Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Dunham said nothing, at once. Then, “Staniford,” he faltered, “she got it out of me.”

  “Did you tell her who Lu — who Miss Blood was?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how I happened to be acquainted with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that we were going on to Trieste with her?”

  “She had it out of me before I knew,” said Dunham. “I didn’t realize what she was after; and I didn’t realize how peculiar the situation might seem—”

  “I see nothing peculiar in the situation,” interrupted Staniford, haughtily. Then he laughed consciously. “Or, yes, I do; of course I do! You must know her to appreciate it, though.” He mused a while before he added: “No wonder Mrs. Rivers was determined to come aboard! I wish we had let her, — confound her! She’ll think I was ashamed of it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of! By Heaven, I should like to hear any one—” Staniford broke off, and laughed, and then bit his lip, smiling. Suddenly he burst out again, frowning: “I won’t view it in that light. I refuse to consider it from that point of view. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as regular as anything else in life. It’s the same to me as if she were in her own house, and I had come there to tell her that she has my future in her hand. She’s such a lady by instinct that she’s made it all a triumph, and I thank God that I haven’t done or said anything to mar it. Even that beast of a Hicks didn’t; it’s no merit. I’ve made love to her, — I own it; of course I have, because I was in love with her; and my fault has been that I haven’t made love to her openly, but have gone on fancying that I was studying her character, or some rubbish of that sort. But the fault is easily repaired.” He turned about, as if he were going to look for Lydia at once, and ask her to be his wife. But he halted abruptly, and sat down. “No; that won’t do,” he said. “That won’t do at all.” He remained thinking, and Dunham, unwilling to interrupt his reverie, moved a few paces off. “Dunham, don’t go. I want your advice. Perhaps I don’t see it in the right light.”

  “How is it you see it, my dear fellow?” asked Dunham.

  “I don’t know whether I’ve a right to be explicit with her, here. It seems like taking an advantage. In a few days she will be with her friends—”

  “You must wait,” said Dunham, decisively. “You can’t speak to her before she is in their care; it wouldn’t be the thing. You’re quite right about that.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be the thing,” groaned Staniford. “But how is it all to go on till then?” he demanded desperately.

  “Why, just as it has before,” answered Dunham, with easy confidence.

  “But is that fair to her?”

  “Why not? You mean to say to her at the right time all that a man can. Till that time comes I haven’t the least doubt she understands you.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Staniford, simply. He had suddenly grown very subject and meek to Dunham.

  “Yes,” said the other, with the superiority of a betrothed lover; “women are very quick about those things.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” sighed Staniford, with nothing of his wonted arrogant pretension in regard to women’s moods and minds, “I suppose you’re right. And you would go on just as before?”

  “I would, indeed. How could you change without making her unhappy — if she’s interested in you?”

  “That’s true. I could imagine worse things than going on just as before. I suppose,” he added, “that something more explicit has its charms; but a mutual understanding is very pleasant, — if it is a mutual understanding.” He looked inquiringly at Dunham.

  “Why, as to that, of course I don’t know. You ought to be the best judge of that. But I don’t believe your impressions would deceive you.”

  “Yours did, once,” suggested Staniford, in suspense.

  “Yes; but I was not in love with her,” explained Dunham.

  “Of course,” said Staniford, with a breath of relief. “And you think — Well, I must wait!” he concluded, grimly. “But don’t — don’t mention this matter, Dunham, unless I do. Don’t keep an eye on me, old fellow. Or, yes, you must! You can’t help it. I want to tell you, Dunham, what makes me think she may be a not wholly uninterested spectator of my — sentiments.” He made full statement of words and looks and tones. Dunham listened with the patience which one lover has with another.

  XX.

  The few days that yet remained of their voyage were falling in the latter half of September, and Staniford tried to make the young girl see the surpassing loveliness of that season under Italian skies; the fierceness of the summer is then past, and at night, when chiefly they inspected the firmament, the heaven has begun to assume something of the intense blue it wears in winter. She said yes, it was very beautiful, but she could not see that the days were finer, or the skies bluer, than those of September at home; and he laughed at her loyalty to the American weather. “Don’t you think so, too?” she asked, as if it pained her that he should like Italian weather better.

  “Oh, yes, — yes,” he said. Then he turned the talk on her, as he did whenever he could. “I like your meteorological patriotism. If I were a woman, I should stand by America in everything.”

  “Don’t you as a man?” she pursued, still anxiously.

  “Oh, certainly,” he answered. “But women owe our continent a double debt of fidelity. It’s the Paradise of women, it’s their Promised Land, where they’ve been led up out of the Egyptian bondage of Europe. It’s the home of their freedom. It is recognized in America that women have consciences and souls.”

  Lydia looked very grave. “Is it — is it so different with women in Europe?” she faltered.

  “Very,” he replied, and glanced at her half-laughingly, half-tenderly.

  After a while, “I wish you would tell me,” she said, “just what you mean. I wish you would tell me what is the difference.”

  “Oh, it’s a long story. I will tell you — when we get to Venice.” The well-worn jest served its purpose again; she laughed, and he continued: “By the way, just when will that be? The captain says that if this wind holds we shall be in Trieste by Friday afternoon. I suppose your friends will meet you there on Saturday, and that you’ll go back with them to Venice at once.”

  “Yes,” assented Lydia.

  “Well, if I should come on Monday, would that be too soon?”

  “Oh, no!” she answered. He wondered if she had been vaguely hoping that he might go directly on with her to Venice. They were together all day, now, and the long talks went on from early morning, when they met before breakfast on deck, until late at night, when they parted there, with blushed and laughed good-nights. Sometimes the trust she put upon his unspoken promises was terrible; it seemed to condemn his reticence as fantastic and hazardous. With her, at least, it was clear that this love was the first; her living and loving were one. He longed to testify the devotion which he felt, to leave it unmistakable and safe past accident; he thought of making his will, in which he should give her everything, and declare her supremely dear; he could only rid himself of this by drawing up the paper in writing, and then he easily tore it in pieces.

  They drew nearer together, not only in their talk about each other, but in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves. But Staniford’s pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation, his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket of her sack, or the picturesqueness with, which she sat facing him, and leant upon the rail, with her elbow wrapped in her shawl, and the fringe gathered in the hand which propped her cheek. He scribbled his sketch-book full of her contours and poses, which sometimes he caught unawares, and which sometimes she sat for him to draw. One day, as they sat occupied in this, “I wonder,” he said, “if you have anything of my feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure excursion, without
taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much at home.”

  “Why, yes,” she said, joyously; “do you have that feeling, too?”

  “I wonder what it is makes us feel so,” he ventured.

  “Perhaps,” she returned, “the long voyage.”

  “I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,” he said, reverting to the original figure. “Shall you?”

  “You know I don’t know much about it,” she answered, in lithe evasion, for which she more than atoned with a conscious look and one of her dark blushes. Yet he chose, with a curious cruelty, to try how far she was his.

  “How odd it would be,” he said, “if we never should have a chance to talk up this voyage of ours when it is over!”

  She started, in a way that made his heart smite him. “Why, you said you—” And then she caught herself, and struggled pitifully for the self-possession she had lost. She turned her head away; his pulse bounded.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t? I am living for that.” He took the hand that lay in her lap; she seemed to try to free it, but she had not the strength or will; she could only keep her face turned from him.

  XXI.

  They arrived Friday afternoon in Trieste, and Captain Jenness telegraphed his arrival to Lydia’s uncle as he went up to the consulate with his ship’s papers. The next morning the young men sent their baggage to a hotel, but they came back for a last dinner on the Aroostook. They all pretended to be very gay, but everybody was perturbed and distraught. Staniford and Dunham had paid their way handsomely with the sailors, and they had returned with remembrances in florid scarfs and jewelry for Thomas and the captain and the officers. Dunham had thought they ought to get something to give Lydia as a souvenir of their voyage; it was part of his devotion to young ladies to offer them little presents; but Staniford overruled him, and said there should be nothing of the kind. They agreed to be out of the way when her uncle came, and they said good-by after dinner. She came on deck to watch them ashore. Staniford would be the last to take leave. As he looked into her eyes, he saw brave trust of him, but he thought a sort of troubled wonder, too, as if she could not understand his reticence, and suffered from it. There was the same latent appeal and reproach in the pose in which she watched their boat row away. She stood with one hand resting on the rail, and her slim grace outlined against the sky. He waved his hand; she answered with a little languid wave of hers; then she turned away. He felt as if he had forsaken her.

  The afternoon was very long. Toward night-fall he eluded Dunham, and wandered back to the ship in the hope that she might still be there. But she was gone. Already everything was changed. There was bustle and discomfort; it seemed years since he had been there. Captain Jenness was ashore somewhere; it was the second mate who told Staniford of her uncle’s coming.

  “What sort of person was he?” he asked vaguely.

  “Oh, well! Dum an Englishman, any way,” said Mason, in a tone of easy, sociable explanation.

  The scruple to which Staniford had been holding himself for the past four or five days seemed the most incredible of follies, — the most fantastic, the most cruel. He hurried back to the hotel; when he found Dunham coming out from the table d’hôte he was wild.

  “I have been the greatest fool in the world, Dunham,” he said. “I have let a quixotic quibble keep me from speaking when I ought to have spoken.”

  Dunham looked at him in stupefaction. “Where have you been?” he inquired.

  “Down to the ship. I was in hopes that she might be still there. But she’s gone.”

  “The Aroostook gone?”

  “Look here, Dunham,” cried Staniford, angrily, “this is the second time you’ve done that! If you are merely thick-witted, much can be forgiven to your infirmity; but if you’ve a mind to joke, let me tell you you choose your time badly.”

  “I’m not joking. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I may be thick-witted, as you say; or you may be scatter-witted,” said Dunham, indignantly. “What are you after, any way?”

  “What was my reason for not being explicit with her; for going away from her without one honest, manly, downright word; for sneaking off without telling her that she was more than life to me, and that if she cared for me as I cared for her I would go on with her to Venice, and meet her people with her?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” replied Dunham, vaguely. “We agreed that there would be a sort of — that she ought to be in their care before—”

  “Then I can tell you,” interrupted Staniford, “that we agreed upon the greatest piece of nonsense that ever was. A man can do no more than offer himself, and if he does less, after he’s tried everything to show that he’s in love with a woman, and to make her in love with him, he’s a scamp to refrain from a bad motive, and an ass to refrain from a good one. Why in the name of Heaven shouldn’t I have spoken, instead of leaving her to eat her heart out in wonder at my delay, and to doubt and suspect and dread — Oh!” he shouted, in supreme self-contempt.

  Dunham had nothing to urge in reply. He had fallen in with what he thought Staniford’s own mind in regard to the course he ought to take; since he had now changed his mind, there seemed never to have been any reason for that course.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “it isn’t too late yet to see her, I dare say. Let us go and find what time the trains leave for Venice.”

  “Do you suppose I can offer myself in the salle d’attente?” sneered Staniford. But he went with Dunham to the coffee-room, where they found the Osservatore Triestino and the time-table of the railroad. The last train left for Venice at ten, and it was now seven; the Austrian Lloyd steamer for Venice sailed at nine.

  “Pshaw!” said Staniford, and pushed the paper away. He sat brooding over the matter before the table on which the journals were scattered, while Dunham waited for him to speak. At last he said, “I can’t stand it; I must see her. I don’t know whether I told her I should come on to-morrow night or not. If she should be expecting me on Monday morning, and I should be delayed — Dunham, will you drive round with me to the Austrian Lloyd’s wharf? They may be going by the boat, and if they are they’ll have left their hotel. We’ll try the train later. I should like to find out if they are on board. I don’t know that I’ll try to speak with them; very likely not.”

  “I’ll go, certainly,” answered Dunham, cordially.

  “I’ll have some dinner first,” said Staniford. “I’m hungry.”

  It was quite dark when they drove on to the wharf at which the boat for Venice lay. When they arrived, a plan had occurred to Staniford, through the timidity which had already succeeded the boldness of his desperation. “Dunham,” he said, “I want you to go on board, and see if she’s there. I don’t think I could stand not finding her. Besides, if she’s cheerful and happy, perhaps I’d better not see her. You can come back and report. Confound it, you know, I should be so conscious before that infernal uncle of hers. You understand!”

  “Yes, yes,” returned Dunham, eager to serve Staniford in a case like this. “I’ll manage it.”

  “Well,” said Staniford, beginning to doubt the wisdom of either going aboard, “do it if you think best. I don’t know—”

  “Don’t know what?” asked Dunham, pausing in the door of the fiacre.

  “Oh, nothing, nothing! I hope we’re not making fools of ourselves.”

  “You’re morbid, old fellow!” said Dunham, gayly. He disappeared in the darkness, and Staniford waited, with set teeth, till he came back. He seemed a long time gone. When he returned, he stood holding fast to the open fiacre-door, without speaking.

  “Well!” cried Staniford, with bitter impatience.

  “Well what?” Dunham asked, in a stupid voice.

  “Were they there?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

  “Can’t tell, man? Did you go to see?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  A heavy sense of calamity descended upon Staniford’s heart, but pa
tience came with it. “What’s the matter, Dunham?” he asked, getting out tremulously.

  “I don’t know. I think I’ve had a fall, somewhere. Help me in.”

  Staniford got out and helped him gently to the seat, and then mounted beside him, giving the order for their return. “Where is your hat?” he asked, finding that Dunham was bareheaded.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Am I bleeding?”

  “It’s so dark, I can’t see.”

  “Put your hand here.” He carried Staniford’s hand to the back of his head.

  “There’s no blood; but you’ve had an ugly knock there.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Dunham. “I remember now; I slipped and struck my head.” He lapsed away in a torpor; Staniford could learn nothing more from him.

  The hurt was not what Staniford in his first anxiety had feared, but the doctor whom they called at the hotel was vague and guarded as to everything but the time and care which must be given in any event. Staniford despaired; but there was only one thing to do. He sat down beside his friend to take care of him.

  His mind was a turmoil of regrets, of anxieties, of apprehensions; but he had a superficial calmness that enabled him to meet the emergencies of the case. He wrote a letter to Lydia which he somehow knew to be rightly worded, telling her of the accident. In terms which conveyed to her all that he felt, he said that he should not see her at the time he had hoped, but promised to come to Venice as soon as he could quit his friend. Then, with a deep breath, he put that affair away for the time, and seemed to turn a key upon it.