“I’ve had no wages for many months. Lie down.”
CHAPTER XVII
MRS. SWINTON GOES HOME
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.