The Law-Breakers and Other Stories | Page 4

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"I'd like to ask your advice about something, Miss Wellington, if you don't object."
Mary thought she knew what was coming, surprising as it was to be consulted. She smiled encouragingly.
"It's about a gentleman friend of mine," continued Miss Burke, with rising color, "who wishes me to marry him. Perhaps you have heard of him," she added with a suggestion of furtive pride. "His name is Jim Daly."
"I know all about him."
Miss Burke was evidently not prepared for such a sweeping answer. "You know what he did, then?" she asserted after a moment's hesitation.
"He pretended to be some one else, and passed a civil-service examination, wasn't it?"
"Yes. I can tell by your tone that you think it was disreputable. So do I, Miss Wellington; though some of my friends say that it was Jim's desire to help a friend which led him to do it. But he had to serve his time in jail, didn't he?" She looked as though she were going to cry. Then she said awkwardly: "What I wished to ask was whether you would marry him if you were I."
Mary frowned. The responsibility was disconcerting. "Do you love him?" she asked plumply.
"I did love him; I suppose I do still; yes, I do." She jerked out her answers in quick succession. "But our engagement is broken."
"Because of this?"
"Because he has been in jail. None of my family has ever been in jail." Miss Burke set in place the loose hairs of her pompadour with a gesture of severe dignity as she spoke.
"And he knows, of course, that his dishonesty is the reason why you feel that you cannot trust him?" inquired Mary, who, being a logical person, regarded the last answer as not altogether categorical.
"It wasn't like stealing," said the girl, by way of resenting the phrase.
"It was dishonorable and untrue."
"The people down my way don't think much of the civil-service laws. They call them frills, something to get round if you can. That's how they excuse him." She spoke with nervous rapidity and a little warmth.
"But they are our country's laws just the same. And a good man--a patriotic man--ought not to break them." Mary was conscious of voicing George Colfax's sentiments as well as her own. The responsibility of the burden imposed on her was trying, and she disliked her part of mentor. Nevertheless, she felt that she must not abstain from stating the vital point clearly; so she continued:
"Is not the real difficulty, my dear, that the man who could be false in one thing might be false in another when the occasion arose?"
Miss Burke flushed at the words, and suddenly covered her face with her hands.
"That's it, of course. That's what haunts me. I could forgive him the other--the having been in jail and all that; but it's the possibility that he might do something worse after we were married--when it was too late--which frightens me. 'False in one thing, false in everything,' that's what the proverb is. Do you believe that is true, Miss Wellington?"
Her unmasked conscience revealed clearly the distress caused by its own sensitiveness; but she spoke beseechingly, as though to invite comfort from her companion on the score of this adage.
"Tell me what sort of a man Mr. Daly is in other respects," said Mary.
"Oh, he's kind!" she answered with enthusiasm. "He has been a good son and brother; he is always helping people, and has more friends than any one in the district. I don't see why he cared for me," she added with seeming irrelevance.
"It's a great point in his favor that he does care for you, my dear. Is he steady at his work?"
"When he isn't too busy with politics. He says that he will give them up, if I insist; but my doing so might prevent his being chosen to Congress." There was again rueful pride in her plaint.
Mary sat silent for a moment. "He stands convicted of falsehood." She seemed to be speaking to herself.
"Yes," gasped the girl, as her mentor paused to let the fell substantive be weighed.
"That seems terrible to me. But you know him better than I do."
Miss Burke's face lighted at the qualification. Yet her quick intelligence refused to be thus cajoled. "But what would you do in my place? That's what I wish to know."
Mary winced. She perceived the proud delicacy of the challenge, and recognized that she had condescendingly shirked the real inquiry.
"It is so hard to put oneself in another's place. The excuses you have given for his conduct seem to me inadequate. That is, if a man gave those reasons to me--I believe I could never trust him again." Mary spoke with conviction, but she realized that she felt like a grandmother.
"Thank you," said Miss Burke. "That's what I wished to know." She looked at the