, even the kinds that are brutified and demoralized by their association with machinery, without thinking how far the arts still come short of the trades. If any sculptor could feel it, what a magnificent bas-relief just that thing would make!" He turned round to look at the men again: in their different poses of self-forgetfulness and interest in their work, they had a beauty and grace, in spite of their clumsy dress, which ennobled the scene.

When Matt once more faced round, he smiled serenely on his friend. Wade, who knew his temperament and his philosophy, was deceived for the moment. "Then you don't share Miss Northwick's anxiety about her father," he began, as if Matt had been dealing directly with that matter, and had been giving his reasons for not being troubled about it. "Have you heard any thing yet? But of course you haven't, or – "

Matt halted him, and looked down into his face from his greater height with a sort of sobered cheerfulness. "How much do you know about Miss Northwick's father?"

"Very little – nothing in fact but what she and her sister showed me in the morning paper. I know they're in great distress about him; I just met Miss Suzette and your sister, and they told me I should find you at the station."

Matt began to walk on again. "I didn't know but you had heard some talk from the outside. I came off to escape the pressure of inquiry at the station; people had found out somehow that I had been put in charge of the telegraphing when the young ladies left. I imagined they wouldn't follow me if I went for a walk." He put his hand through Wade's arm, and directed their course across the tracks toward the street away from the station, where Elbridge had walked his horses up and down the evening he met Northwick. "I told them to look out for me, if they got anything; I should keep in sight somewhere. Isn't it a curious commentary on our state of things," he went on, "that when any man in a position of trust can't be accounted for twenty-four hours after he leaves home, the business-like supposition is that he has run away with money that doesn't belong to him?"

"What do you mean, Matt?"

"I mean that the popular belief in Hatboro' seems to be that Northwick was on his way to Canada on the train that was wrecked."

"Shocking, shocking!" said Wade. "What makes you think they believe that?"

"The conjecture and speculation began in the station the moment Miss Northwick left it, and before it could be generally understood that I was there to represent her. I suppose there wasn't a man among them that wouldn't have trusted Northwick with all he had, or wouldn't have felt that his fortune was made if Northwick had taken charge of his money. In fact I heard some of them saying so before their deference for me shut their mouths. Yet I haven't a doubt they all think he's an absconding defaulter."

"It's shocking," said Wade, sadly, "but I'm afraid you're right. These things are so common that people are subjected to suspicion on no kind of – " But just at this juncture Matt lifted his head from the moment's revery in which he seemed to have been far absent.

"Have you seen much of the family this winter?"

"Yes, a good deal," said Wade. "They're not communicants, but they've been regular attendants at the services, and I've been a good deal at their house. They seem rather lonely; they have very little to do with the South Hatboro' people, and nothing at all with the villagers. I don't know why they've spent the winter here. Of course one hears all kinds of gossip. The gossips at South Hatboro' say that Miss Suzette was willing to be on with young Wilmington again, and that she kept the family here. But I place no faith in such a conjecture."

"It has a rustic crudity," said Matt. "But if Jack Wilmington ever cared anything for the girl, now's his chance to be a man and stand by her."

Something in Matt's tone made Wade stop and ask, "What do you mean, Matt? Is there anything besides – "

"Yes." Matt took a fresh grip of his friend's arm, and walked him steadily forward, and kept him walking in spite of his involuntary tendency to come to a halt every few steps, and try to urge something that he never quite got from his tongue, against the probability of what Matt was saying. "I mean that these people are right in their suspicions."

"Right?"

"My dear Caryl, there is no doubt whatever that Northwick is a defaulter to the company in a very large amount. It came out at a meeting of the directors on Monday. He confessed it, for he could not deny it in the face of the proof against him, and he was given a number of days to make up his shortage. He was released on parole: it was really the best thing, the wisest as well as the mercifullest, and of course he broke his word, and seized the first chance to run away. I knew all about the defalcation from my father just after the meeting. There is simply no question about it."

"Gracious powers!" said Wade, finally helpless to dispute the facts which he still did not realize. "And you think it possible – do you suppose – imagine – that it was really he who was in that burning car? What an awful fate!"

"An awful fate?" asked Matt. "Do you think so? Yes, yours is the safe ground in regard to a thing of that kind – the only ground."

"The only ground?"

"I was thinking of my poor father," said Matt.

"He said some sharp things to that wretched creature at the meeting of the Board – called him a thief, and I dare say other hard names – and told him that the best thing that could happen to him was a railroad accident on his way home."

"Ah!"

"You see? When he read the account of that accident in the paper this morning, and found a name so much like Northwick's among the victims, he was fearfully broken up, of course. He felt somehow as if he had caused his death – I could see that, though of course he wouldn't admit anything of the kind."

"Of course," said Wade, compassionately.

"I suppose it isn't well to invoke death in any way. He is like the devil, and only too apt to come, if you ask for him. I don't mean anything superstitious, and I don't suppose my father really has any superstitious feeling about the matter. But he's been rather a friend – or a victim – of that damnable theory that the gentlemanly way out of a difficulty like Northwick's is suicide, and I suppose he spoke from association with it, or by an impulse from it. He has been telegraphing right and left, to try to verify the reports, as it was his business and duty to do, anyway; and he caught at the notion of my coming up here with Louise to see if we could be of any use to those two poor women."

"Poor women!" Wade echoed. "The worst must fall upon them, as the worst always seems to do."

"Yes, wherever a cruel blow falls there seems to be a woman for it to fall on. And you see what a refinement of cruelty this is going to be when it reaches them? They have got to know that their father met that awful death, and that he met it because he was a defaulter and was running away. I suppose the papers will be full of it."

"That seems intolerable. Couldn't anything be done to stop them?"

"Why the thing has to come out. You can keep happiness a secret, but sorrow and shame have to come out – I don't know why, but they do. Then, when they come out, we feel as if the means of their publicity were the cause of them. It's very unphilosophical." They walked slowly along in silence for a few moments, and then Matt's revery broke out again in words: "Well, it's to be seen now whether she has the strength that bears, or the strength that breaks. The way she held her head, as she took the reins and drove off, with poor Louise beside her palpitating with sympathy for her trouble and anxiety about her horses, was, yes, it was superb: there's no other word for it. Ah, poor girl!"

"Your sister's presence will be a great help to her," said Wade. "It was very good of her to come."

"Ah, there wasn't anything else for it," said Matt, flinging his head up. "Louise has my father's loyalty. I don't know much about her friendship with Miss Northwick – she's so much younger than I, and they came together when I was abroad – but I've fancied she wasn't much liked among the girls, and Louise was her champion, in a way. When Louise read that report, nothing would do but she must come."

"Of course."

"But our being here must have its embarrassments for my father. It was a sacrifice for him to let us come."

"I don't understand."

"It was he who carried through the respite the directors gave Northwick; and now he will have the appearance before some people of helping to cover up the miserable facts, of putting a good face on things while a rogue was getting away from justice. He might even be supposed to have some interest in getting him out of the way."

"Oh, I don't think any such suspicion can attach itself to such a man as Mr. Hilary," said Wade, with a certain resentment of the suggestion even from the man's son.

"In a commercial civilization like ours any sort of suspicion can attach to any sort of man in a case like this," said Matt.

Wade took off his hat and wiped his forehead. "I can't realize that the case is what you say. I can't realize it at all. It seems like some poor sort of play, of make-believe. I can't forgive myself for being so little moved by it. We are in the presence of a horror that ought to make us uncover our heads and fall to our knees and confess our own sins to God!"

"Ah, I'm with you there!" said Matt, and he pushed his hand farther through his friend's arm.

They were both still well under thirty, and they both had that zest for mere experience, any experience, that hunger for the knowledge of life, which youth feels. In their several ways they were already men who had thought for themselves, or conjectured, rather; and they were eager to verify their speculations through their emotions. They thought a good deal alike in many things, though they started from such opposite points in their thinking; and they both had finally the same ideal of life. Their intimacy was of as old a date as their school days; at Harvard they were in the same clubs as well as the same class. Wade's father was not a Boston man, but his mother was a Bellingham, and he was nurtured in the traditions of Hilary's social life. Both had broken with them: Wade not so much when he became a ritualist as Hilary when he turned his back on manufacturing.

They were now not without a kind of pride in standing so close to the calamity they were fated witnesses of, and in the midst of their sympathy they had a curiosity which concerned itself with one of the victims because she was a young and beautiful girl. Their pity not so much forgot as ignored Northwick's elder daughter, who was a plain, sick old maid, and followed the younger with a kind of shrinking and dread of her doom which Matt tried to put into words.

"I assure you if I couldn't manage to pull away from it at moments, I don't see how I could stand it. I had a sense of personal disgrace, when I met that poor girl, with what I had in my mind. I felt as if I were taking some base advantage of her in knowing that about her father, and I was so glad when she went off with Louise and left me to struggle with my infamous information alone. I hurried Louise away with her in the most cowardly haste. We don't any of us realize it, as you say. Why, just imagine! It means sorrow, it means shame, it means poverty. They will have to leave their house, their home; she will have to give up everything to the company. It isn't merely friends and her place in the world; it's money, it's something to eat and wear, it's a roof over her head!"

Wade refused the extreme view portrayed by his friend's figures. "Of course she won't be allowed to come to want."

"Of course. But there's really no measuring the sinuous reach of a disaster like this. It strikes from a coil that seems to involve everything."

"What are you going to do if you get bad news?" asked Wade.

"Ah, I don't know! I must tell her, somehow; unless you think that you – " Wade gave a start which Matt interpreted aright; he laughed nervously. "No, no! It's for me to do it. I know that; unless I can get Louise. Ah! I wonder what that is."

They were walking back toward the station again, and Matt had seen a head and arm projected from the office window, and a hand waving a sheet of yellow paper. It seemed meant for them. They both began to run, and then they checked themselves; and walked as fast as they could.

"We must refer the matter to your sister," said Wade, "and if she thinks best, remember that I shall be quite ready to speak to Miss Northwick. Or, if you think best, I will speak to her without troubling your sister."

"Oh, you're all right, Wade. You needn't have any doubt of that. We'll see. I wonder what there is in that dispatch."

The old station master had come out of the station and was hurrying to meet them with the message, now duly enclosed in an envelope. He gave it to Matt and promptly turned his back on him.

Matt tore it open, and read: "Impossible to identify parlor-car passengers." The telegram was signed "Operator," and was dated at Wellwater. It fell blankly on their tense feeling.

"Well," said Wade, after a long breath. "It isn't the worst."

Matt read it frowningly over several times; then he smiled. "Oh, no. This isn't at all bad. It's nothing. But so far, it's rather comforting. And it's something, even if it is nothing. Well, I suppose I'd better go up to Miss Northwick with it. Wait a moment; I must tell them where to send if anything else comes."

"I'll walk with you as far as St. Michael's," said Wade, when they left the station. "I'm going to my study, there."

They set off together, up the middle of the street, which gave them more elbow-room than the sidewalk narrowly blocked out of the snow.

From a large store as they were passing, a small, dry-looking, pompous little man advanced to the middle of the street, and stopped them. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Wade! I beg your pardon, sir!" he said, nimbly transferring himself, after the quasi self-introduction, from Wade to Matt. "May I ask whether you have received any further information?"

"No," said Matt, amiably, "the only answer we have got is that it is impossible to identify the passengers in the parlor-car."

"Ah, thank you! Thank you very much, sir! I felt sure it couldn't be our Mr. Northwick. Er – good-morning, sir."

He bowed himself away, and went into his store again, and Matt asked Wade, "Who in the world is that?"

"He's a Mr. Gerrish – keeps the large store, there. Rather an unpleasant type."

Matt smiled. "He had the effect of refusing to believe that anything so low as an accident could happen to a man of Northwick's business standing."

"Something of that," Wade assented. "He worships Northwick on the altar of material success."

Matt lifted his head and looked about. "I suppose the whole place is simply seething with curiosity."

Just after they reached the side-street where Wade left him to go down to his church, he met Sue Northwick driving in her sleigh. She was alone, except for the groom impassive in the rumble.

"Have you heard anything?" she asked, sharply.

Matt repeated the dispatch from the operator at Wellwater.