A Knight of the Nineteenth Century Part 16

"Yes," replied Mrs. Arnot, sadly, completing in thought her friend's unfinished sentence. "But I had no part in the act, and no knowledge of it until a short time since. I am now doing all I can to procure your son's speedy release. My husband's action has been perfectly legal, and we, who would temper justice with mercy, must do so in a legal way.

Permit me to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Melville. He can both advise us and carry out such arrangements as are necessary;" and Mrs.

Haldane saw that Mrs. Arnot was accompanied by a gentleman, whom in her distress she had not hitherto noticed.

The janitor now opened the door, and ushered them into a very plain apartment, used both as an office and reception-room. Mrs. Haldane was so overcome by her emotion that her friend led her to a chair, and continued her rea.s.suring words in a low voice designed for her ears alone:

"Mr. Melville is a lawyer, and knows how to manage these matters. You may trust him implicitly. I will give security for your son's future appearance, should it be necessary, and I am quite satisfied it will not be, as my husband has promised me that he will not prosecute if the money is refunded."

"I would have paid ten times the amount--anything rather than have suffered this public disgrace," sobbed the poor woman, who, true to her instincts and life-long habit of thought, dwelt more upon the consequent shame of her son's act than its moral character.

"Mr. Melville says he will give bail in his own name for me," resumed Mrs. Arnot, "as, of course, I do not wish to appear to be acting in opposition to my husband. Indeed, I am not, for he is willing that some such an arrangement should be made. He has very many in his employ, and feels that he must be governed by rigid rules. Mr. Melville a.s.sures me that he can speedily effect Egbert's release. Perhaps it will save you pain to go at once to our house and meet your son there."

"No," replied the mother, rising, "I wish to see him at once. I _do_ appreciate _your_ kindness, but I cannot go to the place which shelters your husband. I can never forgive him. Nor can I go to a hotel. I would rather stay in this prison until I can hide myself and my miserable son in our own home. Oh, how dark and dreadful are G.o.d's ways! To think that the boy that I had brought up in the Church, as it were, should show such unnatural depravity!" Then, stepping to the door, she said to the under-sheriff in waiting, "Please take me to my son at once, if possible."

"Would you like me to go with you?" asked Mrs. Arnot, gently.

"Yes, yes! for I may faint on the way. Oh, how differently this day is turning out from what I expected! I was in hopes that Egbert could meet me in a little trip to New York, and I find him in prison!"

CHAPTER XV

HALDANE'S RESOLVE

It was not in accordance with nature nor with Haldane's peculiar temperament that he should remain long under a stony paralysis of shame and despair. Though tall and manlike in appearance, he was not a man.

Boyish traits and impulses still lingered; indeed, they had been fostered and maintained longer than usual by a fond and indulgent mother. It was not an evidence of weakness, but rather a wholesome instinct of nature, that his thoughts should gradually find courage to go to that mother as his only source of comfort and help. She, at least, would not scorn him, and with her he might find a less dismal refuge than his narrow cell, should it be possible to escape imprisonment. If it were not, he was too young and unacquainted with misfortune not to long for a few kind words of comfort.

He did not even imagine that Mrs. Arnot, the wife of his employer, would come near him in his deep disgrace. Even the thought of her kindness and his requital of it now stung him to the quick, and he fairly writhed as he pictured to himself the scorn that must have been on Laura's face as she saw him on his way to prison like a common thief.

As he remembered how full of rich promise life was but a few days since, and how all had changed even more swiftly and unexpectedly than the grotesque events of a horrid dream, he bowed his head in his hands and sobbed like a grief-stricken child.

"O mother, mother," he groaned, "if I could only hear your voice and feel your touch, a little of this crushing weight might be lifted off my heart!"

Growing calmer after a time, he was able to consider his situation more connectedly, and he was about to summon the sheriff in charge of the prison, that he might telegraph his mother, when he heard her voice as, in the company of that official, she was seeking her way to him.

He shrank back in his cell. His heart beat violently as he heard the rustle of her dress. The sheriff unlocked the grated iron door which led to the long, narrow corridor into which the cells opened, and to which prisoners had access during the day.

"He's in that cell, ladies," said the officer's voice, and then, with commendable delicacy, withdrew, having first ordered the prisoners in his charge to their cells.

"Lean upon my arm," urged a gentle voice, which Haldane recognized as that of Mrs. Arnot.

"O, this is awful!" moaned the stricken woman; "this is more than _I_ can endure."

The p.r.o.noun she used threw a chill on the heart of her son, but when she tottered to the door of his cell he sprang forward with the low, appealing cry:

"Mother!"

But the poor gentlewoman was so overcome that she sank down on a bench by the door, and, with her face buried in her hands, as if to shut out a vision that would blast her, she rocked back and forth in anguish, as she groaned:

"O Egbert, Egbert! you have disgraced me, you have disgraced your sisters, you have disgraced yourself beyond remedy. O G.o.d! what have I done to merit this awful, this overwhelming disaster?"

With deep pain and solicitude Mrs. Arnot watched the young man's face as the light from the grated window fell upon it. The appeal that trembled in his voice had been more plainly manifest in his face, which had worn an eager and hopeful expression, and even suggested the spirit of the little child when in some painful emergency it turns to its first and natural protector.

But most marked was the change caused by the mother's lamentable want of tact and self-control, for that same face became stony and sullen.

Instead of showing a spirit which deep distress and crushing disaster had made almost childlike in its readiness to receive a mother's comfort once more, he suddenly became, in appearance, a hardened criminal.

Mrs. Arnot longed to undo by her kindness the evil which her friend was unwittingly causing, but could not come between mother and son. She stooped down, however, and whispered:

"Mrs. Haldane, speak kindly to your boy. He looked to you for sympathy.

Do not let him feel that you, like the world, are against him."

"O no," said Mrs. Haldane, her sobs ceasing somewhat, "I mean to do my duty by him. He shall always have a good home, but oh! what a blight and a shadow he has brought to that home! That I should have ever lived to see this day! O Egbert, Egbert! your sisters will have to live like nuns, for they can never even go out upon the street again; and to think that the finger of scorn should be pointed after you in the city where your father made our name so honorable!"

"It never shall be," said Haldane coldly. "You have only to leave me in prison to be rid of me a long time."

"Leave you, in prison!" exclaimed his mother; "I would as soon stay here myself. No; through Mrs. Arnot's kindness, arrangements are made for your release. I shall then take you to our miserable home as soon as possible."

"I am not going home."

"Now, this is too much! What will you do?"

"I shall remain in this city," he replied, speaking from an angry impulse. "It was here I fell and covered myself with shame, and I shall here fight my way back to the position I lost. The time shall come when you will no longer say I'm a disgrace to you and my sisters. My heart was breaking, and the first word you greet me with is 'disgrace'; and if I went home, disgrace would always be in your mind, if not upon your tongue. I should have the word and thought kept before me till I went mad. If I go home all my old acquaintances would sneer at me as a mean-spirited cur, whose best exploit was to get in jail, and when his mother obtained his release he could do nothing more manly than hide behind her ap.r.o.n the rest of his days. As far as I can judge, you and my sisters would have no better opinion of me. I have been a wicked fool, I admit, but I was not a deliberate thief. I did hope for a little comfort from you. But since all the world is against me, I'll face and fight the world. I have been dragged through these streets, the scorn of every one, and I will remain in this city until I compel the respect of its proudest citizen."

The moment he ceased his pa.s.sionate utterance, Mrs. Arnot said kindly and gravely:

"Egbert, you are mistaken. There was no scorn in my eyes, but rather deep pity and sorrow. While your course has been very wrong, you have no occasion to despair, and as long as you will try to become a true man you shall have my sympathy and friendship. You do not understand your mother. She loves you as truly as ever, and is willing to make any sacrifice for you. Only, her fuller knowledge of the world makes her realize more truly than you yet can the consequences of your act. The sudden shock has overwhelmed her. Her distress shows how deeply she is wounded, and you should try to comfort her by a lifetime of kindness."

"The best way I can comfort her is by deeds that will wipe out the memory of my disgrace; and," he continued, his impulsive, sanguine spirit kindling with the thought and prospect, "I will regain all and more than I have lost. The time shall come when neither she nor my sisters will have occasion to blush for me, nor to seclude themselves from the world because of their relation to me."

"I should think my heart was sufficiently crushed and broken already,"

Mrs. Haldane sobbed, "without your adding to its burden by charging me with being an unnatural mother. I cannot understand how a boy brought up as religiously as you have been can show such strange depravity. The idea that a child of mine could do anything which would bring him to such a place as this!"

His mother's words and manner seemed to exasperate her son beyond endurance, and he exclaimed pa.s.sionately:

"Well, curse it all! I am here. What's the use of harping on that any longer? Can't you listen when I say I want to retrieve myself? As to my religious bringing up, it never did me a particle of good. If you had whipped my infernal nonsense out of me, and made me mind when I was little--There, there, mother," he concluded more considerately, as she began to grow hysterical under his words, "do, for G.o.d's sake, be more composed! We can't help what has happened now. I'll either change the world's opinion of me, or else get out of it."

"How can I be composed when you talk in so dreadful a manner? You can't change the world's opinion. It never forgives and never forgets. It's the same as if you had said, I'll either do what is impossible or throw away my life!"

"My dear Mrs. Haldane," said Mrs. Arnot, gently but firmly, "your just and natural grief is such that you cannot now judge correctly and wisely concerning this matter. The emergency is so unexpected and so grave that neither you nor your son should form opinions or make resolves until there has been time for calmer thought. Let me take you home with me now, and as soon as Egbert is released he can join you there."

"No, Mrs. Arnot," said Haldane decidedly; "I shall never enter your parlor again until I can enter it as a gentleman--as one whom your other guests, should I meet them, would recognize as a gentleman. Your kindness is as great as it is unexpected, but I shall take no mean advantage of it."

"Well, then," said Mrs. Arnot with a sigh, "nothing can be gained by prolonging this painful interview. We are detaining Mr. Melville, and delaying Egbert's release. Come, Mrs. Haldane; I can take you to the private entrance of a quiet hotel, where you can be entirely secluded until you are ready to return home. Egbert can come there as soon as the needful legal forms are complied with."

"No," said the young man with his former decision, "mother and I must take leave of each other here. Mother wants no jail-birds calling on her at the hotel. When I have regained my social footing--when she is ready to take my arm and walk up Main street of this city--then she shall see me as often as she wishes. It was my own cursed folly that brought me to the gutter, and if mother will pay the price of my freedom, I will alone and unaided make my way back among the highest and proudest."

"I sincerely hope you may win such a position," said Mrs. Arnot gravely, "and it is not impossible for you to do so, though I wish you would make the attempt in a different spirit; but please remember that these considerations do not satisfy and comfort a mother's heart. You should think of all her past kindness; you should realize how deeply you have now wounded her, and strive with tenderness and patience to mitigate the blow."