Chapter 29

The elder sisters discussed Halleck's project apart between themselves, as their wont was with any family interest, and they bent over a map of South America, so as to hide what they were doing from their mother.

Olive had left the room by another door, and she intercepted Halleck before he reached his own.

“What is the matter, Ben?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” he answered, coldly. But he added, “Come in, Olive.”

She followed him, and hovered near after he turned up the gas.

“I can't stand it here, I must go,” he said, turning a dull, weary look upon her.

“Who was at the Elm House that you knew this last time?” she asked, quickly.

“Laura Dixmore isn't driving me away, if you mean that,” replied Halleck.

“I _couldn't_ believe it was she! I should have despised you if it was. But I shall hate her, whoever it was.”

Halleck sat down before his table, and his sister sank upon the corner of a chair near it, and looked wistfully at him. “I know there is some one!”

“If you think I've been fool enough to offer myself to any one, Olive, you're very much mistaken.”

“Oh, it needn't have come to that,” said Olive, with indignant pity.

“My life's a failure here,” cried Halleck, moving his head uneasily from side to side. “I feel somehow as if I could go out there and pick up the time I've lost. Great Heaven!” he cried, “if I were only running away from some innocent young girl's rejection, what a happy man I should be!”

“It's some horrid married thing, then, that's been flirting with you!”

He gave a forlorn laugh. “I'd almost confess it to please you, Olive. But I'd prefer to get out of the matter without lying, if I could. Why need you suppose any reason but the sufficient one I've given?--Don't afflict me! don't imagine things about me, don't make a mystery of me! I've been blunt and awkward, and I've bungled the business with father and mother; but I want to get away because I'm a miserable fraud here, and I think I might rub on a good while there before I found myself out again.”

“Ben,” demanded Olive, regardless of his words, “what have you been doing?”

“The old story,--nothing.”

“Is that true, Ben?”

“You used to be satisfied with asking once, Olive.”

“You _haven't_ been so wicked, so careless, as to get some poor creature in love with, you, and then want to run away from the misery you've made?”

“I suppose if I look it there's no use denying it,” said Halleck, letting his sad eyes meet hers, and smiling drearily. “You insist upon having a lady in the case?”

“Yes. But I see you won't tell me anything; and I _won't_ afflict you. Only I'm afraid it's just some silly thing, that you've got to brooding over, and that you'll let drive you away.”

“Well, you have the comfort of reflecting that I can't get away, whatever the pressure is.”

“You know better than that, Ben; and so do I. You know that, if you haven't got father and mother's consent already, it's only because you haven't had the heart to ask for it. As far as that's concerned, you're gone already. But I hope you won't go without thinking it over, as father says,--and talking it over. I hate to have you seem unsteady and fickle-minded, when I know you're not; and I'm going to set myself against this project till I know what's driving you from us,--or till I'm sure that it's something worth while. You needn't expect that I shall help to make it easy for you; I shall help to make it hard.”

Her loving looks belied her threats; if the others could not resist Ben when any sort of desire showed itself through his habitual listlessness, how could she, who understood him best and sympathized with him most? “There was something I was going to talk to you about, to-night, if you hadn't scared us all with this ridiculous scheme, and ask you whether you couldn't do something.” She seemed to suggest the change of interest with the hope of winning his thoughts away from the direction they had taken; but he listened apathetically, and left her to go further or not as she chose. “I think,” she added abruptly, “that some trouble is hanging over those wretched Hubbards.”

“Some new one?” asked Halleck, with sad sarcasm, turning his eyes towards her, as if with the resolution of facing her.

“You know he's left his place on that newspaper.”

“Yes, I heard that when I was at home before.”

“There are some very disagreeable stories about it. They say he was turned away by Mr. Witherby for behaving badly,--for printing something he oughtn't to have done.”

“That was to have been expected,” said Halleck.

“He hasn't found any other place, and Marcia says he gets very little work to do. He must be running into debt, terribly. I feel very anxious about them. I don't know what they're living on.”

“Probably on some money I lent him,” said Halleck, quietly. “I lent him fifteen hundred in the spring. It ought to make him quite comfortable for the present.”

“Oh, Ben! Why did you lend him money? You might have known he wouldn't do any good with it.”

Halleck explained how and why the loan had been made, and added: “If he's supporting his family with it, he's doing some good. I lent it to him for her sake.”

Halleck looked hardily into his sister's face, but he dropped his eyes when she answered, simply: “Yes, of course. But I don't believe she knows anything about it; and I'm glad of it: it would only add to her trouble. She worships you, Ben!”

“Does she?”

“She seems to think you are perfect, and she never comes here but she asks when you're to be home. I suppose she thinks you have a good influence on that miserable husband of hers. He's going from bad to worse, I guess. Father heard that he is betting on the election. That's what he's doing with your money.”

“It would be somebody else's money if it wasn't mine,” said Halleck. “Bartley Hubbard must live, and he must have the little excitements that make life agreeable.”

“Poor thing!” sighed Olive, “I don't know what she would do if she heard that you were going away. To hear her talk, you would think she had been counting the days and hours till you got back. It's ridiculous, the way she goes on with mother; asking everything about you, as if she expected to make Bartley Hubbard over again on your pattern. I should hate to have anybody think me such a saint as she does you. But there isn't much danger, thank goodness! I could laugh, sometimes, at the way she questions us all about you, and is so delighted when she finds that you and that wretch have anything in common. But it's all too miserably sad. She certainly _is_ the most single-hearted creature alive,” continued Olive, reflectively. “Sometimes she _scares_ me with her innocence. I don't believe that even her jealousy ever suggested a wicked idea to her: she's furious because she feels the injustice of giving so much more than he does. She hasn't really a thought for anybody else: I do believe that if she were free to choose from now till doomsday she would always choose Bartley Hubbard, bad as she knows him to be. And if she were a widow, and anybody else proposed to her, she would be utterly shocked and astonished.”

“Very likely,” said Halleck, absently.

“I feel very unhappy about her,” Olive resumed. “I know that she's anxious and troubled all the time. _Can't_ you do something, Ben? Have a talk with that disgusting thing, and see if you can't put him straight again, somehow?”

“No!” exclaimed Halleck, bursting violently from his abstraction. “I shall have nothing to do with them! Let him go his own way and the sooner he goes to the--I won't interfere,--I can't, I mustn't! I wonder at you, Olive!” He pushed away from the table, and went limping about the room, searching here and there for his hat and stick, which were on the desk where he had put them, in plain view. As he laid hand on them at last, he met his sister's astonished eyes. “If I interfered, I should not interfere because I cared for _him_ at all!” he cried.

“Of course not,” said Olive. “But I don't see anything to make you _wonder_ at me about that.”

“It would be because I cared for her--”

“Certainly! You didn't suppose I expected you to interfere from any other motive?”

He stood looking at her in stupefaction, with his hand on his hat and stick, like a man who doubts whether he has heard aright. Presently a shiver passed over him, another light came into his eyes, and he said quietly, “I'm going out to see Atherton.”

“To-night?” said his sister, accepting provisionally, as women do, the apparent change of subject. “Don't go to-night, Ben! You're too tired.”

“I'm not tired. I intended to see him to-night, at any rate. I want to talk over this South American scheme with him.” He put on his hat, and moved quickly toward the door.

“Ask him about the Hubbards,” said Olive. “Perhaps he can tell you something.”

“I don't want to know anything. I shall ask him nothing.”

She slipped between him and the door. “Ben, you haven't heard anything against poor Marcia, have you?”

“No!”

“You don't think she's to blame in any way for his going wrong, do you?

“How could I?”

“Then I don't understand why you won't do anything to help her.”

He looked at her again, and opened his lips to speak once, but closed them before he said, “I've got my own affairs to worry me. Isn't that reason enough for not interfering in theirs?”

“Not for you, Ben.”

“Then I don't choose to mix myself up in other people's misery. I don't like it, as you once said.”

“But you can't help it sometimes, as _you_ said.”

“I can this time, Olive. Don't you see,--” he began.

“I see there's something you won't tell me. But I shall find it out.” She threatened him half playfully.

“I wish you could,” he answered. “Then perhaps you'd let me know.” She opened the door for him now, and as he passed out he said gently, “I _am_ tired, but I sha'n't begin to rest till I have had this talk with Atherton. I had better go.”

“Yes,” Olive assented, “you'd better.” She added in banter, “You're altogether too mysterious to be of much comfort at home.”

The family heard him close the outside door behind him after Olive came back to them, and she explained, “He's gone out to talk it over with Mr. Atherton.”

His father gave a laugh of relief. “Well, if he leaves it to Atherton, I guess we needn't worry about it.”

“The child isn't at all well,” said his mother.

XXXIII.

Halleck met Atherton at the door of his room with his hat and coat on. “Why, Halleck! I was just going to see if you had come home!”

“You needn't now,” said Halleck, pushing by him into the room. “I want to see you, Atherton, on business.”

Atherton took off his hat, and closed the door with one hand, while he slipped the other arm out of his overcoat sleeve. “Well, to tell the truth, I was going to mingle a little business myself with the pleasure of seeing you.” He turned up the gas in his drop-light, and took the chair from which he had looked across the table at Halleck, when they talked there before. “It's the old subject,” he said, with a sense of repetition in the situation. “I learn from Witherby that Hubbard has taken that money of yours out of the Events, and from what I hear elsewhere he is making ducks and drakes of it on election bets. What shall you do about it?”

“Nothing,” said Halleck.

“Oh! Very well,” returned Atherton, with the effect of being a little snubbed, but resolved to take his snub professionally. He broke out, however, in friendly exasperation: “Why in the world did you lend the fellow that money?”

Halleck lifted his brooding eyes, and fixed them half pleadingly, half defiantly upon his friend's face. “I did it for his wife's sake.”

“Yes, I know,” returned Atherton. “I remember how you felt. I couldn't share your feeling, but I respected it. However, I doubt if your loan was a benefit to either of them. It probably tempted him to count upon money that he hadn't earned, and that's always corrupting.”

“Yes,” Halleck replied. “But I can't say that, so far as he's concerned, I'm very sorry. I don't suppose it would do her any good if I forced him to disgorge any balance he may have left from his wagers?”

“No, hardly.”

“Then I shall let him alone.”

The subject was dismissed, and Atherton waited for Halleck to speak of the business on which he had come. But Halleck only played with the paper cutter which his left hand had found on the table near him, and, with his chin sunk on his breast, seemed lost in an unhappy reverie.

“I hope you won't accuse yourself of doing him an injury,” said Atherton, at last, with a smile.

“Injury?” demanded Halleck, quickly. “What injury? How?”

“By lending him that money.”

“Oh! I had forgotten that; I wasn't thinking of it,” returned Halleck impatiently. “I was thinking of something different. I'm aware of disliking the man so much, that I should be willing to have greater harm than that happen to him,--the greatest, for what I know. Though I don't know, after all, that it would be harm. In another life, if there is one, he might start in a new direction; but that isn't imaginable of him here; he can only go from bad to worse; he can only make more and more sorrow and shame. Why shouldn't one wish him dead, when his death could do nothing but good?”

“I suppose you don't expect me to answer such a question seriously.”

“But suppose I did?”

“Then I should say that no man ever wished any such good as that, except from the worst motive; and the less one has to do with such questions, even as abstractions, the better.”

“You're right,” said Halleck. “But why do you call it an abstraction?”

“Because, in your case, nothing else is conceivable.”

“I told you I was willing the worst should happen to him.”

“And I didn't believe you.”

Halleck lay back in his chair, and laughed wearily. “I wish I could convince somebody of my wickedness. But it seems to be useless to try. I say things that ought to raise the roof, both to you here and to Olive at home, and you tell me you don't believe me, and she tells me that Mrs. Hubbard thinks me a saint. I suppose now, that if I took you by the button-hole and informed you confidentially that I had stopped long enough at 129 Clover Street to put Bartley Hubbard quietly out of the way, you wouldn't send for a policeman.”

“I should send for a doctor,” said Atherton.

“Such is the effect of character! And yet out of the fulness of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Out of the heart proceed all those unpleasant things enumerated in Scripture; but if you bottle them up there, and keep your label fresh, it's all that's required of you, by your fellow-beings, at least. What an amusing thing morality would be if it were not--otherwise. Atherton, do you believe that such a man as Christ ever lived?”

“I know you do, Halleck,” said Atherton.

“Well, that depends upon what you call _me_. It what I was--if my well Sunday-schooled youth--is I, I do. But if I, poising dubiously on the momentary present, between the past and future, am I, I'm afraid I don't. And yet it seems to me that I have a fairish sort of faith. I know that, if Christ never lived on earth, some One lived who imagined him, and that One must have been a God. The historical fact oughtn't to matter. Christ being imagined, can't you see what a comfort, what a rapture, it must have been to all these poor souls to come into such a presence and be looked through and through? The relief, the rest, the complete exposure of Judgment Day--”

“Every day is Judgment Day,” said Atherton.

“Yes, I know your doctrine. But I mean the Last Day. We ought to have something in anticipation of it, here, in our social system. Character is a superstition, a wretched fetish. Once a year wouldn't be too often to seize upon sinners whose blameless life has placed them above suspicion, and turn them inside out before the community, so as to show people how the smoke of the Pit had been quietly blackening their interior. That would destroy character as a cult.” He laughed again. “Well, this isn't business,--though it isn't pleasure, either, exactly. What I came for was to ask you something. I've finished at the Law School, and I'm just ready to begin here in the office with you. Don't you think it would be a good time for me to give up the law? Wait a moment!” he said, arresting in Atherton an impulse to speak. “We will take the decent surprise, the friendly demur, the conscientious scruple, for granted. Now, honestly, do you believe I've got the making of a lawyer in me?”

“I don't think you're very well, Halleck,” Atherton began.

“Ah, _you're_ a lawyer! You won't give me a direct answer!”

“I will if you wish,” retorted Atherton.

“Well.”

“Do you want to give it up?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. No man ever prospered in it yet who wanted to leave it. And now, since it's come to this, I'll tell you what I really _have_ thought, all along. I've thought that, if your heart was really set on the law, you would overcome your natural disadvantages for it; but if the time ever came when you were tired of it, your chance was lost: you never would make a lawyer. The question is, whether that time has come.”

“It has,” said Halleck.

“Then stop, here and now. You've wasted two years' time, but you can't get it back by throwing more after it. I shouldn't be your friend, I shouldn't be an honest man, if I let you go on with me, after this. A bad lawyer is such a very bad thing. This isn't altogether a surprise to me, but it will be a blow to your father,” he added, with a questioning look at Halleck, after a moment.

“It might have been, if I hadn't taken the precaution to deaden the place by a heavier blow first.”

“Ah! you've spoken to him already?”

“Yes, I've had it out in a sneaking, hypothetical way. But I could see that, so far as the law was concerned it was enough; it served. Not that he's consented to the other thing; there's where I shall need your help, Atherton. I'll tell you what my plan is.” He stated it bluntly at first; and then went over the ground and explained it fully, as he had done at home. Atherton listened without permitting any sign of surprise to escape him; but he listened with increasing gravity, as if he heard something not expressed in Halleck's slow, somewhat nasal monotone, and at the end he said, “I approve of any plan that will take you away for a while. Yes, I'll speak to your father about it.”

“If you think you need any conviction, I could use arguments to bring it about in you,” said Halleck, in recognition of his friend's ready concurrence.

“No, I don't need any arguments to convince me, I believe,” returned Atherton.

“Then I wish you'd say something to bring me round! Unless argument is used by somebody, the plan always produces a cold chill in me.” Halleck smiled, but Atherton kept a sober face. “I wish my Spanish American was here! What makes you think it's a good plan? Why should I disappoint my father's hopes again, and wring my mother's heart by proposing to leave them for any such uncertain good as this scheme promises?” He still challenged his friend with a jesting air, but a deeper and stronger feeling of some sort trembled in his voice.

Atherton would not reply to his emotion; he answered, with obvious evasion: “It's a good cause; in some sort--the best sort--it's a missionary work.”

“That's what my mother said to me.”

“And the change will be good for your health.”

“That's what I said to my mother!”

Atherton remained silent, waiting apparently for Halleck to continue, or to end the matter there, as he chose.

It was some moments before Halleck went on; “You would say, wouldn't you, that my first duty was to my own undertakings, and to those who had a right to expect their fulfilment from me? You would say that it was an enormity to tear myself away from the affection that clings to me in that home of mine, yonder, and that nothing but some supreme motive, could justify me? And yet you pretend to be satisfied with the reasons I've given you. You're not dealing honestly with me, Atherton!”

“No,” said Atherton, keeping the same scrutiny of Halleck's face which he had bent upon him throughout, but seeming now to hear his thoughts rather than his words. “I knew that you would have some supreme motive; and if I have pretended to approve your scheme on the reasons you have given me, I haven't dealt honestly with you. But perhaps a little dishonesty is the best thing under the circumstances. You haven't told me your real motive, and I can't ask it.”

“But you imagine it?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you imagine? That I have been disappointed in love? That I have been rejected? That the girl who had accepted me has broken her engagement? Something of that sort?” demanded Halleck, scornfully.

Atherton did not answer.

“Oh, how far you are from the truth! How blest and proud and happy I should be if it were the truth!” He looked into his friend's eyes, and added bitterly: “You're not curious, Atherton; you don't ask me what my trouble really is! Do you wish me to tell you what it is without asking?”

Atherton kept turning a pencil end for end between his fingers, while a compassionate smile slightly curved his lips. “No,” he said, finally, “I think you had better not tell me your trouble. I can believe very well without knowing it that it's serious--”

“Oh, tragic!” said Halleck, self-contemptuously.

“But I doubt if it would help you to tell it. I've too much respect for your good sense to suppose that it's an unreality; and I suspect that confession would only weaken you. If you told me, you would feel that you had made me a partner in your responsibility, and you would be tempted to leave the struggle to me. If you're battling with some temptation, some self-betrayal, you must make the fight alone: you would only turn to an ally to be flattered into disbelief of your danger or your culpability.”

Halleck assented with a slight nod to each point that the lawyer made. “You're right,” he said, “but a man of your subtlety can't pretend that he doesn't know what the trouble is in such a simple case as mine.”

“I don't know anything certainly,” returned Atherton, “and as far as I can I refuse to imagine anything. If your trouble concerns some one besides yourself,--and no great trouble can concern one man alone,--you've no right to tell it.”

“Another Daniel come to judgment!”

“You must trust to your principles, your self-respect, to keep you right--”

Halleck burst into a harsh laugh, and rose from his chair: “Ah, there you abdicate the judicial function! Principles, self-respect! Against _that_? Don't you suppose I was approached _through_ my principles and self-respect? Why, the Devil always takes a man on the very highest plane. He knows all about our principles and self-respect, and what they're made of. How the noblest and purest attributes of our nature, with which we trap each other so easily, must amuse him! Pity, rectitude, moral indignation, a blameless life,--he knows that they're all instruments for him. No, sir! No more principles and self-respect for me,--I've had enough of them; there's nothing for me but to run, and that's what I'm going to do. But you're quite right about the other thing, Atherton, and I give you a beggar's thanks for telling me that my trouble isn't mine alone, and I've no right to confide it to you. It is mine in the sense that no other soul is defiled with the knowledge of it, and I'm glad you saved me from the ghastly profanation, the sacrilege, of telling it. I was sneaking round for your sympathy; I did want somehow to shift the responsibility on to you; to get you--God help me!--to flatter me out of my wholesome fear and contempt of myself. Well! That's past, now, and--Good night!” He abruptly turned away from Atherton and swung himself on his cane toward the door.

Atherton took up his hat and coat. “I'll walk home with you,” he said.

“All right,” returned Halleck, listlessly.

“How soon shall you go?” asked the lawyer, when they were in the street.