LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West Virginians in New York, saying their brother assented to their agreement;and it now remained for Lapham to fulfil his part of it.
He was ludicrously far from able to do this; and unless he could get some extension of time from them, he must lose this chance, his only chance, to retrieve himself.
He spent the time in a desperate endeavour to raise the money, but he had not raised the half of it when the banks closed.
With shame in his heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted so haughtily, and laid his plan before him.
He could not bring himself to ask Bellingham's help, but he told him what he proposed to do. Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was an experiment, and that the price asked was enormous, unless a great success were morally certain. He advised delay, he advised prudence;he insisted that Lapham ought at least to go out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and works before he put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.
"That's all well enough," cried Lapham; "but if I don't clinch this offer within twenty-four hours, they'll withdraw it, and go into the market; and then where am I?""Go on and see them again," said Bellingham. "They can't be so peremptory as that with you. They must give you time to look at what they want to sell. If it turns out what you hope, then--I'll see what can be done.
But look into it thoroughly."
"Well!" cried Lapham, helplessly submitting. He took out his watch, and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four o'clock train. He hurried back to his office, and put together some papers preparatory to going, and despatched a note by his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he was starting for New York, and did not know just when he should get back.
The early spring day was raw and cold. As he went out through the office he saw the clerks at work with their street-coats and hats on; Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on her shoulders, and looked particularly comfortless as she operated her machine with her red fingers.
"What's up?" asked Lapham, stopping a moment.
"Seems to be something the matter with the steam,"she answered, with the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have to work for a living.
"Well, take your writer into my room. There's a fire in the stove there," said Lapham, passing out.
Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office.
She had passed the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of trial and left him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It astounded her that such a thing should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt.
But she had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the thing that had played her false;that she had kept her mind so long upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of roguery as the means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she owned her limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be right, and nothing else.
She admired and revered him for going beyond her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.
She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she wished that those days were back again. She saw Corey at his desk, and she could not bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham's room, and opening the door without knocking, shut it behind her.
Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating a typewriter.
She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not personally interesting to them.
It vexed the wife that any one else should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl's indifference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one corner, and Lapham's office coat, looking intensely like him to his wife's familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs. Lapham liked even less than the girl's good looks this domestication of her garments in her husband's office. She began to ask herself excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out of her unreasonableness.
"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?"she sharply asked of the girl.
"I couldn't say exactly," replied the girl, without looking round.
"Has he been out long?"
"I don't know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the clock, without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working her machine.
"Well, I can't wait any longer," said the wife abruptly.
