Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Yes,” Staniford assented vaguely; “that’s the great object.”

  After a while Dunham asked, “She’s never said anything to you about your rescuing Hicks?”

  “Rescuing? What rescuing? They’d have had him out in another minute, any way,” said Staniford, fretfully. Then he brooded angrily upon the subject: “But I can tell you what: considering all the circumstances, she might very well have said something. It looks obtuse, or it looks hard. She must have known that it all came about through my trying to keep him away from her.”

  “Oh, yes; she knew that,” said Dunham; “she spoke of it at the time. But I thought—”

  “Oh, she did! Then I think that it would be very little if she recognized the mere fact that something had happened.”

  “Why, you said you hoped she wouldn’t. You said it would be embarrassing. You’re hard to please, Staniford.”

  “I shouldn’t choose to have her speak for my pleasure,” Staniford returned. “But it argues a dullness and coldness in her—”

  “I don’t believe she’s dull; I don’t believe she’s cold,” said Dunham, warmly.

  “What do you believe she is?”

  “Afraid.”

  “Pshaw!” said Staniford.

  The eve of their arrival at Messina, he discharged one more duty by telling Hicks that he had better come on to Trieste with them. “Captain Jenness asked me to speak to you about it,” he said. “He feels a little awkward, and thought I could open the matter better.”

  “The captain’s all right,” answered Hicks, with unruffled humility, “but I’d rather stop at Messina. I’m going to get home as soon as I can, — strike a bee-line.”

  “Look here!” said Staniford, laying his hand on his shoulder. “How are you going to manage for money?”

  “Monte di Pietà,” replied Hicks. “I’ve been there before. Used to have most of my things in the care of the state when I was studying medicine in Paris. I’ve got a lot of rings and trinkets that’ll carry me through, with what’s left of my watch.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because you can draw on me, if you’re going to be short.”

  “Thanks,” said Hicks. “There’s something I should like to ask you,” he added, after a moment. “I see as well as you do that Miss Blood isn’t the same as she was before. I want to know — I can’t always be sure afterwards — whether I did or said anything out of the way in her presence.”

  “You were drunk,” said Staniford, frankly, “but beyond that you were irreproachable, as regarded Miss Blood. You were even exemplary.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Hicks, with a joyless laugh. “Sometimes it takes that turn. I don’t think I could stand it if I had shown her any disrespect. She’s a lady, — a perfect lady; she’s the best girl I ever saw.”

  “Hicks,” said Staniford, presently, “I haven’t bored you in regard to that little foible of yours. Aren’t you going to try to do something about it?”

  “I’m going home to get them to shut me up somewhere,” answered Hicks. “But I doubt if anything can be done. I’ve studied the thing; I am a doctor, — or I would be if I were not a drunkard, — and I’ve diagnosed the case pretty thoroughly. For three months or four months, now, I shall be all right. After that I shall go to the bad for a few weeks; and I’ll have to scramble back the best way I can. Nobody can help me. That was the mistake this last time. I shouldn’t have wanted anything at Gibraltar if I could have had my spree out at Boston. But I let them take me before it was over, and ship me off. I thought I’d try it. Well, it was like a burning fire every minute, all the way. I thought I should die. I tried to get something from the sailors; I tried to steal Gabriel’s cooking-wine. When I got that brandy in Gibraltar I was wild. Talk about heroism! I tell you it was superhuman, keeping that canteen corked till night! I was in hopes I could get through it, — sleep it off, — and nobody be any the wiser. But it wouldn’t work. O Lord, Lord, Lord!”

  Hicks was as common a soul as could well be. His conception of life was vulgar, and his experience of it was probably vulgar. He had a good mind enough, with abundance of that humorous brightness which may hereafter be found the most national quality of the Americans; but his ideals were pitiful, and the language of his heart was a drolling slang. Yet his doom lifted him above his low conditions, and made him tragic; his despair gave him the dignity of a mysterious expiation, and set him apart with all those who suffer beyond human help. Without deceiving himself as to the quality of the man, Staniford felt awed by the darkness of his fate.

  “Can’t you try somehow to stand up against it, and fight it off? You’re so young yet, it can’t—”

  The wretched creature burst into tears. “Oh, try, — try! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t you suppose I’ve had reasons for trying? If you could see how my mother looks when I come out of one of my drunks, — and my father, poor old man! It’s no use; I tell you it’s no use. I shall go just so long, and then I shall want it, and will have it, unless they shut me up for life. My God, I wish I was dead! Well!” He rose from the place where they had been sitting together, and held out his hand to Staniford. “I’m going to be off in the morning before you’re out, and I’ll say good-by now. I want you to keep this chair, and give it to Miss Blood, for me, when you get to Trieste.”

  “I will, Hicks,” said Staniford, gently.

  “I want her to know that I was ashamed of myself. I think she’ll like to know it.”

  “I will say anything to her that you wish,” replied Staniford.

  “There’s nothing else. If ever you see a man with my complaint fall overboard again, think twice before you jump after him.”

  He wrung Staniford’s hand, and went below, leaving him with a dull remorse that he should ever have hated Hicks, and that he could not quite like him even now.

  But he did his duty by him to the last. He rose at dawn, and was on deck when Hicks went over the side into the boat which was to row him to the steamer for Naples, lying at anchor not far off. He presently returned, to Staniford’s surprise, and scrambled up to the deck of the Aroostook. “The steamer sails to-night,” he said, “and perhaps I couldn’t raise the money by that time. I wish you’d lend me ten napoleons. I’ll send ’em to you from London. There’s my father’s address: I’m going to telegraph to him.” He handed Staniford a card, and the latter went below for the coins. “Thanks,” said Hicks, when he reappeared with them. “Send ’em to you where?”

  “Care Blumenthals’, Venice. I’m going to be there some weeks.”

  In the gray morning light the lurid color of tragedy had faded out of Hicks. He was merely a baddish-looking young fellow whom Staniford had lent ten napoleons that he might not see again. Staniford watched the steamer uneasily, both from the Aroostook and from the shore, where he strolled languidly about with Dunham part of the day. When she sailed in the evening, he felt that Hicks’s absence was worth twice the money.

  XVIII.

  The young men did not come back to the ship at night, but went to a hotel, for the greater convenience of seeing the city. They had talked of offering to show Lydia about, but their talk had not ended in anything. Vexed with himself to be vexed at such a thing, Staniford at the bottom of his heart still had a soreness which the constant sight of her irritated. It was in vain that he said there was no occasion, perhaps no opportunity, for her to speak, yet he was hurt that she seemed to have seen nothing uncommon in his risking his own life for that of a man like Hicks. He had set the action low enough in his own speech; but he knew that it was not ignoble, and it puzzled him that it should be so passed over. She had not even said a word of congratulation upon his own escape. It might be that she did not know how, or did not think it was her place to speak. She was curiously estranged. He felt as if he had been away, and she had grown from a young girl into womanhood during his absence. This fantastic conceit was strongest when he met her with Captain Jenness one day. He had f
ound friends at the hotel, as one always does in Italy, if one’s world is at all wide, — some young ladies, and a lady, now married, with whom he had once violently flirted. She was willing that he should envy her husband; that amused him in his embittered mood; he let her drive him about; and they met Lydia and the captain, walking together. Staniford started up from his lounging ease, as if her limpid gaze had searched his conscience, and bowed with an air which did not escape his companion.

  “Ah! Who’s that?” she asked, with the boldness which she made pass for eccentricity.

  “A lady of my acquaintance,” said Staniford, at his laziest again.

  “A lady?” said the other, with an inflection that she saw hurt. “Why the marine animal, then? She bowed very prettily; she blushed prettily, too.”

  “She’s a very pretty girl,” replied Staniford.

  “Charming! But why blush?”

  “I’ve heard that there are ladies who blush for nothing.”

  “Is she Italian?”

  “Yes, — in voice.”

  “Oh, an American prima donna!” Staniford did not answer. “Who is she? Where is she from?”

  “South Bradfield, Mass.” Staniford’s eyes twinkled at her pursuit, which he did not trouble himself to turn aside, but baffled by mere impenetrability.

  The party at the hotel suggested that the young men should leave their ship and go on with them to Naples; Dunham was tempted, for he could have reached Dresden sooner by land; but Staniford overruled him, and at the end of four days they went back to the Aroostook. They said it was like getting home, but in fact they felt the change from the airy heights and breadths of the hotel to the small cabin and the closets in which they slept; it was not so great alleviation as Captain Jenness seemed to think that one of them could now have Hicks’s stateroom. But Dunham took everything sweetly, as his habit was; and, after all, they were meeting their hardships voluntarily. Some of the ladies came with them in the boat which rowed them to the Aroostook; the name made them laugh; that lady who wished Staniford to regret her waved him her hand kerchief as the boat rowed away again. She had with difficulty been kept from coming on board by the refusal of the others to come with her. She had contrived to associate herself with him again in the minds of the others, and this, perhaps, was all that she desired. But the sense of her frivolity — her not so much vacant-mindedness as vacant-heartedness — was like a stain, and he painted in Lydia’s face when they first met the reproach which was in his own breast.

  Her greeting, however, was frank and cordial; it was a real welcome. Staniford wondered if it were not more frank and cordial than he quite liked, and whether she was merely relieved by Hicks’s absence, or had freed herself from that certain subjection in which she had hitherto been to himself.

  Yet it was charming to see her again as she had been in the happiest moments of the past, and to feel that, Hicks being out of her world, her trust of everybody in it was perfect once more. She treated that interval of coldness and diffidence as all women know how to treat a thing which they wish not to have been; and Staniford, a man on whom no pleasing art of her sex was ever lost, admired and gratefully accepted the effect of this. He fell luxuriously into the old habits again. They had still almost the time of a steamer’s voyage to Europe before them; it was as if they were newly setting sail from America. The first night after they left Messina Staniford found her in her place in the waist of the ship, and sat down beside her there, and talked; the next night she did not come; the third she came, and he asked her to walk with him. The elastic touch of her hand on his arm, the rhythmic movement of her steps beside him, were things that seemed always to have been. She told him of what she had seen and done in Messina. This glimpse of Italy had vividly animated her; she had apparently found a world within herself as well as without.

  With a suddenly depressing sense of loss, Staniford had a prevision of splendor in her, when she should have wholly blossomed out in that fervid air of art and beauty; he would fain have kept her still a wilding rosebud of the New England wayside. He hated the officers who should wonder at her when she first came into the Square of St. Mark with her aunt and uncle.

  Her talk about Messina went on; he was thinking of her, and not of her talk; but he saw that she was not going to refer to their encounter. “You make me jealous of the objects of interest in Messina,” he said. “You seem to remember seeing everything but me, there.”

  She stopped abruptly. “Yes,” she said, after a deep breath, “I saw you there;” and she did not offer to go on again.

  “Where were you going, that morning?”

  “Oh, to the cathedral. Captain Jenness left me there, and I looked all through it till he came back from the consulate.”

  “Left you there alone!” cried Staniford.

  “Yes; I told him I should not feel lonely, and I should not stir out of it till he came back. I took one of those little pine chairs and sat down, when I got tired, and looked at the people coming to worship, and the strangers with their guide-books.”

  “Did any of them look at you?”

  “They stared a good deal. It seems to be the custom in Europe; but I told Captain Jenness I should probably have to go about by myself in Venice, as my aunt’s an invalid, and I had better get used to it.”

  She paused, and seemed to be referring the point to Staniford.

  “Yes, — oh, yes,” he said.

  “Captain Jenness said it was their way, over here,” she resumed; “but he guessed I had as much right in a church as anybody.”

  “The captain’s common sense is infallible,” answered Staniford. He was ashamed to know that the beautiful young girl was as improperly alone in church as she would have been in a café, and he began to hate the European world for the fact. It seemed better to him that the Aroostook should put about and sail back to Boston with her, as she was, — better that she should be going to her aunt in South Bradfield than to her aunt in Venice. “We shall soon be at our journey’s end, now,” he said, after a while.

  “Yes; the captain thinks in about eight days, if we have good weather.”

  “Shall you be sorry?”

  “Oh, I like the sea very well.”

  “But the new life you are coming to, — doesn’t that alarm you sometimes?”

  “Yes, it does,” she admitted, with a kind of reluctance.

  “So much that you would like to turn back from it?”

  “Oh, no!” she answered quickly. Of course not, Staniford thought; nothing could be worse than going back to South Bradfield. “I keep thinking about it,” she added. “You say Venice is such a very strange place. Is it any use my having seen Messina?”