Geoffrey Hamstead Part 45

The cab was dismissed while she put on her hat, and as they walked through the quiet streets toward the heart of the city, he went on with all the particulars, which she seemed determined to hear. Several times they met people who knew her and knew of her engagement to Hampstead, and they were surprised to see her walking with--of all men--Maurice Rankin. But she saw no one, gazing before her with the look which means madness if the mind be not diverted. Suddenly, as they had to cross one of the main arteries of the city, a sound fell upon Margaret's ear that made her stop and grasp Rankin by the arm. Then the cry came again--from a boy running toward them along the street:

"Special edition of the Evening News! All about Geoffrey Hampstead, the bank robber!"

For a moment her grasp came near tearing a piece out of Rankin's arm.

But this was only when the blow struck her. She stopped the boy and bought a paper. She gave him half a dollar and walked on.

"This will do to give them at home," she said simply. "I could not tell them myself."

But the blow was too much for her. To hear the name of the man she worshiped yelled through the streets as a bank robber's was more than she felt able to bear. She must get home now. Another experience of this kind, and something would happen.

"Good-by!" she said, as she stopped abruptly at the corner of a street.

Not a vestige of a tear had been seen in her eyes. "I will go home now.

You have been very kind. I forgive you for--"

She turned quickly, and Rankin stood and watched her as she pa.s.sed rapidly away.

No. 173 Tremaine Buildings had become slightly better furnished since the opening of this story. Between the time when he made the cruise in the Ideal and the events recorded in the preceding chapters, Rankin had contributed somewhat to his comforts in an inexpensive way. In order to buy his coal, which he did now with much satisfaction, he had still to practice the strictest economy. But he took some pleasure in his solitary existence. From time to time he bought different kinds of preserves sold in pressed-gla.s.s goblets and jugs of various sizes. After the jam was consumed the prize in gla.s.sware would be washed by Mrs.

Priest and added to his collection, and there was a keen sense of humor in him when he added each terrible utensil to his stock. "A poor thing--but mine own!" he would quote, as he bowed to an imaginary audience and pointed with apologetic pride to a hideous pressed-gla.s.s b.u.t.ter-bolt.

In buying packages of dusty, doctored, and detestable tea he acquired therewith a collection of gift-spoons of different sizes, and also knives, forks, and plates, which, if not tending to develop a taste for high art, were useful. At a certain "seven-cent store" he procured, for the prevailing price, articles in tinware, the utility of which was out of all proportion to the cost.

Thus, when he sat down of an evening and surveyed a packing-box filled with several sacks of coal, all paid for; when he viewed the collection of gla.s.sware, the "family plate," and the very desirable cutlery; when he gazed with pride upon his seven-cent treasures and his curtains of chintz at ten cents a mile; when he considered that all these were his very own, his sense of having possessions made him less communistic and more conservative. Primitively, a Conservative was a being who owned something, just as Darwin's chimpanzee in the "Zoo," who discovered how to break nuts with a stone and hid the stone, was a Tory; the other monkeys who stole it were necessarily Reformers.

About ten o'clock on the evening of the trial Rankin was sitting among his possessions sipping some "gift-spoon" tea. Around him were three evening papers and two special editions. The "startling developments"

and "unexpected changes" which had "transpired" at the Victoria Bank had made the special editions sell off like cheap peaches, and Rankin was enjoying the weakness--pardonable in youth and not unknown to maturity--of reading each paper's account of himself and the trial. They spoke of his "acuteness" and "foresight," and commented on his being the sole means of recovering the forty-eight thousand dollars. One paper must have jumped at a conclusion when it called him "a well-known and promising young lawyer--one of the rising men at the bar."

"The tide has turned," he said. "Twenty cents a day is not going to cover my total expenses after this. I feel it in my bones that the money will come pouring in now." He was mechanically filling a pipe when a rap at the door recalled him from his dream. A tall Scotchman, whom Rankin recognized as the messenger of the Victoria Bank, handed him a letter and then felt around for the stairs in the darkness, and descended backward, on his hands and knees, for fear of accidents.

A pleasing letter from the manager of the Victoria Bank inclosed one of the recovered thousand-dollar bills.

Rankin sat down. "I shall never," he said, with an air of resolve, "steal any more coal! And now I'll have a cigar, three for a quarter, and blow the expense!"

Two weeks afterward there came to him a copy of a resolution pa.s.sed by the bank directors, together with a notification that they had arranged with the bank solicitors, Messrs. G.o.dlie, Lobbyer, Dertewercke, and Toylor, to have him taken in as a junior partner.

Immediately after Geoffrey was sentenced, Jack Cresswell was, of course, discharged. A dozen hands were being held out to congratulate him, when Detective Dearborn drew him through a side door into an empty room, where they had a short talk about keeping the name of Nina Lindon from the public, and then they departed together for Tremaine Buildings in a cab, while the two valises in front looked, like their owner, none the better for their vicissitudes. Dearborn felt that little could be said to mend the trouble he had caused Jack, but he did all he could, and there was certainly nothing hard-hearted in the care with which the redoubtable detective a.s.sisted his former victim to bed. Mrs. Priest was summoned, also a doctor. Jack was found to be worse than he thought, and Patsey was ordered to remain within call in the next room, where he consumed cigars at twelve dollars the hundred throughout the night.

The next day Mrs. Mackintosh and Margaret came down in a cab to Jack's lonely quarters, and insisted upon his being moved to their house during his illness. While unable to go home to his parents at Halifax he was loath to give trouble to his friends, and made excuses, until he saw that Margaret really wished him to come, and divined that his coming might be a relief to her.

It was so. In the weeks that followed, whatever these two suffered in the darkness and solitude of the nights, during the day-time they were brave. The heart of each knew its own bitterness. In a short time Jack found the comfort of speech in telling Margaret many things. Unavoidably Geoffrey's name came up, for he was entangled in both their lives.

Little by little Jack's story came out, as he lay back weakly on his couch, until, warmed by Margaret's sympathy, he told her all about Nina and himself--so far as he knew the story--and in the presence of his manifold troubles, and at the thought of his suffering when he witnessed, as a captive, Nina's death, Margaret felt that she was in the presence of one who had known even greater grief than her own. This was good for her. After a while she was able to speak to Jack about Geoffrey, and this brought them more and more together.

When he got well, his breach of duty in going away without notice was overlooked, and he was taken back to his old post. There he worked on as the years rolled by. Country managerships were offered to him, and declined. He had nothing to make money for, and the only thing he really enjoyed was Margaret's society, in which he would talk about Nina and Geoffrey without restraint. For many years he remained ignorant that his marriage with Nina was, after all, for New York State a valid one, since marriage by simple contract, without religious ceremony, is sufficient in that State. He never dreamed Geoffrey had been indirectly the cause of his life's ruin, and always spoke of him as a man almost without blame. However unreasonable, there are, among all the faulty emotions, few more beautiful than a man's affection for a man. When it exists, it is the least exacting attachment of his life.

Margaret listened to his superlatives about Geoffrey. She listened; but as the years pa.s.sed on she grew wiser. When walking in the open fields, or perhaps beside the wide lake, an image would come to her in gladsome colors, in matchless beauty--a Greek G.o.d with floating hair and full of resolve and victory, and in her dreams she would see and talk with him, and would find him grave and thoughtful and tender, and all that a man could be. Then would come the rending of the heart. This was a thief who had decoyed his friend, and, good or bad, was lost to her.

And thus time pa.s.sed on. For two or three years she went nowhere. She tried going into society, after Geoffrey's sentence, thinking to obtain relief in change of thought, but the experiment was a failure. She found that she had not the elasticity of temperament which can doff care and don gayety as society demands. So she gave up the attempt for years, and then went again only at her mother's solicitation. She said she had her patients at the hospital, her studies with her father, her many books to read, her long walks with Jack and Maurice Rankin, and what more did she want?

She did not hear of Geoffrey. The six years of his imprisonment had dragged themselves into the past, and she supposed he was free again, if he had not died in the penitentiary. But nothing was heard of him, and thus the time rolled on, while Margaret's mother secretly wept to see her daughter's early bloom departing, while no hope of any happy married life seemed possible to her.

Grave, pleasant, studious, thoughtful, as the years rolled by, she went on with her hospital work. From the depths of the grief into which she was plunged, she could discern some truths that might have remained unknown if her life had continued sunny--just as at noonday from the bottom of a deep pit or well the stars above us can be seen. To her the bitterness of her life was medicinal. Speaking chemically, it was like the acid of the unripe apple acting upon the starch in it to make a sugar--thus to perfect a sweet maturity. She was one of the richly endowed women in whom sensitiveness and strength combine peculiarly for either superlative joy or sorrow, and hers was a grief which, for her, nothing but tending the bed of sickness seemed to mitigate. Many a bruised heart was healed, gladdened, and bewitched by the angel smile on the sweet firm, full lips which could quiver with compa.s.sion. There are some smiles, given for others, when grief has made thought for self unbearable, which nothing but a descent into h.e.l.l and glorious rising again could produce.

CHAPTER XXIX.

This is peace!

To conquer love of self and l.u.s.t of life, To tear deep-rooted pa.s.sion from the breast, To still the inward strife; For glory, to be lord of self;...

... For countless wealth, To lay up lasting treasure Of perfect service rendered, duties done In charity, soft speech, and stainless days;

These riches shall not fade away in life Nor any death dispraise.

(_Buddha's Sermon.--The Light of Asia._) ARNOLD.

Geoffrey Hampstead had come out of the penitentiary with his former hopes for life shattered. Margaret was lost to him. He came out without a tie on earth--a living man from whom all previous reasons for existence seemed to have been removed. For six years he had worked in the penitentiary with all the energy that was in him, in order to keep his thoughts from driving him mad. At one time all had been before him.

And now--Oh, the silent grinding of the teeth during the first two years of it! After that he grew quieter and became able to regard his life calmly. He learned how to suffer. To a large extent he ceased now to think about himself. In the lowest depths of mental misery self died.

Then, for the first time in his life, he was able to realize the extent of his wrongs to others. What now broke him down gradually was not, as at first, the bitterness of his own lost hopes, but the thought that the life of Margaret was wrecked--and by him, that the lives of others had been wrecked--and by him. This was what the penitentiary now consisted of. This was the penitentiary which would last for always.

When the period of his sentence had expired, he had gone to New York and obtained work with his old employers on Wall Street. But his mind was not in his occupation. With his energy, it was impossible to live with no definite end in view. Why plod along on microscopic savings, like a mere machine to be fed and to work? When mental anguish, for him the worst whip of retribution, had made thought for self so unbearable that at last it died, there arose in him, untarnished by selfishness, the n.o.bility which had always been occultly stamped upon him, and which in prison enabled him to protect himself, as it were, against madness, and to refuse to be unable to suffer--a n.o.bility able to realize the perfection of a life lived for others, which none can realize until first thought for self has been in some way killed. Rightly or wrongly, he had become convinced in years of anguished thought that with a continually aching heart may coexist an internal gladness that arises from the gift of self to others and makes the suffering not only bearable but even desirable--that this was altogether a mental phenomenon, such as memory, but one on which religions had been built, and that it was capable of making a heaven of earth and leading one, with the ecstasy of self-gift, even to crucifixion.

He determined to go to Paris to study medicine. For this, money was required, and he conceived a plan for making a small fortune suddenly.

If he failed, what then? The world would lose a helper. His employers, on being approached, saw that if proper contracts were made they were sure to get their money back, and supplied him with all he required for expenses.

Mr. Rankin, of the firm of G.o.dlie, Dertewercke, Toylor, and Rankin, had, for more than six years, shared with Jack Cresswell the old rooms "_vice_ Hampstead, on active service." All Geoffrey's old relics had been left untouched. He had sent word to have them sold, and Rankin, to satisfy him, had let him think they were sold and that the money they brought had been applied as directed. The money had been applied as directed; but it had come out of Rankin's little bank account, and so, until the time came when they could be handed over to Hampstead, the old trophies remained where they were after being insured for a sum which, for "old truck and rubbage only fit for a second-'and shop," seemed, to Mrs. Priest, suspiciously large.

Rankin had received from a client the disposal of several pa.s.ses on a special train that was to take some railway officials and their families to Niagara Falls to see the great swimmer, John Jackson, together with his dog, endeavor to swim the Whirlpool Rapids. Half the world was excited over this event, which had been advertised everywhere. While dining with Jack at the Mackintoshes on the Sunday previous to the event, Rankin proposed that Margaret should accompany Jack and him to see the trial made.

Margaret hesitated, but Rankin said: "Oh, you know, as far as the fellow himself is concerned, it will be hard to say how he is as he goes past.

You'll just see a head in the water for a moment, and then it will have vanished down the river."

"I don't suppose there will be much to see if the water takes him past at the rate of nineteen miles an hour," said Margaret.

"Just so. There won't be much to see. But we can have a pleasant day at the falls and give the abused hack-men a chance. The 'special' will have a number of ladies on board, and, if you like champagne, now's your chance. What is a special train without champagne?"

"Well, what do you say, mother?" asked Margaret.

Mrs. Mackintosh, to give her daughter an acceptable change and to get her out of her fixed ways, would have sent her to almost anything from balloon ascension to a church lottery.

"Do as you wish, my dear. I think I would like you to go. I do not see how it would be possible for a spectator to know whether the man was suffering or not in those waters, and, as for his sacrificing his life, why that is his own lookout. If he lives I suppose he will get well paid, will he not, Mr. Rankin?"

"They expect he will make about twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars.