Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, I did care for you!” she broke out. “You know I did—”

  He was instantly across the room, beside her. “Yes, yes, I know it!” But she shrank away.

  “You tried to make me believe you cared for me, by everything you could do. And I did believe you then; and yes, I believed you afterwards, when I didn’t know what to believe. You were the one true thing in the world to me. But it seems that you didn’t believe it yourself.”

  “That I didn’t believe it myself? That I — I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You took a week to think it over! I have had a week, too, and I have thought it over, too. You have come too late.”

  “Too late? You don’t, you can’t, mean — Listen to me, Lydia; I want to tell you—”

  “No, there is nothing you can tell me that would change me. I know it, I understand it all.”

  “But you don’t understand what kept me.”

  “I don’t wish to know what made you break your word. I don’t care to know. I couldn’t go back and feel as I did to you. Oh, that’s gone! It isn’t that you did not come — that you made me wait and suffer; but you knew how it would be with me after I got here, and all the things I should find out, and how I should feel! And you stayed away! I don’t know whether I can forgive you, even; oh, I’m afraid I don’t; but I can never care for you again. Nothing but a case of life and death—”

  “It was a case of life and death!”

  Lydia stopped in her reproaches, and looked at him with wistful doubt, changing to a tender fear.

  “Oh, have you been hurt? Have you been sick?” she pleaded, in a breaking voice, and made some unconscious movement toward him. He put out his hand, and would have caught one of hers, but she clasped them in each other.

  “No, not I, — Dunham—”

  “Oh!” said Lydia, as if this were not at all enough.

  “He fell and struck his head, the night you left. I thought he would die.” Staniford reported his own diagnosis, not the doctor’s; but he was perhaps in the right to do this. “I had made him go down to the wharf with me; I wanted to see you again, before you started, and I thought we might find you on the boat.” He could see her face relenting; her hands released each other. “He was delirious till yesterday. I couldn’t leave him.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you write to me?” She ignored Dunham as completely as if he had never lived. “You knew that I—” Her voice died away, and her breast rose.

  “I did write—”

  “But how, — I never got it.”

  “No, — it was not posted, through a cruel blunder. And then I thought — I got to thinking that you didn’t care—”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “Could you doubt me?”

  “You doubted me,” said Staniford, seizing his advantage. “I brought the letter with me to prove my truth.” She did not look at him, but she took the letter, and ran it greedily into her pocket. “It’s well I did so, since you don’t believe my word.”

  “Oh, yes, — yes, I know it,” she said; “I never doubted it!” Staniford stood bemazed, though he knew enough to take the hands she yielded him; but she suddenly caught them away again, and set them against his breast. “I was very wrong to suspect you ever; I’m sorry I did; but there’s something else. I don’t know how to say what I want to say. But it must be said.”

  “Is it something disagreeable?” asked Staniford, lightly.

  “It’s right,” answered Lydia, unsmilingly.

  “Oh, well, don’t say it!” he pleaded; “or don’t say it now, — not till you’ve forgiven me for the anxiety I’ve caused you; not till you’ve praised me for trying to do what I thought the right thing. You can’t imagine how hard it was for one who hasn’t the habit!”

  “I do praise you for it. There’s nothing to forgive you; but I can’t let you care for me unless I know — unless” — She stopped, and then, “Mr. Staniford,” she began firmly, “since I came here, I’ve been learning things that I didn’t know before. They have changed the whole world to me, and it can never be the same again.”

  “I’m sorry for that; but if they haven’t changed you, the world may go.”

  “No, not if we’re to live in it,” answered the girl, with the soberer wisdom women keep at such times. “It will have to be known how we met. What will people say? They will laugh.”

  “I don’t think they will in my presence,” said Staniford, with swelling nostrils. “They may use their pleasure elsewhere.”

  “And I shouldn’t care for their laughing, either,” said Lydia. “But oh, why did you come?”

  “Why did I come?”

  “Was it because you felt bound by anything that’s happened, and you wouldn’t let me bear the laugh alone? I’m not afraid for myself. I shall never blame you. You can go perfectly free.”

  “But I don’t want to go free!”

  Lydia looked at him with piercing earnestness. “Do you think I’m proud?” she asked.

  “Yes, I think you are,” said Staniford, vaguely.

  “It isn’t for myself that I should be proud with other people. But I would rather die than bring ridicule upon one I — upon you.”

  “I can believe that,” said Staniford, devoutly, and patiently reverencing the delay of her scruples.

  “And if — and—” Her lips trembled, but she steadied her trembling voice. “If they laughed at you, and thought of me in a slighting way because—” Staniford gave a sort of roar of grief and pain to know how her heart must have been wrung before she could come to this. “You were all so good that you didn’t let me think there was anything strange about it—”

  “Oh, good heavens! We only did what it was our precious and sacred privilege to do! We were all of one mind about it from the first. But don’t torture yourself about it, my darling. It’s over now; it’s past — no, it’s present, and it will always be, forever, the dearest and best thing in life Lydia, do you believe that I love you?”

  “Oh, I must!”

  “And don’t you believe that I’m telling you the truth when I say that I wouldn’t, for all the world can give or take, change anything that’s been?”

  “Yes, I do believe you. Oh, I haven’t said at all what I wanted to say! There was a great deal that I ought to say. I can’t seem to recollect it.”

  He smiled to see her grieving at this recreance of her memory to her conscience. “Well, you shall have a whole lifetime to recall it in.”

  “No, I must try to speak now. And you must tell me the truth now, — no matter what it costs either of us.” She laid her hands upon his extended arms, and grasped them intensely. “There’s something else. I want to ask you what you thought when you found me alone on that ship with all of you.” If she had stopped at this point, Staniford’s cause might have been lost, but she went on: “I want to know whether you were ever ashamed of me, or despised me for it; whether you ever felt that because I was helpless and friendless there, you had the right to think less of me than if you had first met me here in this house.”

  It was still a terrible question, but it offered a loop-hole of escape, which Staniford was swift to seize. Let those who will justify the answer with which he smiled into her solemn eyes: “I will leave you to say.” A generous uncandor like this goes as far with a magnanimous and serious-hearted woman as perhaps anything else.

  “Oh, I knew it, I knew it!” cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to him at last, “Oh — oh — are you sure it’s right?”

  “I have no doubt of it,” answered Staniford. Nor had he any question of the strategy through which he had triumphed in this crucial test. He may have thought that there were always explanations that had to be made afterwards, or he may have believed that he had expiated in what he had done and suffered for her any slight which he had felt; possibly, he considered that she had asked more than she had a right to do. It is certain that he said with every appearance of sincerity, “It began the moment I saw you on the wharf, there, and when I came to k
now my mind I kept it from you only till I could tell you here. But now I wish I hadn’t! Life is too short for such a week as this.”

  “No,” said Lydia, “you acted for the best, and you are — good.”

  “I’ll keep that praise till I’ve earned it,” answered Staniford.

  XXVII.

  In the Campo Santi Apostoli at Venice there stands, a little apart from the church of that name, a chapel which has been for many years the place of worship for the Lutheran congregation. It was in this church that Staniford and Lydia were married six weeks later, before the altar under Titian’s beautiful picture of Christ breaking bread.

  The wedding was private, but it was not quite a family affair. Miss Hibbard had come down with her mother from Dresden, to complete Dunham’s cure, and she was there with him perfectly recovered; he was not quite content, of course, that the marriage should not take place in the English chapel, but he was largely consoled by the candles burning on the altar. The Aroostook had been delayed by repairs which were found necessary at Trieste, and Captain Jenness was able to come over and represent the ship at the wedding ceremony, and at the lunch which followed. He reserved till the moment of parting a supreme expression of good-will. When he had got a hand of Lydia’s and one of Staniford’s in each of his, with his wrists crossed, he said, “Now, I ain’t one to tack round, and stand off and on a great deal, but what I want to say is just this: the Aroostook sails next week, and if you two are a mind to go back in her, the ship’s yours, as I said to Miss Blood, here, — I mean Mis’ Staniford; well, I hain’t had much time to get used to it! — when she first come aboard there at Boston. I don’t mean any pay; I want you to go back as my guests. You can use the cabin for your parlor; and I promise you I won’t take any other passengers this time. I declare,” said Captain Jenness, lowering his voice, and now referring to Hicks for the first time since the day of his escapade, “I did feel dreadful about that fellow!”

  “Oh, never mind,” replied Staniford. “If it hadn’t been for Hicks perhaps I mightn’t have been here.” He exchanged glances with his wife, that showed they had talked all that matter over.

  The captain grew confidential. “Mr. Mason told me he saw you lending that chap money. I hope he didn’t give you the slip?”

  “No; it came to me here at Blumenthals’ the other day.”

  “Well, that’s right! It all worked together for good, as you say. Now you come!”

  “What do you say, my dear?” asked Staniford, on whom the poetic fitness of the captain’s proposal had wrought.

  Women are never blinded by romance, however much they like it in the abstract. “It’s coming winter. Do you think you wouldn’t be seasick?” returned the bride of an hour, with the practical wisdom of a matron.

  Staniford laughed. “She’s right, captain. I’m no sailor. I’ll get home by the all-rail route as far as I can.”

  Captain Jenness threw back his head, and laughed too. “Good! That’s about it.” And he released their hands, so as to place one hairy paw on a shoulder of each. “You’ll get along together, I guess.”

  “But we’re just as much obliged to you as if we went, Captain Jenness. And tell all the crew that I’m homesick for the Aroostook, and thank all for being so kind to me; and I thank you, Captain Jenness!” Lydia looked at her husband, and then startled the captain with a kiss.

  He blushed all over, but carried it off as boldly as he could. “Well, well,” he said, “that’s right! If you change your minds before the Aroostook sails, you let me know.”

  This affair made a great deal of talk in Venice, where the common stock of leisure is so great that each person may without self-reproach devote a much larger share of attention to the interests of the others than could be given elsewhere. The decorous fictions in which Mrs. Erwin draped the singular facts of the acquaintance and courtship of Lydia and Staniford were what unfailingly astonished and amused him, and he abetted them without scruple. He found her worldliness as innocent as the unworldliness of Lydia, and he gave Mrs. Erwin his hearty sympathy when she ingenuously owned that the effort to throw dust in the eyes of her European acquaintance was simply killing her. He found endless refreshment in the contemplation of her attitude towards her burdensome little world, and in her reasons for enslaving herself to it. He was very good friends with both of the Erwins. When he could spare the time from Lydia, he went about with her uncle in his boat, and respected his skill in rowing it without falling overboard. He could not see why any one should be so much interested in the American character and dialect as Mr. Erwin was; but he did not object, and he reflected that after all they were not what their admirer supposed them.

  The Erwins came with the Stanifords as far as Paris on their way home, and afterwards joined them in California, where Staniford bought a ranch, and found occupation if not profit in its management. Once cut loose from her European ties, Mrs. Erwin experienced an incomparable repose and comfort in the life of San Francisco; it was, she declared, the life for which she had really been adapted, after all; and in the climate of Santa Barbara she found all that she had left in Italy. In that land of strange and surprising forms of every sort, her husband has been very happy in the realization of an America surpassing even his wildest dreams, and he has richly stored his note-book with philological curiosities. He hears around him the vigorous and imaginative locutions of the Pike language, in which, like the late Canon Kingsley, he finds a Scandinavian hugeness; and pending the publication of his Hand-Book of Americanisms, he is in confident search of the miner who uses his pronouns cockney-wise. Like other English observers, friendly and unfriendly, he does not permit the facts to interfere with his preconceptions.

  Staniford’s choice long remained a mystery to his acquaintances, and was but partially explained by Mrs. Dunham, when she came home. “Why, I suppose he fell in love with her,” she said. “Of course, thrown together that way, as they were, for six weeks, it might have happened to anybody; but James Staniford was always the most consummate flirt that breathed; and he never could see a woman, without coming up, in that metaphysical way of his, and trying to interest her in him. He was always laughing at women, but there never was a man who cared more for them. From all that I could learn from Charles, he began by making fun of her, and all at once he became perfectly infatuated with her. I don’t see why. I never could get Charles to tell me anything remarkable that she said or did. She was simply a country girl, with country ideas, and no sort of cultivation. Why, there was nothing to her. He’s done the wisest thing he could by taking her out to California. She never would have gone down, here. I suppose James Staniford knew that as well as any of us; and if he finds it worth while to bury himself with her there, we’ve no reason to complain. She did sing, wonderfully; that is, her voice was perfectly divine. But of course that’s all over, now. She didn’t seem to care much for it; and she really knew so little of life that I don’t believe she could form the idea of an artistic career, or feel that it was any sacrifice to give it up. James Staniford was not worth any such sacrifice; but she couldn’t know that either. She was good, I suppose. She was very stiff, and she hadn’t a word to say for herself. I think she was cold. To be sure, she was a beauty; I really never saw anything like it, — that pale complexion some brunettes have, with her hair growing low, and such eyes and lashes!”

  “Perhaps the beauty had something to do with his falling in love with her,” suggested a listener. The ladies present tried to look as if this ought not to be sufficient.

  “Oh, very likely,” said Mrs. Dunham. She added, with an air of being the wreck of her former self, “But we all know what becomes of beauty after marriage.”

  The mind of Lydia’s friends had been expressed in regard to her marriage, when the Stanifords, upon their arrival home from Europe, paid a visit to South Bradfield. It was in the depths of the winter following their union, and the hill country, stern and wild even in midsummer, wore an aspect of savage desolation. It was sheeted in heavy snow
, through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut shrill across the white wastes, and from the crests of the billowed drifts drove a scud of stinging particles in their faces, while the sun, as high as that of Italy, coldly blazed from a cloudless blue sky. Ezra Perkins, perched on the seat before them, stiff and silent as if he were frozen there, drove them from Bradfield Junction to South Bradfield in the long wagon-body set on bob-sleds, with which he replaced his Concord coach in winter. At the station he had sparingly greeted Lydia, as if she were just back from Greenfield, and in the interest of personal independence had ignored a faint motion of hers to shake hands; at her grandfather’s gate, he set his passengers down without a word, and drove away, leaving Staniford to get in his trunk as he might.

  “Well, I declare,” said Miss Maria, who had taken one end of the trunk in spite of him, and was leading the way up through the path cleanly blocked out of the snow, “that Ezra Perkins is enough to make you wish he’d stayed in Dakoty!”

  Staniford laughed, as he had laughed at everything on the way from the station, and had probably thus wounded Ezra Perkins’s susceptibilities. The village houses, separated so widely by the one long street, each with its path neatly tunneled from the roadway to the gate; the meeting-house, so much vaster than the present needs of worship, and looking blue-cold with its never-renewed single coat of white paint; the graveyard set in the midst of the village, and showing, after Ezra Perkins’s disappearance, as many signs of life as any other locality, realized in the most satisfactory degree his theories of what winter must be in such a place as South Bradfield. The burning smell of the sheet-iron stove in the parlor, with its battlemented top of filigree iron work; the grimness of the horsehair-covered best furniture; the care with which the old-fashioned fire-places had been walled up, and all accessible character of the period to which the house belonged had been effaced, gave him an equal pleasure. He went about with his arm round Lydia’s waist, examining these things, and yielding to the joy they caused him, when they were alone. “Oh, my darling,” he said, in one of these accesses of delight, “when I think that it’s my privilege to take you away from all this, I begin to feel not so very unworthy, after all.”