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CHAPTER XXVIII
Yea, it becomes a man
To cherish memory, where he had delight,
For kindness is the natural birth of kindness.
Whose soul records not the great debt of joy,
Is stamped forever an ignoble man.
Sophocles (Ajax).
As Rankin broke the news to Margaret – by degrees and very quietly – she showed but little sign of feeling. Her face whitened and she moved stiffly to the open window, where she could sit in the draught. As she made Rankin tell her the whole story she simply grew stony, while she sat with bloodless hands clinched together, as if she thus clutched at her soul to save it from the madness of a terrible grief.
Suddenly she interrupted him.
"Dismiss your cab," she said. "I will walk back with you part of the way."
When she turned toward him, the strained face was so white and the eyes so wide and expressionless that he became afraid.
"Perhaps you would rather be alone," said he, doubtful about letting her go into the street.
She seemed to divine what was in his mind, for she made him feel more at ease by a gentler tone:
"Alone? No, no! Anything but that! The walk will do me good."
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 passed 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-glass goblets and jugs of various sizes. After the jam was consumed the prize in glassware 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-glass butter-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 glassware, 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 passed by the bank directors, together with a notification that they had arranged with the bank solicitors, Messrs. Godlie, 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 assisted 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 passed 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 god 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 passed 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 compassion. There are some smiles, given for others, when grief has made thought for self unbearable, which nothing but a descent into hell and glorious rising again could produce.
CHAPTER XXIX
This is peace!
To conquer love of self and lust of life,
To tear deep-rooted passion 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 nobility 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 nobility 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 Godlie, 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 passes 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. Arrangements have been made not only with the railways, but also with the hotels for his commission on all profits, which will be paid to him if he lives, or, if not, to his family. I don't know that it should be necessarily looked upon as a suicidal speculation. I have examined the water a good many times, and am by no means certain that his safe passage is impossible, if he can keep on the surface and not get dragged under where the water seems to shoot downward. If he gets through, or even if he tries it and fails, he will prove himself as brave a man as ever lived."
"I think I will go," said Margaret, brightening up with her old love for daring. "It is not like going to a bullfight, and the excitement will be intense."
So they went off on the special, and when they arrived at the rapids, after descending the precipice in the hydraulic lift, they went along the path to the platform where the photographs are taken. This place was filled with seats, numbered and reserved, and Rankin's party were seated in the front row. No less than a hundred thousand people were watching the forces of the river at this time. They were noticing how the precipices gradually converged as they approached the rapids, and how apparent was the downward slope of the water as it rushed through the narrowed gorge. They were noticing how the descending current struck projections of fallen rock at the sides, causing back-waves to wash from each bank diagonally across the main volume of the river, and make a continual combat of waters in the middle of the stream. Here, the deep, irresistible flow of the main current charges into the midst of the battle raging between the lateral surges, and carries them off bodily, while they continue to fight and tear at each other as far as one can see down the river. It is a bewildering spectacle of immeasurable forces, giving the idea of thousands of white horses driven madly into a narrowing gorge, where, in the crush, hundreds are forced upward and ride along on the backs of the others, plunging and flinging their white crests high in the air and gnashing at each other as they go.
The worst spot of all is directly in front of the platform, where Rankin's party was sitting. They waited until the time at which Jackson was advertised to begin his swim, and then they grew impatient. Jack was standing on a wooden parapet near at hand waiting until the swimmer should appear around the bend far up the river, for they could not see him take to the water from the place where they were.
All at once, before the rest of the people near him could see anything, Jack called out: "There he is!" as he descried, with his sailor's eyes, two black specks on the water far away, up above the bridges.
Jackson and his dog had jumped out of a boat in the middle of the river, in the calm part half a mile up, and, as they swam down with the current under the bridges, the dense mass of people there admired the easy grace with which he swam, and remarked the whiteness of his skin. His dog, a huge creature, half Great Dane and half Newfoundland, swam in front of him, directed by his voice. Both of them could be seen to raise themselves once or twice, so that they could get a better view of the wild water in front of them. The dog recognized the danger, and for a moment turned toward the shore and barked; but his master raised his hand and directed him onward. Another moment, now, and the fight for life began, for reaching the shore was as impossible as flying to the moon.
The first back-wash that came to them was a small one, and they both passed through it, each receiving the water in the face. The next wash followed almost immediately, and they tried to swim over it, but it turned both man and dog over on their sides and spread them out at full length on the surface of the main current. The people on the suspension bridge could see that both received a terrible blow. They both seemed to dive under the next wave, and then the water became so turbulent and the speed of their passage so great that it was impossible to give a minute description of what happened.
Rankin's party and the multitude of spectators now watched what they could see in breathless silence. At times, as the swimmers approached, our party could see them hoisted in the air on the top of a wave, or ridge or upheaval of water. Most of the time they were lost to sight in the gulleys or, valleys, or else they were beneath the surface. It does not take long to go a few hundred yards at nineteen miles an hour, and in what scarcely seemed more than an instant the man, with the dog still in front of him, had come near them. What Jack noticed was that as the man here shook the water out of his eyes and raised himself, shoulders out, by "treading water," his skin was almost scarlet. This, alone told a tale of what he had gone through since the people on the bridges had remarked the whiteness of his skin.
He was now almost opposite them, and his face, set desperately, turned, during an instant in a quieter spot, toward the platform. Margaret gave a piercing shriek, and fell back into Rankin's arms. At the next half-moment a huge boiling mountain, foaming up against the current in which the swimmer's body floated, struck him a terrible blow, and threw the dog back on top of him. Both were engulfed. After a while the dog's head appeared again, but Geoffrey Hampstead was overwhelmed in the Bedlam of waters, whose foaming, raging madness battered out his life.
