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The Forgers
by
She checked herself in surprise. He had been fumbling in his pocket and now laid down a pile of green and yellow banknotes on the table.
“I have scraped together every last cent I can spare,” he continued, talking jerkily to suppress his emotion. “They cannot take those away from you, Constance. And–when I am settled–in a new life,” he swallowed hard and averted his eyes further from her startled gaze, “under a new name, somewhere, if you have just a little spot in your heart that still responds to me, I–I–no, it is too much even to hope. Constance, the accounts will not come out right because I am– I am an embezzler.”
He bit off the word viciously and then sank his head into his hands and bowed it to a depth that alone could express his shame.
Why did she not say something, do something? Some women would have fainted. Some would have denounced him. But she stood there and he dared not look up to read what was written in her face. He felt alone, all alone, with every man’s hand against him, he who had never in all his life felt so or had done anything to make him feel so before. He groaned as the sweat of his mental and physical agony poured coldly out on his forehead. All that he knew was that she was standing there, silent, looking him through and through, as cold as a statue. Was she the personification of justice? Was this but a foretaste of the ostracism of the world?
“When we were first married, Constance,” he began sadly, “I was only a clerk for Green & Co., at two thousand a year. We talked it over. I stayed and in time became cashier at five thousand. But you know as well as I that five thousand does not meet the social obligations laid on us by our position in the circle in which we are forced to move.”
His voice had become cold and hard, but he did not allow himself to be betrayed into adding, as he might well have done in justice to himself, that to her even a thousand dollars a month would have been only a beginning. It was not that she had be accustomed to so much in the station of life from which he had taken her. The plain fact was that New York had had an over-tonic effect on her.
“You were not a nagging woman, Constance,” he went on in a somewhat softened tone. “In fact you have been a good wife; you have never thrown it up to me that I was unable to make good to the degree of many of our friends in purely commercial lines. All you have ever said is the truth. A banking house pays low for its brains. My God!” he cried stiffening out in the chair and clenching his fists, “it pays low for its temptations, too.”
There had been nothing in the world Carlton would not have given to make happy the woman who stood now, leaning on the table in cold silence, with averted head, regarding neither him nor the pile of greenbacks.
“Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through my hands every week,” he resumed. “That business owed me for my care of it. It was taking the best in me and in return was not paying what other businesses paid for the best in other men. When a man gets thinking that way, with a woman whom he loves as I love you–something happens.”
He paused in the bitterness of his thoughts. She moved as if to speak. “No, no,” he interrupted. “Hear me out first. All I asked was a chance to employ a little of the money that I saw about me–not to take it, but to employ it for a little while, a few days, perhaps only a few hours. Money breeds money. Why should I not use some of this idle money to pay me what I ought to have?