A CIRCLE IN THE WATER. (continued 2)

"My niece," Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, "came home this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her."

My wife said, "Oh, yes," and after a moment, a very painful moment, in which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.

"Mrs. March," she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic kind of embarrassment, "we have come—Fay wanted we should come and ask if you knew about her father—"

"Why, didn't he come to you last night?" my wife began.

"Yes, he did," said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, "But we thought—we thought—you might know where he was. And Fay—Did he tell you what he was going to do?"

"Yes," my wife gasped back.

The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate—conscience, soul—whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful innocence.

"Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!"

I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time, "Why, I've been expecting him to come in at any moment;" and this was true enough.

"I guess he's not very far off," said old Hasketh. "I don't believe but what he'll turn up." Within the comfort these words were outwardly intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man's nature, which was more to me than the explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted Tedham's decision, and he might very well have done this without impugning anything but the weakness of his will.

My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory of the case that could be openly urged. "Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn't you understand him so, my dear?"

I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, "Yes, certainly," and we began to reassure one another more and more. We talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did, that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old cockpit and shone on by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard his daughter saying, "I can't understand why he shouldn't have come to us, or should have put it off. He couldn't think I didn't wish to see him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him soon. "I don't know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"

"I don't say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting humility. "I'm sure there isn't any one in the whole world that I would bless the sight of half as much."

"I could have come before, if I'd known where he was; or, if I had only known, I might have been here Saturday!" She broke into a piteous lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn't—he couldn't—have thought I didn't want to see him!"

It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion; women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the best we could; and we don't dare to let her know that Tedham isn't coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried to make believe it might be well if he didn't; but she had to drop that; it set the girl wild. She hasn't got anything but the one idea: that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than Tedham did, and he's flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it's so. I'm afraid," Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, "that Mrs. Hasketh is going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up. I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can't be made to work, and I don't suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it's essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn't an accident in any particular, and if she's his daughter it's because she was meant to be, and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that's the way Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now."

A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why, Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.

The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever fully say.

VIII.

It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one evening some weeks later, and "It would be all very well," I philosophized, "if the dead came back at once, but if one came back after ten years, it would be difficult."

"It was worse than coming back from the dead," said my wife. "But I hope that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to be out of it, and I don't wish to see any of them ever again."

"Why, I don't know about that," I returned, and I began to laugh. "You know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?"

"What has he got to do with it?"

"Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent record—elsewhere—it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the actuary."

"Basil! You didn't allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?"

"No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax."

This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence against society.

His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous. But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself to accept him.

During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of further blackening her father's character (for so I understood her insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him for her sake.

They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience, an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle in the water.