"How about the business? People coming to their senses?"
"Not very fast," Dick admitted. "Of course it's a little soon."
After dinner at the Wheelers', when Walter Wheeler had gone to a vestry
meeting, Bassett delivered himself to Margaret of a highly indignant
harangue on the situation in general.
"That's how I see it," he finished. "He's done a fine thing. A finer
thing by a damned sight than I'd do, or any of this town. He's given up
money enough to pay the national debt--or nearly. If he'd come back
with it, as Judson Clark, they wouldn't have cared a hang for the past.
They'd have licked his boots. It makes me sick."
He turned on her.
"You too, I think, Mrs. Wheeler. I'm not attacking you on that score;
it's human nature. But it's the truth."
"Perhaps. I don't know."
"They'll drive him to doing it yet. He came back to make a place for
himself again, like a man. Not what he had, but what he was. But they'll
drive him away, mark my words."
Later on, but more gently, he introduced the subject of Elizabeth.
"You can't get away from this, Mrs. Wheeler. So long as she stands off,
and you behind her, the town is going to take her side. She doesn't know
it, but that's how it stands. It all hangs on her. If he wasn't the man
he is, I'd say his salvation hangs on her. I don't mean she ought to
take him back; it's too late for that, if she's engaged. But a little
friendliness and kindness wouldn't do any harm. You too. Do you ever
have him here?"
"How can I, as things are?"
"Well, be friendly, anyhow," he argued. "That's not asking much. I
suppose he'd cut my throat if he knew, but I'm a straight-to-the-mark
sort of person, and I know this: what this house does the town will do."
"I'll talk to Mr. Wheeler. I don't know. I'll say this, Mr. Bassett.
I won't make her unhappy. She has borne a great deal, and sometimes I
think her life is spoiled. She is very different."
"If she is suffering, isn't it possible she cares for him?"
But Margaret did not think so. She was so very calm. She was so calm
that sometimes it was alarming.
"He gave her a ring, and the other day I found it, tossed into a drawer
full of odds and ends. I haven't seen it lately; she may have sent it
back."