The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester

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But the days passed, and though he was not able to bring himself to
leave Mount Hope, his purpose in its final aspect underwent no change.
He lived to himself, and his old haunts and his old friends saw nothing
of him. Evelyn Langham, whom he had known before she married his friend
Marshall, was fortunately absent from town. Her letters to him remained
unanswered; the last one he had burned unread. He was sick of the
devious crooked paths he had trodden; he might not be just the stuff of
which saints are made, but there was the hope in his heart of better
things than he had yet known.

At about the time Mr. Shrimplin was attacking his Thanksgiving turkey,
North, from his window, watched the leaden clouds that overhung the
housetops. From the frozen dirt of the unpaved streets the keen wind
whipped up scanty dust clouds, mingling them with sudden flurries of
fine snow. Save for the passing of an occasional pedestrian who breasted
the gale with lowered head, the Square was deserted. Staring down on it,
North drummed idly on the window-pane. What an unspeakable fool he had
been, and what a price his folly was costing him! As he stood there,
heavy-hearted and bitter in spirit, he saw Marshall Langham crossing the
Square in the direction of his office. He watched his friend's
wind-driven progress for a moment, then slipped into his overcoat and,
snatching up his hat, hurried from the room.

Langham, with Moxlow, his law partner, occupied two handsomely furnished
rooms on the first floor, of the one building in Mount Hope that was
distinctly an office building, since its sky-scraping five stories were
reached by an elevator. Here North found Langham--a man only three or
four years older than himself, tall, broad-shouldered, with an
oratorical air of distinction and a manner that proclaimed him the
leading young lawyer at the local bar.

He greeted North cordially, and the latter observed that his friend's
face was unusually flushed, and that beads of perspiration glistened on
his forehead, which he frequently wiped with a large linen handkerchief.

"What have you been doing with yourself, Jack?" he demanded, sliding his
chair back from the desk at which he was seated. "I haven't had a
glimpse of you in days."

"I have been keeping rather quiet."

"What's the matter? Liver out of whack?" Langham smiled complacently.

"Worse than that!" North rejoined moodily.

"That's saying a good deal? What is it, Jack?"

But North was not inclined to lay bare his heart; he doubted if Langham
could be made to comprehend any part of his suffering.

"I am getting down to my last dollar, Marsh. I don't know where the
money went, but it's gone," he finally said.

Langham nodded.

"You have certainly had your little time, Jack, and it's been a
perfectly good little time, too! What are you going to do when you are
cleaned out?"

"That's part of the puzzle, Marsh, that's the very hell and all of it."

"Well, you have had your fun--lots of it!" said Langham, swabbing his
face.

North noticed the embroidered initial in the corner of the handkerchief.

"Fun! Was it fun?" he demanded with sudden heat.

"You took it for fun. Personally I think it was a pretty fair
imitation."

"Yes, I took it for fun, or mistook it; that's the pity of it! I can
forgive myself for almost everything but having been a fool!"

"That's always a hard dose to swallow," agreed Langham. He was willing
to enter into his friend's mood.

"Have you ever tried to swallow it?" asked North.

"I can't say I have. Some of us haven't any business with a
conscience--our blood's too red. I've made up my mind that, while I may
be a man of moral impulses I am also a creature of purest accident. It's
the same with you, Jack. You are a pretty decent fellow down under the
skin; there's still the divine spark in you, though perhaps it doesn't
burn bright enough to warm the premises. But it's there, like a shaft of
light from a gem, a gem in the rough--though I believe I'm mixing my
metaphors."

"Why don't you say a pearl in the mire?"

"But that doesn't really take from your pearlship, though it may dim
your luster. No, Jack, the accidents have been to your morals instead of
your arms and legs. That's how I explain it in my own case, and it's
saved me many a bad quarter of an hour with myself. I know I'd be on
crutches if the vicissitudes of which I have been the victim could be
given physical expression."

"Marsh," said North soberly, "I am going away."

"You are going to do what, Jack?" demanded the lawyer.

"I am going to leave Mount Hope. I am going West for a bit, and after I
am gone I want you to sell the stuff in my rooms for me; have an auction
and get rid of every stick of the fool truck!"

"Why, what's wrong? Going away--when?"

"At once, to-morrow--to-night maybe. I don't know quite when, but very
soon. I want you to get rid of all my stuff, do you understand? Before
long I'll write you my address and you can send me whatever it brings. I
expect I'll need the money--"

"Why, you're crazy, man!" cried Langham.

North moved impatiently. He had not come to discuss the merit of his
plans.

"On the contrary I am having my first gleam of reason," he said briefly.

"Of course you know best, Jack," acquiesced Langham after a moment's
silence.

"You'll do what I ask of you, Marsh?"

"Oh, hang it, yes." He hesitated for an instant and then said 'frankly.
"You know I'm rather in your debt; I don't suppose five hundred dollars
would square what I have had from you first and last."

"I hope you won't mention it! Whenever it is quite convenient, that will
be soon enough."

"Thank you, Jack!" said Langham gratefully. "The fact is the pickings
here are pretty small."

Again the lawyer mopped his brow and again North moved impatiently.

"Don't say another word about it, Marsh," he repeated. "McBride has
agreed to take the last of my gas bonds off my hands; that will get me
away from here."

"How many have you left?" asked Langham curiously.

"Ten," said North.

Langham whistled.

"Do you mean to tell me you are down to that? Why, you told me once you
held a hundred!"

"So I did once, but it costs money to be the kind of fool I've been!
said North.

"Well, I suppose you are doing the sensible thing in getting out of
this. Have you any notion where you are going or what you'll do?"

North shook his head.

"Oh, you'll get into something!" the lawyer encouraged. "When shall you
see McBride?"

"This afternoon. Why?"

"I was going to say that I was just there with Atkinson. He and McBride
have been in a timber speculation, and Atkinson handed over three
thousand dollars in cash to the old man. I suppose he has banked it in
some heap of scrap-iron on the premises!" said Langham laughing.

"I think I shall go there now," resolved North. While he was speaking he
had moved to the door leading into the hail, and had opened it.

"Hold on, John!" said Langham, detaining him. "Evelyn is home. She came
quite unexpectedly to-day; you won't leave town without getting up to
the house to see her?"

"I think I shall," replied North hastily. "I much prefer not to say
good-by."

"Oh, nonsense!" cried Langham.

"No, Marsh, I don't intend to say good-by to any one!" North quietly
turned back into the room.

"I had intended having you up to the house to-night for a blow-out,"
urged Langham, but North shook his head. "You and Gilmore, Jack; and by
the way, this puts me in a nice hole! I have already asked Gilmore, and
he's coming. Now, how the devil am to get out of it? I can't spring him
alone on the family circle, and I don't want to hurt his feelings!"

"Call it off, Marsh; say I couldn't come; that's a good enough excuse to
give Gilmore. Why, that fellow's a common card-sharp, you can't ask
Evelyn to meet him!"

A slight noise in the hall caused both men to glance toward the door,
where they saw just beyond the threshold the swarthy-faced Gilmore.

There was a brief embarrassed silence, and then North nodded to the
new-comer, but the salutation was not returned.

"Well, good-by, Marsh!" he said, and turned to the door. As he brushed
past the gambler their eyes met for an instant, and in that instant
Gilmore's face turned livid with rage.

"I'll fix you for that, so help me God, I will!" he said, but North made
no answer. He passed down the hall, down the stairs, and out into the
street.

McBride's was directly opposite on the corner of High Street and the
Square; a mean two-story structure of frame, across the shabby front of
which hung a shabby creaking sign bearing witness that within might be
found: "Archibald McBride, Hardware and Cutlery, Implements and Bar
Iron." McBride had kept store on that corner time out of mind.

He was an austere unapproachable old man, having no relatives of whom
any one knew; with few friends and fewer intimates; a rich man,
according to the Mount Hope standard, and a miser according to the Mount
Hope gossip, with the miser's traditional suspicion of banks. It was
rumored that he had hidden away vast sums of money in his dingy store,
or in the closely-shuttered rooms above, where the odds and ends of the
merchandise in which he dealt had accumulated in rusty and neglected
heaps.

The old man wore an air of mystery, and this air of mystery extended to
his place of business. It was dark and dirty and ill-kept. On the
brightest summer day the sunlight stole vaguely in through grimy
cobwebbed windows. The dust of years had settled deep on unused shelves
and, in abandoned corners, and whole days were said to pass when no one
but the ancient merchant himself entered the building. Yet in spite of
the trade that had gone elsewhere he had grown steadily richer year by
year.

When North entered the store he found McBride busy with his books in his
small back office, a lean black cat asleep on the desk at his elbow.

"Good afternoon, John!" said the old merchant as he turned from his high
desk, removing as he did so a pair of heavy steel-rimmed spectacles,
that dominated a high-bridged nose which in turn dominated a wrinkled
and angular face.

"I thought I should find you here!" said North.

"You'll always find me here of a week-day," and he gave the young fellow
the fleeting suggestion of a smile. He had a liking for North, whose
father, years before, had been one of the few friends he had made in
Mount Hope.

The Norths had been among the town's earliest settlers, John's
grandfather having taken his place among the pioneers when Mount Hope
had little but its name to warrant its place on the map. At his death
Stephen, his only son, assumed the family headship, married, toiled,
thrived and finished his course following his wife to the old
burying-ground after a few lonely heart-breaking months, and leaving
John without kin, near or far, but with a good name and fair riches.

"I have brought you those gas bonds, Mr. McBride," said North, going at
once to the purpose of his visit.

The old merchant nodded understandingly.

"I hope you can arrange to let me have the money for them to-day,"
continued North.

"I think I can manage it, John. Atkinson and Judge Langham's boy, Marsh,
were just here and left a bit of cash. Maybe I can make up the sum."
While he was speaking, he had gone to the safe which stood open in one
corner of the small office.

In a moment he returned to the desk with a roll of bills in his hands
which he counted lovingly, placing them, one by one, in a neat pile
before him.

"You're still in the humor to go away?" he asked, when he had finished
counting the money.

"Never more so!" said North briefly.

"What do you think of young Langham, John? Will he ever be as sharp a
lawyer as the judge?"

"He's counted very brilliant," evaded North.

He rather dreaded the old merchant when his love of gossip got the
better of his usual reserve.

"I hadn't seen the fellow in months to speak to until to-day. He's a
clever talker and has a taking way with him, but if the half I hear is
true, he's going the devil's own gait. He's a pretty good friend to Andy
Gilmore, ain't he--that horse-racing, card-playing neighbor of yours?"
He pushed the bills toward North. "Run them over, John, and see if I
have made any mistake." He slipped off his glasses again and fell to
polishing them with his handkerchief. "It's all right, John?" he asked
at length.

"Yes, quite right, thank you." And North produced the bonds from an
inner pocket of his coat and handed them to McBride.

"So you are going to get out of this place, John? You're going West, you
say. What will you do there?" asked the old merchant as he carefully
examined the bonds.

"I don't know yet."

"I'm trusting you're through with your folly, John; that your crop of
wild oats is in the ground. You've made a grand sowing!"

"I have," answered North, laughing in spite of himself.

"You'll be empty-handed I'm thinking, but for the money you take from
here."'

"Very nearly so."

"How much have you gone through with, John, do you mind rightly?"

"Fifteen or twenty thousand dollars."

"A nice bit of money!" He shook his head and chuckled dryly. "It's
enough to make your father turn in his grave. He's said to me many a
time when he was a bit close in his dealings with me, 'I'm, saving for
my boy, Archie.' Eh? But it ain't always three generations from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves; you've made a short cut of it! But
you're going to do the wise thing, John; you've been a fool here, now go
away and be a man! Let all devilishness alone and work hard; that's the
antidote for idleness, and it's overmuch of idleness that's been your
ruin."

"I imagine it is," said North cheerfully.

"You'll be making a clever man out of yourself, John," McBride continued
graciously. "Not a flash in the pan like your friend Marshall Langham
yonder. It's drink will do for him the same as it did for his
grandfather, it's in the blood; but that was before your time."

"I've heard of him; a remarkably able lawyer, wasn't he?"

"Pooh! You'll hear a plenty of nonsense talked, and by very sensible
people, too, about most drunken fools! He was a spender and a
profligate, was old Marshall Langham; a tavern loafer, but a man of
parts. Yes, he had a bit of a brain, when he was sober and of a mind to
use it."

One would scarcely have supposed that Archibald McBride, silent,
taciturn, money-loving, possessed the taste for scandal that North knew
he did possess. The old merchant continued garrulously.

"They are a bad lot, John, those Langhams, but it took the smartest one
of the whole tribe to get the better of me. I never told you that
before, did I? It was old Marshall himself, and he flattered me into
loaning him a matter of a hundred dollars once; I guess I have his note
somewhere yet. But I swore then I'd have no more dealings with any of
them, and I'm likely to keep my word as long as I keep my senses. It's
the little things that prick the skin; that make a man bitter. I suppose
the judge's boy has had his hand in your pocket? He looks like a man
who'd be free enough with another's purse."

But North shook his head.

"No, no, I have only myself to blame," he said.

"What do you hear of his wife? How's the marriage turning out?" and he
shot the young fellow a shrewd questioning glance.

"I know nothing about it," replied North, coloring slightly.

"She'll hardly be publishing to the world that she's married a drunken
profligate--"

This did not seem to North to call for an answer, and he attempted none.
He turned and moved toward the front of the store, followed by the old
merchant. At the door he paused.

"Thank you for your kindness, Mr. McBride!"

"It was no kindness, just a matter of business" said McBride hastily.
"I'm no philanthropist, John, but just a plain man of business who'll
drive a close bargain if he can."

"At any rate, I'm going to thank you," insisted North, smiling
pleasantly. "Good-by," and he extended his hand, which the old merchant
took.

"Good-by, and good luck to you, John, and you might drop me a line now
and then just to say how you get on."

"I will. Good-by!"

"I know you'll succeed, John. A bit of application, a bit of necessity
to spur you on, and we'll be proud of you yet!"

North laughed as he opened the door and stepped out; and Archibald
McBride, looking through his dingy show-windows, watched him until he
disappeared down the street; then he turned and reentered his office.

Meanwhile North hurried away with the remnant of his little fortune in
his pocket. Five minutes' walk brought him to the building that had
sheltered him for the last few years. He climbed the stairs and entered
the long hail above. He paused, key in hand, before his door, when he
heard behind him a light footfall on the uncarpeted floor and the swish
of a woman's skirts. As he turned abruptly, the woman who had evidently
followed him up from the street, came swiftly down the hall toward him.

"Jack!" she said, when she was quite near.

The short winter's day had brought an early twilight to the place, and
the woman was closely veiled, but the moment she spoke North recognized
her, for there was something in the mellow full-throated quality of her
speech which belonged only to one voice that he knew.

"Mrs. Langham!--Evelyn!" he exclaimed, starting back in dismay.

"Hush, Jack, you needn't call it from the housetops!" As she spoke she
swept aside her veil and he saw her face, a superlatively pretty face
with scarlet smiling lips and dark luminous eyes that were smiling, too.

"Do you want to see me, Evelyn?" he asked awkwardly.

But she was neither awkward nor embarrassed; she was still smiling up
into his face with reckless eyes and brilliant lips. She pointed to the
door with her small gloved hand.

"Open it, Jack!" she commanded.

For a moment he hesitated. She was the one person he did not wish to
see, least of all did he wish to see her there. She was not nicely
discreet, as he well knew. She did many things that were not wise, that
were, indeed, frankly imprudent. But clearly they could not stand there
in the hallway. Gilmore or some of Gilmore's friends might come up the
stairs at any moment. Langham himself might be of these.

Something of all this passed through North's mind as he stood there
hesitating. Then he unlocked the door, and standing aside, motioned her
to precede him into the room.

This room, the largest of several, he occupied, was his parlor. On
entering it he closed the door after him, and drew forward a chair for
Evelyn, but he did not himself sit down, nor did he remove his overcoat.

He had known Evelyn all his life, they had played together as children;
more than this, though now he would have been quite willing to forget
the whole episode and even more than willing that she should forget it,
there had been a time when he had moped in wretched melancholy because
of what he had then considered her utter fickleness. Shortly after this
he had been sent East to college and had borne the separation with a
fortitude that had rather surprised him when he recalled how bitter a
thing her heartlessness had seemed.

When they met again he had found her more alluring than ever, but more
devoted to her pleasures also; and then Marshall Langham had come into
her life. North had divined that the course of their love-making was far
from smooth, for Langham's temper was high and his will arbitrary, nor
was he one to bear meekly the crosses she laid on him, crosses which
other men had borne in smiling uncomplaint, reasoning no doubt, that it
was unwise to take her favors too seriously; that as they were easily
achieved they were quite as easily forfeited. But Langham was not like
the other men with whom she had amused herself. He was not only older
and more brilliant, but was giving every indication that his
professional success would be solid and substantial. Evelyn's father had
championed his cause, and in the end she had married him.

In the five years that had elapsed since then, her romance had taken its
place with the accepted things of life, and she revenged herself on
Langham, for what she had come to consider his unreasonable exactions,
by her recklessness, by her thirst for pleasure, and above all by her
extravagance.

Through all the vicissitudes of her married life, the smallest part of
which he only guessed, North had seen much of Evelyn. There was a daring
dangerous recklessness in her mood that he had sensed and understood and
to which he had made quick response. He knew that she was none too happy
with Langham, and although he had been conscious of no wish to wrong the
husband he had never paused to consider the outcome of his intimacy with
the wife.

Evelyn was the first to break the silence.

"You wonder why I came here, don't you, Jack?" she said.

"You should never have done it!" he replied quickly.

"What about my letters, why didn't you answer them?" she demanded. "I
hadn't one word from you in weeks. It quite spoiled my trip East. What
was I to think? And then you sent me just a line saying you were leaving
Mount Hope--" she drew in her breath sharply. There was a brief silence.
"Why?" she asked at length.

"It is better that I should," he answered awkwardly.

He felt a sudden remorseful tenderness for her; he wished that she might
have divined the change that had come over him; even how worthless a
thing his devotion had been, the utter selfishness of it.

"Why is it better?" she asked. He was near enough for her to put out a
small hand and rest it on his arm. "Jack, have I done anything to make
you hate me? Don't you care any longer for me?"

"I care a great deal, Evelyn. I want you to think the best of me."

"But why do you go? And when do you think of going, Jack?" The hand that
she had rested there a moment before, left his arm and dropped at her
side.

"I don't know yet, my plans are very uncertain. I am quite at the end of
my money. I have been a good deal of a fool, Evelyn."

Something in his manner restrained her, she was not so sure as she had
been of her hold on him. She looked up appealingly into his face, the
smile had left her lips and her eyes were sad, but he mistrusted the
genuineness of this swift change of mood, certainly its permanence.

"What will there be left for me, Jack, when you go? I thought--I
thought--" her full lips quivered.

She was realizing that this separation which her imagination had already
invested with a tragic significance, meant much less to him than she
believed it would mean to her; more than this, the cruel suspicion was
certifying itself that in her absence from Mount Hope, North had
undergone some strange transformation; was no longer the reckless,
dissipated, young fellow who for months had been as her very shadow.

"I am going to-night, Evelyn," he said with sudden determination.

She gave a half smothered cry.

"To-night! To-night!" she repeated.

He changed his position uncomfortably.

"I am at the end of my string, Evelyn," he said slowly.

"I--I shall miss you dreadfully, Jack! You know I am frightfully
unhappy; what will it be when you go? Marsh has made a perfect wreck of
my life!"

"Nonsense, Evelyn!" he replied bruskly. "You must be careful what you
say to me!"

"I haven't been careful before!" she asserted.

He bit his lips. She went swiftly on.

"I have told you everything! I don't care what happens to me--you know I
don't, Jack! I am deadly desperately tired!" She paused, then she cried
vehemently. "One endures a situation as long as one can, but there comes
a time when it is impossible to go on with the falsehood any longer, and
I have reached that time! It is my life, my happiness that are at
stake!"

"Sometimes it is better to do without happiness," he philosophized.

"That is silly, Jack, no one believes that sort of thing any more; but
it is good to teach to women and children, it saves a lot of bother, I
suppose. But men take their happiness regardless of the rights of
others!"

"Not always," he said.

"Yes, always!" she insisted.

"But you knew what Marsh was before you married him."

"It's a woman's vanity to believe she can reform, can control a man."
She glanced at him furtively. What had happened to change him? Always
until now he had responded to the recklessness of her mood, he had
seemed to understand her without the need of words. Her brows met in an
angry frown. Was he a coward? Did he fear Marshall Langham? Once more
she rested her hand on his arm. "Jack, dear Jack, are _you_ going to
fail me, too?"

"What would you have me say or do, Evelyn?" he demanded impatiently.

She regarded him sadly.

"What has made you change, Jack? What is it; what have I done? Why did
you not answer my letters? Why did you not come to see me?"

"I only learned that you were in town this afternoon," he said.

"Yes, but you had no intention of coming, I know you hadn't! You would
have left Mount Hope without even a good-by to me!"

"It is hard enough to have to go, Evelyn!"

"It isn't that, Jack. What have I done? How have I displeased you?"

"You haven't displeased me, Evelyn," he faltered.

"Then why have you treated me as you have?"

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