The Rise of Silas Lapham

by William Dean Howells

  “Sometimes I’ve thought—I’ve been afraid—that you avoided me.”

  “Avoided you?”

  “Yes! Tried not to be alone with me.”

  She might have told him that there was no reason why she should be alone with him, and that it was very strange he should make this complaint of her. But she did not. She kept looking down at the fan, and then she lifted her burning face and looked at the clock again. “Mother and Irene will be sorry to miss you,” she gasped.

  He instantly rose and came toward her. She rose too, and mechanically put out her hand. He took it as if to say good night. “I didn’t mean to send you away,” she besought him.

  “Oh, I’m not going,” he answered simply. “I wanted to say—to say that it’s I who make her talk about you. To say I— There is something I want to say to you; I’ve said it so often to myself that I feel as if you must know it.” She stood quite still, letting him keep her hand, and questioning his face with a bewildered gaze. “You must know—she must have told you—she must have guessed—” Penelope turned white, but outwardly quelled the panic that sent the blood to her heart. “I—I didn’t expect—I hoped to have seen your father—but I must speak now, whatever—I love you!”

  She freed her hand from both of those he had closed upon it, and went back from him across the room with a sinuous spring. “Me!” Whatever potential complicity had lurked in her heart, his words brought her only immeasurable dismay.

  He came toward her again. “Yes, you. Who else?”

  She fended him off with an imploring gesture. “I thought—I—it was—”

  She shut her lips tight, and stood looking at him where he remained in silent amaze. Then her words came again, shudderingly. “Oh, what have you done?”

  “Upon my soul,” he said, with a vague smile, “I don’t know. I hope no harm?”

  “Oh, don’t laugh!” she cried, laughing hysterically herself. “Unless you want me to think you the greatest wretch in the world!”

  “I?” he responded. “For heaven’s sake tell me what you mean!”

  “You know I can’t tell you. Can you say—can you put your hand on your heart and say that—you—say you never meant—that you meant me—all along?”

  “Yes!—yes! Who else? I came here to see your father, and to tell him that I wished to tell you this—to ask him— But what does it matter? You must have known it—you must have seen—and it’s for you to answer me. I’ve been abrupt, I know, and I’ve startled you; but if you love me, you can forgive that to my loving you so long before I spoke.”

  She gazed at him with parted lips.

  “Oh, mercy! What shall I do? If it’s true—what you say—you must go!” she said. “And you must never come anymore. Do you promise that?”

  “Certainly not,” said the young man. “Why should I promise such a thing—so abominably wrong? I could obey if you didn’t love me—”

  “Oh, I don’t! Indeed I don’t! Now will you obey?”

  “No. I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh!”

  He possessed himself of her hand again.

  “My love—my dearest! What is this trouble, that you can’t tell it? It can’t be anything about yourself. If it is anything about anyone else, it wouldn’t make the least difference in the world, no matter what it was. I would be only too glad to show by any act or deed I could that nothing could change me toward you.”

  “Oh, you don’t understand!”

  “No, I don’t. You must tell me.”

  “I will never do that.”

  “Then I will stay here till your mother comes, and ask her what it is.”

  “Ask her?”

  “Yes! Do you think I will give you up till I know why I must?”

  “You force me to it! Will you go if I tell you, and never let any human creature know what you have said to me?”

  “Not unless you give me leave.”

  “That will be never. Well, then—” She stopped, and made two or three ineffectual efforts to begin again. “No, no! I can’t. You must go!”

  “I will not go!”

  “You said you—loved me. If you do, you will go.”

  He dropped the hands he had stretched toward her, and she hid her face in her own.

  “There!” she said, turning it suddenly upon him. “Sit down there. And will you promise me—on your honor—not to speak—not to try to persuade me—not to—touch me? You won’t touch me?”

  “I will obey you, Penelope.”

  “As if you were never to see me again? As if I were dying?”

  “I will do what you say. But I shall see you again; and don’t talk of dying. This is the beginning of life—”

  “No. It’s the end,” said the girl, resuming at last something of the hoarse drawl which the tumult of her feeling had broken into those half-articulate appeals. She sat down too, and lifted her face toward him. “It’s the end of life for me, because I know now that I must have been playing false from the beginning. You don’t know what I mean, and I can never tell you. It isn’t my secret—it’s someone else’s. You—you must never come here again. I can’t tell you why, and you must never try to know. Do you promise?”

  “You can forbid me. I must do what you say.”

  “I do forbid you, then. And you shall not think I am cruel—”

  “How could I think that?”

  “Oh, how hard you make it!”

  Corey laughed for very despair. “Can I make it easier by disobeying you?”

  “I know I am talking crazily. But I’m not crazy.”

  “No, no,” he said, with some wild notion of comforting her; “but try to tell me this trouble! There is nothing under heaven—no calamity, no sorrow—that I wouldn’t gladly share with you, or take all upon myself if I could!”

  “I know! But this you can’t. Oh, my—”

  “Dearest! Wait! Think! Let me ask your mother—your father—”

  She gave a cry.

  “No! If you do that, you will make me hate you! Will you—”

  The rattling of a latchkey was heard in the outer door.

  “Promise!” cried Penelope.

  “Oh, I promise!”

  “Good-bye!” She suddenly flung her arms ’round his neck, and, pressing her cheek tight against his, flashed out of the room by one door as her father entered it by another.

  Corey turned to him in a daze. “I—I called to speak with you—about a matter— But it’s so late now. I’ll—I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “No time like the present,” said Lapham, with a fierceness that did not seem referable to Corey. He had his hat still on, and he glared at the young man out of his blue eyes with a fire that something else must have kindled there.

  “I really can’t now,” said Corey weakly. “It will do quite as well tomorrow. Good night, sir.”

  “Good night,” answered Lapham abruptly, following him to the door and shutting it after him. “I think the devil must have got into pretty much everybody tonight,” he muttered, coming back to the room, where he put down his hat. Then he went to the kitchen stairs and called down, “Hello, Alice! I want something to eat!”

  XVII

  “WHAT’S the reason the girls never get down to breakfast anymore?” asked Lapham, when he met his wife at the table in the morning. He had been up an hour and a half, and he spoke with the severity of a hungry man. “It seems to me they don’t amount to anything. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I go to the office.”

  “Oh yes, you do, Si,” said his wife soothingly. “The girls are nearly always down. But they’re young, and it tires them more than it does us to get up earl
y.”

  “They can rest afterward. They don’t do anything after they are up,” grumbled Lapham.

  “Well, that’s your fault, ain’t it? You oughtn’t to have made so much money, and then they’d have had to work.” She laughed at Lapham’s Spartan mood, and went on to excuse the young people. “Irene’s been up two nights and running, and Penelope says she ain’t well. What makes you so cross about the girls? Been doing something you’re ashamed of?”

  “I’ll tell you when I’ve been doing anything to be ashamed of,” growled Lapham.

  “Oh no, you won’t!” said his wife jollily. “You’ll only be hard on the rest of us. Come now, Si; what is it?”

  Lapham frowned into his coffee with sulky dignity, and said, without looking up, “I wonder what that fellow wanted here last night?”

  “What fellow?”

  “Corey. I found him here when I came home, and he said he wanted to see me; but he wouldn’t stop.”

  “Where was he?”

  “In the sitting room.”

  “Was Pen there?”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  Mrs. Lapham paused, with her hand on the cream jug. “Why, what in the land did he want? Did he say he wanted you?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And then he wouldn’t stay?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you just what it is, Silas Lapham. He came here”—she looked about the room and lowered her voice—“to see you about Irene, and then he hadn’t the courage.”

  “I guess he’s got courage enough to do pretty much what he wants to,” said Lapham glumly. “All I know is, he was here. You better ask Pen about it, if she ever gets down.”

  “I guess I shan’t wait for her,” said Mrs. Lapham; and, as her husband closed the front door after him, she opened that of her daughter’s room and entered abruptly.

  The girl sat at the window, fully dressed, and as if she had been sitting there a long time. Without rising, she turned her face toward her mother. It merely showed black against the light, and revealed nothing till her mother came close to her with successive questions. “Why, how long have you been up, Pen? Why don’t you come to your breakfast? Did you see Mr. Corey when he called last night? Why, what’s the matter with you? What have you been crying about?”

  “Have I been crying?”

  “Yes! Your cheeks are all wet!”

  “I thought they were on fire. Well, I’ll tell you what’s happened.” She rose, and then fell back in her chair. “Lock the door!” she ordered, and her mother mechanically obeyed. “I don’t want Irene in here. There’s nothing the matter. Only, Mr. Corey offered himself to me last night.”

  Her mother remained looking at her, helpless, not so much with amaze, perhaps, as dismay.

  “Oh, I’m not a ghost! I wish I was! You had better sit down, Mother. You have got to know all about it.”

  Mrs. Lapham dropped nervelessly into the chair at the other window and, while the girl went slowly but briefly on, touching only the vital points of the story, and breaking at times into a bitter drollery, she sat as if without the power to speak or stir.

  “Well, that’s all, Mother. I should say I had dreamed it, if I had slept any last night; but I guess it really happened.”

  The mother glanced ’round at the bed, and said, glad to occupy herself delayingly with the minor care: “Why, you have been sitting up all night! You will kill yourself.”

  “I don’t know about killing myself, but I’ve been sitting up all night,” answered the girl. Then, seeing that her mother remained blankly silent again, she demanded, “Why don’t you blame me, Mother? Why don’t you say that I led him on, and tried to get him away from her? Don’t you believe I did?”

  Her mother made her no answer, as if these ravings of self-accusal needed none. “Do you think,” she asked simply, “that he got the idea you cared for him?”

  “He knew it! How could I keep it from him? I said I didn’t—at first!”

  “It was no use,” sighed the mother. “You might as well said you did. It couldn’t help Irene any, if you didn’t.”

  “I always tried to help her with him, even when I—”

  “Yes, I know. But she never was equal to him. I saw that from the start; but I tried to blind myself to it. And when he kept coming—”

  “You never thought of me!” cried the girl, with a bitterness that reached her mother’s heart. “I was nobody! I couldn’t feel! No one could care for me!” The turmoil of despair, of triumph, of remorse and resentment, which filled her soul, tried to express itself in the words.

  “No,” said the mother humbly. “I didn’t think of you. Or I didn’t think of you enough. It did come across me sometimes that maybe— But it didn’t seem as if— And your going on so for Irene—”

  “You let me go on. You made me always go and talk with him for her, and you didn’t think I would talk to him for myself. Well, I didn’t!”

  “I’m punished for it. When did you—begin to care for him?”

  “How do I know? What difference does it make? It’s all over now, no matter when it began. He won’t come here anymore, unless I let him.” She could not help betraying her pride in this authority of hers, but she went on anxiously enough, “What will you say to Irene? She’s safe as far as I’m concerned; but if he don’t care for her, what will you do?”

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Lapham. She sat in an apathy from which she apparently could not rouse herself. “I don’t see as anything can be done.”

  Penelope laughed in a pitying derision.

  “Well, let things go on then. But they won’t go on.”

  “No, they won’t go on,” echoed her mother. “She’s pretty enough, and she’s capable; and your father’s got the money—I don’t know what I’m saying! She ain’t equal to him, and she never was. I kept feeling it all the time, and yet I kept blinding myself.”

  “If he had ever cared for her,” said Penelope, “it wouldn’t have mattered whether she was equal to him or not. I’m not equal to him either.”

  Her mother went on: “I might have thought it was you; but I had got set— Well! I can see it all clear enough, now it’s too late. I don’t know what to do.”

  “And what do you expect me to do?” demanded the girl. “Do you want me to go to Irene and tell her that I’ve got him away from her?”

  “O good Lord!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “What shall I do? What do you want I should do, Pen?”

  “Nothing for me,” said Penelope. “I’ve had it out with myself. Now do the best you can for Irene.”

  “I couldn’t say you had done wrong, if you was to marry him today.”

  “Mother!”

  “No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t say but what you had been good and faithful all through, and you had a perfect right to do it. There ain’t anyone to blame. He’s behaved like a gentleman, and I can see now that he never thought of her, and that it was you all the while. Well, marry him, then! He’s got the right, and so have you.”

  “What about Irene? I don’t want you to talk about me. I can take care of myself.”

  “She’s nothing but a child. It’s only a fancy with her. She’ll get over it. She hain’t really got her heart set on him.”

  “She’s got her heart set on him, Mother. She’s got her whole life set on him. You know that.”

  “Yes, that’s so,” said the mother, as promptly as if she had been arguing to that rather than the contrary effect.

  “If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn’t mine to give.” She added in a burst of despair, “He isn’t mine to keep!”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she has got to bear it. I don’t know what’s to come of it all. But she’s got to bear her share of it.” She rose and went toward the door.

  Penelope r
an after her in a sort of terror. “You’re not going to tell Irene?” she gasped, seizing her mother by either shoulder.

  “Yes, I am,” said Mrs. Lapham. “If she’s a woman grown, she can bear a woman’s burden.”

  “I can’t let you tell Irene,” said the girl, letting fall her face on her mother’s neck. “Not Irene,” she moaned. “I’m afraid to let you. How can I ever look at her again?”

  “Why, you haven’t done anything, Pen,” said her mother soothingly.

  “I wanted to! Yes, I must have done something. How could I help it? I did care for him from the first, and I must have tried to make him like me. Do you think I did? No, no! You mustn’t tell Irene! Not—not—yet! Mother! Yes! I did try to get him from her!” she cried, lifting her head, and suddenly looking her mother in the face with those large dim eyes of hers. “What do you think? Even last night! It was the first time I ever had him all to myself, for myself, and I know now that I tried to make him think that I was pretty and—funny. And I didn’t try to make him think of her. I knew that I pleased him, and I tried to please him more. Perhaps I could have kept him from saying that he cared for me; but when I saw he did—I must have seen it—I couldn’t. I had never had him to myself, and for myself, before. I needn’t have seen him at all, but I wanted to see him; and when I was sitting there alone with him, how do I know what I did to let him feel that I cared for him? Now, will you tell Irene? I never thought he did care for me, and never expected him to. But I liked him. Yes—I did like him! Tell her that! Or else I will.”

  “If it was to tell her he was dead,” began Mrs. Lapham absently.

  “How easy it would be!” cried the girl in self-mockery. “But he’s worse than dead to her; and so am I. I’ve turned it over a million ways, Mother; I’ve looked at it in every light you can put it in, and I can’t make anything but misery out of it. You can see the misery at the first glance, and you can’t see more or less if you spend your life looking at it.” She laughed again, as if the hopelessness of the thing amused her. Then she flew to the extreme of self-assertion. “Well, I have a right to him, and he has a right to me. If he’s never done anything to make her think he cared for her—and I know he hasn’t; it’s all been our doing—then he’s free and I’m free. We can’t make her happy whatever we do; and why shouldn’t I— No, that won’t do! I reached that point before!” She broke again into her desperate laugh. “You may try now, Mother!”