“It’s all nonsense of Crowdie’s. Men are turned out of a club for cheating at cards, and that sort of thing. Besides, Jack’s popular with most of the men. I don’t believe you could get a committee to sit on his offences—not if he locked the oldest member up in the ice-chest, and threw the billiard-table out of the window. He says he has no friends—but it’s all bosh, you know—everybody likes him, except that doughy brother-in-law of mine!”
Katharine was momentarily comforted by Bright’s account of the matter, delivered in his familiar, uncompromising fashion. But she was very far from regaining her composure. She saw that Bright was purposely making light of the matter; and in the course of the silence, which lasted several minutes after he had finished speaking, it all looked worse than it had looked before she had known the exact truth.
She felt, too, an instinct of repulsion from Ralston, which she had never known, nor dreamed possible. Could he not have controlled himself a few hours longer? It was their wedding day. Twelve hours had not passed from the time when they had left the church together until he had been drunk—positively drunk, to the point of knocking down his best friend in such a place as a club. She could not deny the facts. Even Hamilton Bright, kind—more than kind, devoted—did not attempt to conceal the fact that Ralston had been what he called ‘lively.’ And if Bright could not try to make him out to have been sober, who could?
And they had been married that morning! If he had been sober—the word cut her like a whip—if he had been sober, they would at that very moment have been sitting together—planning their future—perhaps in that very corner.
She did not know all yet, either. The clock was striking twelve. It was about at that time that John Ralston was brought into his mother’s house by a couple of policemen, who had found his card-case in his pocket, and had the sense—with the hope of a handsome fee—to bring him home, insensible, stunned almost to death with the blow he had received.
They had waked him roughly, the conductor and the other man, who was really a prize fighter, at the end of the run, in front of the horse-car stables, and John had struck out before he was awake, as some excitable men do. The fight had followed as a matter of course, out in the snow. The professional had not meant to hurt him, but had lost his temper when John had reached him and cut his lip, and a right-handed counter had settled the matter—a heavy right-hander just under John’s left ear.
The policemen said they had picked him up out of a drunken brawl. According to them, everybody was drunk—Ralston, the prize fighter,—who had paid five dollars to be left in peace after the adventure,—the conductor, the driver and every living thing on the scene of action, including the wretched horses of the car.
There was a short account of the affair in the morning papers, but only one or two of them mentioned Ralston’s name.
Katharine had yet much to learn about the doings on her wedding day, when she suddenly announced her intention of going home before the ball was half over. Hester Crowdie took her, in her own carriage; and Mrs. Lauderdale and Crowdie stayed till the end.
Now against all this chain of evidence, including that of several men who had met John in Fifth Avenue about six o’clock, with no overcoat and his hat badly smashed, against evidence that would have hanged a man ten times over in a murder case, stood the plain fact, which nobody but Ralston knew, and which no one would ever believe—the plain fact that he had drunk nothing at all.