Mrs. Swinton returned to the rector, who was waiting in the library, with set face and clenched hands, pacing up and down like a caged beast. The increased whiteness of his hair and the extreme pallor of his skin gave to his sorrow-shadowed eyes an extraordinary brilliancy. His lips moved incessantly as thoughts, surging in his brain, demanded physical utterance. At intervals, he would wring his hands and look upward appealingly, like a man struggling in the toils of a temptation too great to be mastered. A long period of worry and embarrassment had broken his spirit. He was fated with the first real calamity that had ever overtaken him. With money difficulties, he was familiar. They scarcely touched his conscience. But, in this matter of his son’s honor, the divergent roads of right and wrong were clearly defined; unhappily, he was not strong enough fearlessly to tread the path of virtue.

His wife’s arguments seemed unanswerable. Indeed, whenever she was near, he hopelessly surrendered himself to her guidance. He knew perfectly well that the only proper course for a man of God 191 was to go forth into the market-place and proclaim his son’s innocence, to the shame of his wife, of himself, and of his daughter. It was not a question of precise justice. It was a plain issue between God and the devil. But Mary had pursued the policy of throwing dust in his eyes, and led him blindly along the road where he was bound to sink deeper and deeper into the mire.

When the love of wife conflicts with the love of child, a father is between the horns of a dilemma. The woman was living; the boy dead. The arguments were overpoweringly plausible. Mrs. Swinton had her life to live through; whereas Dick’s trials were ended. And would a suspicious world believe he shared his wife’s plunder without knowing how it was obtained? In addition, Netty’s future would certainly be overshadowed to a cruel extent.

The arguments of the woman were, indeed, unanswerable: the misery of it was that the whole thing resolved itself into a simple question of right and wrong. As a clergyman of the church he could not countenance a lie, live a lie, and stand idly by while Herresford compelled the bank to refund the money stolen from them by his wife.

He had naturally argued the matter out with her, in love, in anger, in piteous appeal. It always came around to the same thing in the end—a compromise. The seven thousand dollars must be paid to the 192 miser, if it took the rest of their lives to raise it; if they starved, and denied themselves common necessities. And Herresford must say that he drew the checks for innocent Dick.

His wife agreed with him on these points; but on the question of confessing their sin—their joint sin it had become now—she was obdurate. She had yielded to his entreaties so far as to face the ordeal of an interview with her father, she agreed to the most painful economies; but further she would not go.

If Herresford consented to add lie to lie, and to exonerate Dick by acknowledging the checks, all might yet be well.

Now, when his wife came in, with flushed face and lips working in anger, he cried out, tremulously:

“Well, Mary?”

“It is useless, worse than useless!” she answered. “He is quite impossible, as I told you.”

“Then, he will not lend us the money?”

“No, indeed, no. Worse, John, he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“That I did it. He understood Dick well enough, in spite of his wicked abuse of him, and he had made him his heir. He accused me of altering the checks, and—I couldn’t deny it.”

“Mary! Mary! You have ruined all. He will denounce us.” 193

“No, he doesn’t intend to do that, John. He knows the torture we are enduring, and he wants it to go on. He means to let the bank lose the money.”

“Then, the burden of the guilt still rests on the shoulders of our dead son.”

“Oh, don’t, John—don’t put it like that! I’ve borne enough—I can’t bear much more. I think I’m going mad. My brain throbs, everything goes dim before my sight, and my heart leaps, and shooting pains—”

She tottered forward into her husband’s arms. He clasped her close, drawing her to him and pressing kisses on her cheeks.

“My darling, my darling, be strong. It is not ended yet.”

“Take me home, John—take me home!” she sobbed.

“No, I’ll see the old man myself.”

“John! John! It’ll do no good—I beseech you! I cannot trust you out of my sight. I never know what you may do or what you will say. I know it’s hard for you to go against your principles; but you mustn’t absolutely kill me. I should die, John, if you played traitor to me, your wife, and allowed me to be sent to jail.”

“Don’t Mary—don’t!” he groaned.

“When a man leaves his father and mother, he cleaves unto his wife: and, when I left my home, 194 John, I was faithful and true to you. It was for you that I stooped to the trick which I now realize was a crime which my father uses as a whip to lash me with. We must live it down, John. The bank people are rich. It won’t hurt them much—whereas confession would annihilate us.”

“The money must be paid back,” he cried resolutely, striking the air with his clenched fist, while he held her to him with the other arm.

“It’s impossible, John, impossible. We cannot pay back without explaining why.”

“We must atone—for Dick’s sake. No man shall say that our son robbed him of money without compensation from us, his parents. Let us go home, Mary, and begin from to-day. The rectory must be given up. It must be let furnished, and the servants dismissed. We must go into some cheap place.”

“Yes, let us go home, John. You’ll talk more reasonably there, and see things in another light.”

The man listened, and allowed himself to be led. This was as it had been always; but it could not go on forever. Deep down in John Swinton’s vacillating nature, there was the spirit of a martyr.