CHAPTER XXXIII
But if in her heroic soul she was ready to pay, and to make him pay, at the price of public shame for her and her children, the full penalty of his misdeeds, it was not to be so. He was to escape the full measure of retribution, shielded by the accident of his class. Unknown to him, the tangled threads of his fate were being sorted in the great city, and the vengeance of society was being averted, so far, at least, as legal punishment was concerned. Everett Wheeler, once recovered from his disgust at the sentimental folly of the architect's confession at the inquest, had no mind to see his cousin on trial for manslaughter. His mood was invariably to settle things, to cover them up, to bury them! As has been said, he had political influence, enough to reach even to the district attorney's office, enough to close the mouth of the Chicago Buzzard, to quiet the snarls of the Thunderer. So the case against the men held to the Grand Jury for the hotel disaster was quietly dropped. The mayor put another man in Bloom's place as chief building inspector, and very soon things went merrily on in their old way. And that was the end of it all! The seventeen human beings who had lost their lives in the fire had not even pointed a moral by their agonizing death. For a few summer months the gaunt, smoke-blackened pit of ruins on the boulevard served to remind the passers-by of a grewsome tale. Then, by the beginning of the new year, in its place rose a splendid apartment building, faced with cut stone and trimmed with marble.
Wheeler notified the architect in a curt note that the case had been dismissed, and Jackson showed the letter to his wife.
"Thank God!" he exclaimed fervently, "that is the end. I shan't drag you into the mud any farther."
Helen looked up from the lawyer's letter with a troubled face. She had hardened herself to the coming trial, which she had fully expected. Now that it had been spared, all was not yet right to her scrupulous perception. A terrible wrong had been committed, a wrong to the poor souls who had lost their lives, a wrong, too, to the city and to society, making an evil pool of corruption. And in some mysterious way this had been covered up, hidden, and all was to go on as before! She had a primitive idea that all evil necessitated exact payment, and as long as this payment was deferred, so long was the day of light, of health, put off.
But the man, realizing more clearly than she the indirect penalties which his situation inevitably imposed, gave no further thought to the abstract question of justice. The outlook was bad enough as it was. He saw nothing before him in this city where he naturally belonged.
"What would you think of our moving to St. Louis?" he asked, a few days after he had received the lawyer's letter. "There is some sort of an opening there for me. Of course I had rather be in New York, but it is out of the question. It would take too long to get started. Or we might try Denver. I have done some work there, and it's a growing place."
"Do you think that we must leave Chicago?" she asked.
"Why!" he exclaimed, surprised that she should consider for a moment the possibility of their remaining where he had made such a failure of his life. "Do you want to stay here and be dropped by every soul you have known?"
"I don't care very much for that!"