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Updated: May 7, 2025
I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly began in a way to lead up to the fact. "Isabel," I said, "Tedham is out at last." I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse. "Is that what kept you!" she demanded, instantly. "Have you seen him?" "Yes," I admitted.
She ought not to escape it, even if she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to do." Tedham shook his head stubbornly. "She has borne her share, already, and I won't inflict my penalty on her innocence " "Innocence? It's because she is innocent that it must be inflicted upon her!
"Yes," he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause. "I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me." Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, "Won't you try?"
"You didn't say you would?" "I said most decidedly I wouldn't," I returned, and I recalled my severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it had given me at the time. "I told him that I had no business to interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to meddle with the course things had taken."
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.
This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it with the exact truth. "No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever about it." I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show of having to collect himself before he went on. "Then you think my daughter is with her?" "I didn't say that. I don't know anything about it."
Well, we had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event. There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth. I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room.
I did indeed remember Tedham's affection for his daughter, whom I remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him.
Put him behind a good horse, with a pocketful of some one else's money, in a handsome suit of clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft's in immediate prospect, and you couldn't see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved and wears his hair cut rather close." "Basil!" "Why do you object to the fact?
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.
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