The Quality of Mercy Part 13

"Oh!" The man disappeared, and after another interval Adeline came in.

She showed the trepidation she felt at finding herself in the presence of an interviewer.

"Will you sit down?" she said, timidly, and she glanced at the card which she had brought back this time. It bore the name of Lorenzo A.

Pinney, and in the left hand corner the words _Representing the Boston Events_. Mr. Pinney made haste to rea.s.sure her by a very respectful and business-like straightforwardness of manner; he did not forbid it a certain shade of authority.

"I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Northwick. I hoped to have some conversation with you in regard to this--this rumor--accident. Can you tell me just when Mr. Northwick left home?"

"He went up to the Mills, yesterday morning, quite early," said Adeline.

She was in the rise of hope which she and Suzette both felt from the mere fact that Matt Hilary was on the way to hunt the horrible rumor to its source; it seemed to her that he must extinguish it there. She wanted to tell this friendly-looking reporter so; but she would not do this without Suzette's authority. Suzette had been scolding her for not telling her what was in the paper as soon as she read it in the morning; and they were both so far respited for the moment from their fear, as to have had some words back and forth about the propriety of seeing this reporter at all. Adeline was on her most prudent behavior.

"Did you expect him back soon when he left?" Pinney asked respectfully.

"Oh, no; he said he wouldn't be back for some days."

"It's several hours to Ponkwa.s.set, I believe?" suggested Pinney.

"Yes, three or four. There _is_ one train, at half-past-twelve, I think," said Miss Northwick, with a glance at the clock, "that takes you there in three hours."

"The early train doesn't connect right through, then?"

"No; my father would have to wait over at Springfield. He doesn't often take the early train; and so we thought, when we found he wasn't at the Mills, that he had stopped over a day at Springfield to buy some horses from a farmer there. But we've just heard that he didn't. He may have run down to New York; he often has business there. We don't place any reliance on that story"--she gasped the rest out--"about--that accident."

"Of course not," said Pinney with real sympathy. "It's just one of those flying rumors--they get the names all mixed up, those country operators."

"They spelled the name two ways in different papers," said Adeline.

"Father had no earthly business up that way; and he always telegraphs."

"I believe the Mills are on the line of the Union and Dominion Road, are they not?" Pinney fell into the formal style of his printed questionings.

"Yes, they are. Father could get the Northern express at Springfield, and drive over from Ponkwa.s.set Junction; the express doesn't stop at the Falls."

"I see. Well, I won't trouble you any farther, Miss Northwick. I hope you'll find out it's all a mistake about--"

"Oh, I know it is!" said Adeline. "A gentleman--a friend of ours--has just gone up to Wellwater to see about it."

"Oh, well, that's good," said Pinney. "Then you'll soon have good news.

I suppose you've telegraphed?"

"We couldn't get anything by telegraph. That is the reason he went."

It seemed to Pinney that she wished to tell him who went; but she did not tell him; and after waiting for a moment in vain, he rose and said, "Well, I must be getting back to Boston. I should have been up here to see your father about these labor troubles night before last, if I'd taken my wife's advice. I always miss it when I don't," he said, smiling.

There is no reason why a man should acquire merit with other women by seeming subject to his wife or dependent upon her; but he does. They take it as a sort of tribute to themselves, or to the abstract woman; their respect for that man rises; they begin to honor him; their hearts warm to him. Pinney's devotion to his wife had already been of great use to him, on several occasions, in creating an atmosphere of trust about him. He really could not keep her out of his talk for more than five minutes at a time; all topics led up to her sooner or later.

When he now rose to go, Miss Northwick said, "I'm sorry my father isn't at home, and I'm sorry I can't give you any information about the troubles."

"Oh, I shall go to the Mills, to-morrow," he interrupted cheerily. Her relenting emboldened him to say, "You must have a beautiful place, here, in summer, Miss Northwick."

"I like it all times of the year," she answered. "We've all been enjoying the winter so much; it's the first we've spent here for a long time." She felt a strange pleasure in saying this; her reference to their family life seemed to rea.s.sure her of its unbroken continuity, and to warrant her father's safety.

"Yes," said Pinney, "I knew you had let your house in town. I think my wife would feel about it just as you do; she's a great person for the country, and if it wasn't for my work on the paper, I guess I sh'd have to live there."

Miss Northwick took a ma.s.s of heavy-headed jacqueminot roses from the vase where they drooped above the mantel, and wrapping them in a paper from the desk, stiffly offered them to Pinney. "Won't you carry these to your wife?" she said. This was not only a recognition of Pinney's worth in being so fond of his wife, but a vague attempt at propitiation. She thought it might somehow soften the heart of the interviewer in him, and keep him from putting anything in the paper about her. She was afraid to ask him not to do so.

"Oh, thank you," said Pinney. "I didn't mean to--it's very kind of you--I a.s.sure you." He felt very queer to be remanded to the purely human basis in relation to these people, and he made haste to get away from that interview. He had nothing to blame himself for, and yet he now suddenly somehow felt to blame. In the light of the defaulter's home life, Northwick appeared his victim. Pinney was not going to punish him, he was merely going to publish him: but all the same, for that moment, it seemed to him that he was Northwick's persecutor, and was hunting him down, running him to earth. He wished that poor old girl had not given him those flowers; he did not feel that he could take them to his wife; on the way back to the station he stepped aside from the road and dropped them into the deep snow.

His wife met him at the door of their flat, eager to know what success he had; and at sight of her his spirits rose again, and he gave her an enthusiastic synopsis of what he had done.

She flung herself on his knees, where he sat, and embraced him. "Ren, you've done splendidly! And I know you'll beat the _Abstract_ clear out of sight. Oh, Ren, Ren!" She threw her arms round his neck again, and the happy tears started to her eyes. "This will give you any place on the paper you choose to ask for! Oh, I'm the happiest girl in the world."

Pinney gave her a joyful hug. "Yes, it's all right. There are ninety-nine chances to one that he was going to Canada. There's a big default, running up into the hundred thousands, and they gave him a chance to make up his shortage--it's the old story. I've got just the setting I wanted for my facts, and now, as soon as Manton gives us the word to go ahead--"

"Wait till Manton gives the word!" cried Mrs. Pinney. "Well, you shall do no such thing, Ren. We won't wait a minute."

Pinney broke out into a laugh, and gave her another hug for her enthusiasm, and explained, between laughing at her and kissing her, why he had to wait; that if he used the matter before the detective authorized him, it would be the last tip he would ever get from Manton.

"We shan't lose anything. I'm going to commence writing it out, now. I'm going to make it a work of art. Now, you go and get me some coffee, Hat.

There isn't going to be any let up on this till it's all blocked out, any way; and I'm going to leave mighty few places to fill in, I can tell you." He pulled off his coat, and sat down at his desk.

His wife stopped him. "You'd better come out into the kitchen, and work on the table there. It's bigger than this desk."

"Don't know but I had," said Pinney. He gathered up his work and followed her out into the cosy little kitchen, where she cooked their simple meals, and they ate them. "Been living on tea since I been gone?"

He pulled open the refrigerator built into the wall, and glanced into it. "Last night's dinner all there yet!"

"You know I don't care to eat when you're away, Ren," she said, with a pathetic little mouth.

Pinney kissed her and then he sat down to his work again; and when he was tired with writing, his wife took the pen and wrote from his dictation. As they wrought on, they lost the sense, if they ever had it, of a fellow creature inside of the figure of a spectacular defaulter which grew from their hands; and they enjoyed the impersonality which enables us to judge and sentence one another in this world, and to do justice, as we say. It is true that Pinney, having seen Northwick's home, and faced his elderly, invalid daughter, was moved to use him with a leniency which he would not otherwise have felt. He recognized a merit in this forbearance of his, and once, towards the end of his work, when he was taking a little rest, he said: "Reporters get as much abuse as plumbers; but if people only knew what we kept back, perhaps they would sing a different tune. Of course, it's a temptation to describe his daughter, poor old thing, and give the interview in full, but I don't quite like to. I've got to cut it down to the fact that she evidently hadn't the least idea of the defalcation, or why he was on the way to Canada. Might work a little pathos in with that, but I guess I mustn't!"

His wife pushed the ma.n.u.script away from her, and flung down the pen.

"Well, Ren, if you go on talking in that way, you'll take the pleasure out of it for _me_; I can tell you that much. If I get to thinking of his family, I can't help you any more."

"Pshaw!" said Pinney. "The facts have got to come out, any way, and I guess they won't be handled half as mercifully anywhere else as I shall handle 'em." He put his arms round her, and pulled her tight up to him.

"Your tender-heartedness is going to be the ruin of me yet, Hat. If it hadn't been for thinking how you'd have felt, I should gone right up to Wellwater, and looked up that accident, myself, on the ground. But I knew you'd go all to pieces, if I wasn't back at the time I said, and so I didn't go."

"Oh, what a story!" said the young wife, fondly, with her adoring eyes upon him. "I shouldn't have cared, I guess, if you'd never come back."

"Shouldn't you? How many per cent of that am I going to believe?" he asked, and he drew her to him again in a rapture with her pretty looks, and the love he saw in them.

Pinney was a handsome little fellow himself, with a gay give-and-take air that had always served him well with women, and that, as his wife often told him, had made her determine to have him the first time she saw him.

This was at the opening of the Promontory House, two summers before, when Pinney was a.s.signed to write the affair up for the _Events_. She had got her first place as operator in the new hotel; and he brought in a despatch for her to send to Boston just as she was going to shut up the office for the night, and go in to see the dancing in the main dining-room, and perhaps be asked to dance herself by some of the clerks.

At the sound of a pencil tapping on the ledge of the little window in the cast-iron filagree wall of her den, she turned quickly round ready to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes, and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged before the summer was over. They had never yet tired of talking about that first meeting, or of talking about themselves and each other in any aspect.

They found out, as soon as they were engaged, and that sort of social splendor which young people wear to each other's eyes had pa.s.sed, that they were both rather simple and harmless folks, and they began to value each other as being good. This tendency only grew upon them with the greater intimacy of marriage. The chief reason for thinking that they were good was that they loved each other so much; she knew that he was good because he loved her; and he believed that he must have a great deal of good in him, if such a girl loved him so much. They thought it a virtue to exist solely for one another as they did; their mutual devotion seemed to them a form of unselfishness. They felt it a great merit to be frugal and industrious that they might prosper; they prospered solely to their own advantage, but the advantage of persons so deserving through their frugality and industry seemed a kind of altruism; it kept them in constant good humor with themselves, and content with each other. They had risked a great deal in getting married on Pinney's small salary, but apparently their courage had been rewarded, and they were not finally without the sense that their happiness had been achieved somehow in the public interest.

XV.