this history, nor upon that of the days and weeks and months that followed, wringing the heart and all but crazing the brain of the wife who would not, in the darkest hours of her desolation, believe herself wilfully abandoned. But we have the record, unbroken and irrefragable, which shall not only right his victim, but shall bring yonder perjurer to justice."
The words had an iron weight; they fell like blows. Bartley did not stir; but Marcia moved uneasily in her chair, and a low pitiful murmur broke from behind her veil. Her father stopped again, panting, and his dry lips closed and parted several times before he could find his voice again. But at that sound of grief he partially recovered himself, and went on brokenly.
"I now ask this Court, for due cause, to set aside the default upon which judgment has been rendered against the defendant, and I shall then ask leave to file her cross-petition for divorce."
Marcia started half-way from her chair, and then fell back again; she looked round at Halleck as if for help, and hid her face in her hands. Her father cast a glance at her as if for her approval of this development of his plan.
"Then, may it please the Court, upon the rendition of judgment in our favor upon that petition—a result of which I have no more doubt than of my own existence—I shall demand under your law the indictment of yonder perjurer for his crime, and I shall await in security the sentence which shall consign him to a felon's cell in a felon's garb—"
Marcia flung herself upon her father's arm, outstretched toward Bartley. "No! No! No!" she cried, with deep, shuddering breaths, in a voice thick with horror. "Never! Let him go! I will not have it! I didn't understand! I never meant to harm him! Let him go! It is my cause, and I say—"
The old man's arm dropped; he fixed a ghastly, bewildered look upon his daughter, and fell forward across the table at which he stood. The judge started from his chair; the people leaped over the benches, and crushed about the Squire, who fetched his breath in convulsive gasps. "Keep back!" "Give him air!" "Open the window!" "Get a doctor!" cried those next him.
Even Bartley's counsel had joined the crowd about the Squire, from the midst of which broke the long, frightened wail of a child. This was Bartley's opportunity. When his counsel turned to look for him, and advise his withdrawal from a place where he could do no good, and where possibly he might come to harm, he found that his advice had been anticipated: Bartley's chair was vacant.
XLI
That night when Halleck had left the old man to the care of Marcia and Olive, for the time, a note was brought to him from Bartley's lawyer, begging the favor of a few moments' interview on very important business. It might be some offer of reparation or advance in Marcia's interest, and Halleck went with the bearer of the note. The lawyer met him hospitably at the door of his office. "How do you do, sir?" he said, shaking hands. Then he indicated a bulk withdrawn into a corner of the dimly-lighted room; the blinds were drawn, and he locked the door after Halleck's entrance. "Mr. Hubbard, whom I think you know," he added. "I'll just step into the next room, gentlemen, and will be subject to your call at any moment."
The bulk lifted itself and moved some paces toward Halleck; Bartley even raised his hand, with the vague expectation of taking Halleck's, but seeing no responsive gesture on his part, he waved a salutation and dropped it again to his side.
"How d' ye do, Halleck? Rather a secret, black, and midnight interview," he said jocosely. "But I couldn't very well manage it otherwise. I'm not just in the position to offer you the freedom of the city."
"What do you want, Hubbard?" asked Halleck, bluntly.
"How is the old Squire?"
"The doctor thinks he may rally from the shock."
"Paralysis?"
"Yes."
"I have spent the day in the 'tall timber,' as our friends out here say, communing with nature; and I've only just come into town since dark, so I hadn't any particulars." He paused, as if expecting that Halleck might give them, but upon his remaining silent, he resumed. "Of course, as the case now stands, I know very well that the law can't touch me. But I didn't know what the popular feeling might be. The Squire laid it on pretty hot, and he might have made it livelier for me than he intended: he isn't aware of the inflammable nature of the material out here." He gave a nervous chuckle. "I wanted to see you, Halleck, to tell you that I haven't forgotten that money I owe you, and that I mean to pay it all up, some time, yet. If it hadn't been for some expenses I've had lately,—doctor's bills, and so forth,—I haven't been very well, myself,"—he made a sort of involuntary appeal for Halleck's sympathy,—"and I've had to pay out a good deal of money,—I should be able to pay most of it now. As it is, I can only give you five hundred of it." He tugged his porte-monnaie with difficulty up the slope of his pantaloons. "That will leave me just three hundred to begin the world with; for of course I've got to clear out of here. And I'd got very comfortably settled after two years of pretty hard work at the printing business, and hard reading at the law. Well, it's all right. And I want to pay you this money, now, and I'll pay you the rest whenever I can. And I want you to tell Marcia that I did it. I always meant to do it."
"Hubbard," interrupted Halleck, "you don't owe me any money. Your father-in-law paid that debt two years ago. But you owe some one else a debt that no one can pay for you. We needn't waste words: what are you going to do to repair the wrong you have done the woman and the child—" He stopped; the effort had perhaps been too much.
Bartley saw his emotion, and in his benighted way he honored it. "Halleck, you are a good fellow. You are such a good fellow that you can't understand this thing. But it's played out. I felt badly about it myself, at one time; and if I hadn't been robbed of that money you lent me on my way here, I'd have gone back inside of forty-eight hours. I was sorry for Marcia; it almost broke my heart to think of the little one; but I knew they were in the hands of friends; and the more time I had to think it over, the more I was reconciled to what I had done. That was the only way out, for either of us. We had tried it for three years, and we couldn't make it go; we never could have made it go; we were incompatible. Don't you suppose I knew Marcia's good qualities? No one knows them better, or appreciates them more. You might think that I applied for this divorce because I had some one else in view. Not any more in mine at present! But I thought we ought to be free, both of us; and if our marriage had become a chain, that we ought to break it." Bartley paused, apparently to give these facts and reasons time to sink into Halleck's mind. "But there's one thing I should like to have you tell her, Halleck: she was wrong about that girl; I never had anything to do with her. Marcia will understand." Halleck made no reply, and Bartley resumed, in a burst of generosity, which marked his fall into the abyss as nothing else could have done. "Look here, Halleck! I can't marry again for two years. But as I understand the law, Marcia isn't bound in any way. I know that she always had a very high opinion of you, and that she thinks you are the best man in the world: why don't you fix it up with Marcia?"
Bartley was in effect driven into exile by the accidents of his suit for divorce which have been described. He was not in bodily danger after the first excitement passed off, if he was ever in bodily danger at all; but he could not reasonably hope to establish himself in a community which had witnessed such disagreeable facts concerning him; before which indeed he stood attainted of perjury, and only saved from the penalty of his crime by the refusal of his wife to press her case.
As soon as her father was strong enough to be removed, Marcia returned to the East with him, in the care of the friends who continued with them. They did not go back to Boston, but went directly to Equity, where
