The Quality of Mercy

by William Dean Howells

The Hilarys always straggled down to breakfast as they chose. When Matt was at home, his mother and he were usually first; then his father came, and Louise last. They took the Events, as many other people did, because with all its faults it was a thorough newspaper; and they maintained their self-respect by taking the Abstract. The morning that the defalcation came out, Matt sent and got all the other papers, which he had glanced through and talked over with his mother before his father joined them at nine o'clock.

Several of them had illustrations: likenesses of Northwick, and views of his house in Boston, and his house in Hatboro'; views of the company's Mills at Ponkwasset; views of the railroad wreck at Wellwater; but it was Pinney's masterpiece which really made Hilary sick. All the papers were atrocious, but that was loathsome. Yet there was really nothing more to blame in the attitude of the papers than in that of the directors, who gave the case to the detectives, and set the machinery of publicity at work. Both were acting quite within their rights, both were fulfilling an official duty. Hilary, however, had been forced against his grain into the position, almost, of Northwick's protector; he had suffered keenly from the falsity of this position, for no one despised the sort of man Northwick was more than he; but when you have suffered, even for a rogue, you begin to feel some kindness for him. All these blows fell upon his growing sympathy for the poor devil, as he called him. He got through the various accounts in the various papers, by broken efforts, taking them as if in successive shocks from these terrible particulars, which seemed to shower themselves upon him when he came in range of them, till he felt bruised and beaten all over.

"Well, at least, it's out, my dear," said his wife, who noted the final effect of his sufferings across the table, and saw him pause bewildered from the last paper he had dropped. "There's that comfort."

"Is that a comfort?" he asked, huskily.

"Why, yes, I think it is. The suspense is over, and now you can begin to pick yourself up."

"I suppose there's something in that." He kept looking at Matt, or rather, at the copy of the Abstract which Matt was hiding behind, and he said, "What have you got there, Matt?"

"Perhaps I'd better read it out," said Matt. "It seems to me most uncommonly good. I wonder who could have done it!"

"Suppose you do your wondering afterwards," said his father impatiently; and Matt began to read. The positions of the article were not such as Hilary could have taken, probably, if he had been in a different mood; its implications were, some of them, such as he must have decidedly refused; but the temper of the whole was so humane, so forbearing, so enlightened, that Hilary was in a glow of personal gratitude to the writer, for what he called his common decency, by the time the reading was over. "That is a very extraordinary article," he said, and he joined Matt in wondering who could have done it, with the usual effect in such cases.

"I wish," said Mrs. Hilary, "that every other newspaper could be kept from those poor things." She meant Northwick's daughters, and she added, "If they must know the facts, they couldn't be more mercifully told them."

"Why, that was what I was thinking, mother," said Matt. "But they can't be kept to this version, unhappily. The misery will have to come on them shapelessly, as all our miseries do. I don't know that the other papers are so bad—"