XXVIII
One morning, a week later, as they sat at breakfast, Ward handed his newspaper across to Elizabeth, indicating an item in the social column, and Elizabeth read:
“Mr. Amos Hunter, accompanied by his daughter, Miss Agnes Hunter, sailed from New York yesterday on the steamer King Emanuel for Naples. Mr. Hunter goes abroad for his health, and will spend the winter in Italy.”
Elizabeth looked up.
“That means—?”
“That it’s settled,” Ward replied.
She grew suddenly weak, in the sense of relief that seemed to dissolve her.
“Unless,” Ward added, and Elizabeth caught herself and looked at her father fearfully, “Hunter should come back.”
“But will he?”
“Some time, doubtless.”
“Oh, dear! Then the suspense isn’t over at all!”
“Well, it’s over for the present, anyway. Eades can do nothing, so Marriott says, as long as Hunter is away, and even if he were to return, the fact that Hunter accepted the money and credited it on his books—in some fashion—would make it exceedingly difficult to prove anything, and of course, under any circumstances, Hunter wouldn’t dare—now.”
Elizabeth sat a moment idly playing with a fork, and her father studied the varying expressions of her face as the shades came and went in her sensitive countenance. Her brow clouded in some little perplexity, then cleared again, and at last she sighed.
“I feel a hundred years old,” she said. “Hasn’t it been horrible?”
“I feel like a criminal myself,” said Ward.
“We are criminals—all of us,” she said, dealing bluntly, cruelly with herself. “We ought all of us to be in the penitentiary, if anybody ought.”
“Yes,” he acquiesced.
“Only,” she said, “nobody ought. I’ve learned that, anyway.”
“What would you do with them?” he asked, in the comfort of entering the realm of the abstract.
“With us?”
“Well—with the criminals.”
“Send us to the penitentiary, I suppose.”
“You are delightfully illogical, Betsy,” he said, trying to laugh.
“That’s all we can be,” she said. “It’s the only logical way.”
Then they were silent, for the maid entered.
“Have we really committed a crime?” she asked, when the door swung on the maid, who came and went so unconsciously in the midst of these tragic currents. “Don’t tell me—if we have.”
“I don’t know,” said Ward. “I presume I’d rather not know. I know I’ve gone through enough to make me miserable the rest of my life. I know that we have settled nothing—that we have escaped nothing—except what people will say.”
“Yes, mama, after all, was the only one wise enough to understand and appreciate the real significance.”
“Well, there’s nothing more we can do now,” he replied.
“No, we must go on living some way.” She got up, went around the table and kissed him on the forehead. “We’ll just lock our little skeleton in the family closet, papa, and once in a while go and take a peep at him. There may be some good in that—he’ll keep us from growing proud, anyway.”
Ward and Marriott had decided to say as little to Elizabeth as possible of their transaction. Ward had gone through a week of agony. In a day or two he had raised the little fortune, and kept it ready, and he had been surprised and a bit perturbed when Gibbs had come and in quite a matter-of-fact way asked for the amount in cash. Ward had helplessly turned it over to him with many doubts and suspicions; but he knew no other way. Afterward, when Gibbs returned and gave him Hunter’s receipt, he had felt ashamed of these doubts and had hoped Gibbs had not noticed them, but Gibbs had gone away without a word, save a gruff:
“Well, that’s fixed, Mr. Ward.”
And yet Elizabeth had wondered about it all. Her conscience troubled her acutely, so acutely that when Marriott came over that evening for the praise he could not forego, and perhaps for a little spiritual corroboration and comfort, she said:
“Gordon, you have done wonders. I can’t thank you.”
“Don’t try,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
She looked troubled. Her brows darkened, and then, unable to resist the impulse any longer, she asked:
“But, Gordon, was it right?”
“What?” he asked, quite needlessly, as they both knew.
“What you—what we—did?”
“Yes, it was right.”
“Was it legal?”
“N-no.”
“Ah!” She was silent a moment. “What is it called?”
“What?”
“You know very well—our crime. I must know the worst. I must know just how bad I am.”
“You wish to have it labeled, classified, as Doctor Tilson would have it?”
“Yes, tell me.”
“I believe,” said Marriott looking away and biting his upper lip, “that it’s called compounding a felony, or something of that sort.”
He was silent and she was silent. Then he spoke again.
“They disbarred poor old Billy Gale for less than that.”
She looked at him, her gray eyes winking rapidly as they did when she was interested and her mind concentrated on some absorbing problem. Then she impulsively clasped her white hands in her lap, and, leaning over, she asked out of the psychological interest the situation must soon or late have for her:
“Tell me, Gordon, just how you felt when you were—”
“Committing it?”
She nodded her head rapidly, almost impatiently.
“Well,” he said with a far-away expression, “I experienced, especially when I was in Danny Gibbs’s saloon, that pleasant feeling of going to hell.”
“You just won’t reassure me,” she said, relaxing into a hopeless attitude.
“Oh, yes, I will,” he replied. “Don’t you remember what Emerson says?” He looked up at the portrait of the beautiful, spiritual face above the mantel.
She looked up in her vivid literary interest.
“No; tell me. He said everything.”
“Yes, everything there is to say. He said, ‘Good men must not obey the laws too well.’”