Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, all Italian cities have something in common.”

  “I presume,” she went on, “that after I get there everything will become natural. But I don’t like to look forward. It — scares me. I can’t form any idea of it.”

  “You needn’t be afraid,” said Staniford. “It’s only more beautiful than anything you can imagine.”

  “Yes — yes; I know,” Lydia answered.

  “And do you really dread getting there?”

  “Yes, I dread it,” she said.

  “Why,” returned Staniford lightly, “so do I; but it’s for a different reason, I’m afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on. Can you remember when it began?”

  “A great while ago,” she answered, humoring his fantasy, “but I can remember.” She paused a long while. “I don’t know,” she said at last, “whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome — I don’t know whether I can express it. You say that Italy — that Venice — is so beautiful; but if I don’t know any one there—” She stopped, as if she had gone too far.

  “But you do know somebody there,” said Staniford. “Your aunt—”

  “Yes,” said the girl, and looked away.

  “But the people in this long dream, — you’re going to let some of them appear to you there,” he suggested.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, reflecting his lighter humor, “I shall want to see them, or I shall not know I am the same person, and I must be sure of myself, at least.”

  “And you wouldn’t like to go back to earth — to South Bradfield again?” he asked presently.

  “No,” she answered. “All that seems over forever. I couldn’t go back there and be what I was. I could have stayed there, but I couldn’t go back.”

  Staniford laughed. “I see that it isn’t the other world that’s got hold of you! It’s this world! I don’t believe you’ll be unhappy in Italy. But it’s pleasant to think you’ve been so contented on the Aroostook that you hate to leave it. I don’t believe there’s a man on the ship that wouldn’t feel personally flattered to know that you liked being here. Even that poor fellow who parted from us at Messina was anxious that you should think as kindly of him as you could. He knew that he had behaved in a way to shock you, and he was very sorry. He left a message with me for you. He thought you would like to know that he was ashamed of himself.”

  “I pitied him,” said Lydia succinctly. It was the first time that she had referred to Hicks, and Staniford found it in character for her to limit herself to this sparse comment. Evidently, her compassion was a religious duty. Staniford’s generosity came easy to him.

  “I feel bound to say that Hicks was not a bad fellow. I disliked him immensely, and I ought to do him justice, now he’s gone. He deserved all your pity. He’s a doomed man; his vice is irreparable; he can’t resist it.” Lydia did not say anything: women do not generalize in these matters; perhaps they cannot pity the faults of those they do not love. Staniford only forgave Hicks the more. “I can’t say that up to the last moment I thought him anything but a poor, common little creature; and yet I certainly did feel a greater kindness for him after — what I — after what had happened. He left something more than a message for you, Miss Blood; he left his steamer chair yonder, for you.”

  “For me?” demanded Lydia. Staniford felt her thrill and grow rigid upon his arm, with refusal. “I will not have it. He had no right to do so. He — he — was dreadful! I will give it to you!” she said, suddenly. “He ought to have given it to you. You did everything for him; you saved his life.”

  It was clear that she did not sentimentalize Hicks’s case; and Staniford had some doubt as to the value she set upon what he had done, even now she had recognized it.

  He said, “I think you overestimate my service to him, possibly. I dare say the boat could have picked him up in good time.”

  “Yes, that’s what the captain and Mr. Watterson and Mr. Mason all said,” assented Lydia.

  Staniford was nettled. He would have preferred a devoted belief that but for him Hicks must have perished. Besides, what she said still gave no clew to her feeling in regard to himself. He was obliged to go on, but he went on as indifferently as he could. “However, it was hardly a question for me at the time whether he could have been got out without my help. If I had thought about it at all — which I didn’t — I suppose I should have thought that it wouldn’t do to take any chances.”

  “Oh, no,” said Lydia, simply, “you couldn’t have done anything less than you did.”

  In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the ship. But if he had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said for him, — that he could not have done anything less. He might have said it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere of the valley? “Do you know, Miss Blood,” he said gravely, “that you pay me a very high compliment?”

  “How?” she asked.

  “You rate my maximum as my mean temperature.” He felt that she listened inquiringly. “I don’t think I’m habitually up to a thing of that kind,” he explained.

  “Oh, no,” she assented, quietly; “but when he struck at you so, you had to do everything.”

  “Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!” cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. “I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are always there!”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, turning her head round with the slow motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

  “I can’t explain now. I will, by and by, — when we get to Venice,” he added, with quick lightness.

  “You put off everything till we get to Venice,” she said, doubtfully.

  “I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time.”

  “Was it?” She laughed. “So it was! I was thinking it was you.”

  It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her thought, in this way. “What was it you were to tell me in Venice?” he asked.

  “I can’t think, now.”

  “Very likely something of yourself — or myself. A third person might say our conversational range was limited.”

  “Do you think it is very egotistical?” she asked, in the gay tone which gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

  “It is in me, — not in you.”

  “But I don’t see the difference.”

  “I will explain sometime.”

  “When we get to Venice?”

  They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes enough.

  When they were serious again, “Tell me,” he said, “what you thought of that lady in Messina, the other day.”

  She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, “I only saw her a moment.”

  “But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some opinion of them.”

  “She is very fine-appearing,” said Lydia.

  Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with who
m she had lived. “I see you don’t wish to say, because you think she is a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we were enemies, if anything.”

  Staniford’s meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, “Why were you riding with her then?”

  “I was driving with her,” he replied, “I suppose, because she asked me.”

  “Asked you!” cried the girl; and he perceived her moral recoil both from himself and from a woman who could be so unseemly. That lady would have found it delicious if she could have known that a girl placed like Lydia was shocked at her behavior. But he was not amused. He was touched by the simple self-respect that would not let her suffer from what was not wrong in itself, but that made her shrink from a voluntary semblance of unwomanliness. It endeared her not only to his pity, but to that sense which in every man consecrates womanhood, and waits for some woman to be better than all her sex. Again he felt the pang he had remotely known before. What would she do with these ideals of hers in that depraved Old World, — so long past trouble for its sins as to have got a sort of sweetness and innocence in them, — where her facts would be utterly irreconcilable with her ideals, and equally incomprehensible?

  They walked up and down a few turns without speaking again of that lady. He knew that she grew momently more constrained toward him; that the pleasure of the time was spoiled for her; that she had lost her trust in him, and this half amused, half afflicted him. It did not surprise him when, at their third approach to the cabin gangway, she withdrew her hand from his arm and said, stiffly, “I think I will go down.” But she did not go at once. She lingered, and after a certain hesitation she said, without looking at him, “I didn’t express what I wanted to, about Mr. Hicks, and — what you did. It is what I thought you would do.”

  “Thanks,” said Staniford, with sincere humility. He understood how she had had this in her mind, and how she would not withhold justice from him because he had fallen in her esteem; how rather she would be the more resolute to do him justice for that reason.

  XIX.

  He could see that she avoided being alone with him the next day, but he took it for a sign of relenting, perhaps helpless relenting, that she was in her usual place on deck in the evening. He went to her, and, “I see that you haven’t forgiven me,” he said.

  “Forgiven you?” she echoed.

  “Yes,” he said, “for letting that lady ask me to drive with her.”

  “I never said—” she began.

  “Oh, no! But I knew it, all the same. It was not such a very wicked thing, as those things go. But I liked your not liking it. Will you let me say something to you?”

  “Yes,” she answered, rather breathlessly.

  “You must think it’s rather an odd thing to say, as I ask leave. It is; and I hardly know how to say it. I want to tell you that I’ve made bold to depend a great deal upon your good opinion for my peace of mind, of late, and that I can’t well do without it now.”

  She stole the quickest of her bird-like glances at him, but did not speak; and though she seemed, to his anxious fancy, poising for flight, she remained, and merely looked away, like the bird that will not or cannot fly.

  “You don’t resent my making you my outer conscience, do you, and my knowing that you’re not quite pleased with me?”

  She looked down and away with one of those turns of the head, so precious when one who beholds them is young, and caught at the fringe of her shawl. “I have no right,” she began.

  “Oh, I give you the right!” he cried, with passionate urgence. “You have the right. Judge me!” She only looked more grave, and he hurried on. “It was no great harm of her to ask me; that’s common enough; but it was harm of me to go if I didn’t quite respect her, — if I thought her silly, and was willing to be amused with her. One hasn’t any right to do that. I saw this when I saw you.” She still hung her head, and looked away. “I want you to tell me something,” he pursued. “Do you remember once — the second time we talked together — that you said Dunham was in earnest, and you wouldn’t answer when I asked you about myself? Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  “I didn’t care, then. I care very much now. You don’t think me — you think I can be in earnest when I will, don’t you? And that I can regret — that I really wish—” He took the hand that played with the shawl-fringe, but she softly drew it away.

  “Ah, I see!” he said. “You can’t believe in me. You don’t believe that I can be a good man — like Dunham!”

  She answered in the same breathless murmur, “I think you are good.” Her averted face drooped lower.

  “I will tell you all about it, some day!” he cried, with joyful vehemence. “Will you let me?”

  “Yes,” she answered, with the swift expulsion of breath that sometimes comes with tears. She rose quickly and turned away. He did not try to keep her from leaving him. His heart beat tumultuously; his brain seemed in a whirl. It all meant nothing, or it meant everything.

  “What is the matter with Miss Blood?” asked Dunham, who joined him at this moment. “I just spoke to her at the foot of the gangway stairs, and she wouldn’t answer me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about Miss Blood — I don’t know what’s the matter,” said Staniford. “Look here, Dunham; I want to talk with you — I want to tell you something — I want you to advise me — I — There’s only one thing that can explain it, that can excuse it. There’s only one thing that can justify all that I’ve done and said, and that can not only justify it, but can make it sacredly and eternally right, — right for her and right for me. Yes, it’s reason for all, and for a thousand times more. It makes it fair for me to have let her see that I thought her beautiful and charming, that I delighted to be with her, that I — Dunham,” cried Staniford, “I’m in love!”

  Dunham started at the burst in which these ravings ended. “Staniford,” he faltered, with grave regret, “I hope not!”

  “You hope not? You — you — What do you mean? How else can I free myself from the self-reproach of having trifled with her, of—”

  Dunham shook his head compassionately. “You can’t do it that way. Your only safety is to fight it to the death, — to run from it.”

  “But if I don’t choose to fight it?” shouted Staniford,— “if I don’t choose to run from it? If I—”

  “For Heaven’s sake, hush! The whole ship will hear you, and you oughtn’t to breathe it in the desert. I saw how it was going! I dreaded it; I knew it; and I longed to speak. I’m to blame for not speaking!”

  “I should like to know what would have authorized you to speak?” demanded Staniford, haughtily.

  “Only my regard for you; only what urges me to speak now! You must fight it, Staniford, whether you choose or not. Think of yourself, — think of her! Think — you have always been my ideal of honor and truth and loyalty — think of her husband—”

  “Her husband!” gasped Staniford. “Whose husband? What the deuce — who the deuce — are you talking about, Dunham?”

  “Mrs. Rivers.”

  “Mrs. Rivers? That flimsy, feather-headed, empty-hearted — eyes-maker! That frivolous, ridiculous — Pah! And did you think that I was talking of her? Did you think I was in love with her?”

  “Why,” stammered Dunham, “I supposed — I thought — At Messina, you know—”

  “Oh!” Staniford walked the deck’s length away. “Well, Dunham,” he said, as he came back, “you’ve spoilt a pretty scene with your rot about Mrs. Rivers. I was going to be romantic! But perhaps I’d better say in ordinary newspaper English that I’ve just found out that I’m in love with Miss Blood.”

  “With her!” cried Dunham, springing at his hand.

  “Oh, come now! Don’t you be romantic, after knocking my chance.”

  “Why, but Staniford!” said Dunham, wringing his hand with a lover’s joy in another’s love and his relief that it was no
t Mrs. Rivers. “I never should have dreamt of such a thing!”

  “Why?” asked Staniford, shortly.

  “Oh, the way you talked at first, you know, and—”

  “I suppose even people who get married have something to take back about each other,” said Staniford, rather sheepishly. “However,” he added, with an impulse of frankness, “I don’t know that I should have dreamt of it myself, and I don’t blame you. But it’s a fact, nevertheless.”

  “Why, of course. It’s splendid! Certainly. It’s magnificent!” There was undoubtedly a qualification, a reservation, in Dunham’s tone. He might have thought it right to bring the inequalities of the affair to Staniford’s mind. With all his effusive kindliness of heart and manner, he had a keen sense of social fitness, a nice feeling for convention. But a man does not easily suggest to another that the girl with whom he has just declared himself in love is his inferior. What Dunham finally did say was: “It jumps with all your ideas — all your old talk about not caring to marry a society girl—”

  “Society might be very glad of such a girl!” said Staniford, stiffly.

  “Yes, yes, certainly; but I mean—”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. It’s all right,” said Staniford. “But it isn’t a question of marrying yet. I can’t be sure she understood me, — I’ve been so long understanding myself. And yet, she must, she must! She must believe it by this time, or else that I’m the most infamous scoundrel alive. When I think how I have sought her out, and followed her up, and asked her judgment, and hung upon her words, I feel that I oughtn’t to lose a moment in being explicit. I don’t care for myself; she can take me or leave me, as she likes; but if she doesn’t understand, she mustn’t be left in suspense as to my meaning.” He seemed to be speaking to Dunham, but he was really thinking aloud, and Dunham waited for some sort of question before he spoke. “But it’s a great satisfaction to have had it out with myself. I haven’t got to pretend any more that I hang about her, and look at her, and go mooning round after her, for this no-reason and that; I’ve got the best reason in the world for playing the fool, — I’m in love!” He drew a long, deep breath. “It simplifies matters immensely to have reached the point of acknowledging that. Why, Dunham, those four days at Messina almost killed me! They settled it. When that woman was in full fascination it made me gasp. I choked for a breath of fresh air; for a taste of spring-water; for — Lurella!” It was a long time since Staniford had used this name, and the sound of it made him laugh. “It’s droll — but I always think of her as Lurella; I wish it was her name! Why, it was like heaven to see her face when I got back to the ship. After we met her that day at Messina, Mrs. Rivers tried her best to get out of me who it was, and where I met her. But I flatter myself that I was equal to that emergency.”