Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Ford came home with a headache; when he woke, the next morning, the long window danced round the room before it settled to its proper place. He was not in the habit of being sick, and he suffered some days with this dizziness before he saw a doctor. Then he asked advice, because the sickness interfered with his work.

  “Go away somewhere,” said the doctor. “It’s indigestion. Get a change of air.”

  “Do you mean the sea-side?” asked Ford.

  “I don’t call that a change of air from Boston. Go to the hills.”

  Ford reflected a moment in disgust. He could have endured the sea-side. “Any particular direction?”

  “No. Go anywhere. Go to the White Mountains. Take a tramp through them.”

  “I’d rather take medicine,” said Ford. “Give me some medicine.”

  “Oh, I’ll give you all the medicine you want,” said the doctor; and he wrote him a prescription.

  Ford went home, and took his medicine with the same skepticism, and tried to keep about his work. The lectures which he had been attending were over long ago; but he had found a chance to do some study with a practical chemist which he was loath to forego; and he had his pot-boiling for the press. But his mind feebly relaxed from the demands upon it, and at last it refused to respond at all. He lingered a week longer in town before he would suffer himself to act upon the doctor’s advice, and when at last he forced himself to submission it was the end of the month. As regarded such matters he was a man of small invention, and he was at a loss how to go, when he had made up his mind to it. He would have been glad of Phillips’s determining counsel, but the time had now come for Phillips’s annual return to nature, and he would be far from Boston and the North Shore. On his way to buy a Guide, Ford saw in the window of a railroad agency the advertisement of a route to the White Mountains, and he advised with the ticket-agent, who took no more interest in the matter than Ford himself, about getting a ticket over his line. It led first to Portland, and then, as the agent indifferently pointed out on the map, went straight to the mountains, with a bold, broad sweep, while rival routes, in spidery crooks, zigzagged thither with a preposterous, almost wanton, indirectness. Ford stood sadly amusing himself, first with the immense advantage of this line over all competitors, and then with the names of the towns near Gorham in New Hampshire, and in the adjoining region of Maine: Milan, Berlin, Success, Byron, Madrid, Avon, New Vineyard, Peru, Norway, Sweden, Industry, Paris, Carthage, — names conjecturably given at hap-hazard, or in despair, or out of humorous recklessness, as names are given to dogs and horses. He wondered whether Dr. Boynton came from Byron or Carthage, or perhaps a little farther off, from Cornville or Solon. He stood so long before the map that the agent lost his patience, and turned to his books; and Ford came away at last without buying a ticket.

  At home he found a visitor whom his sick and dazzled eyes identified after a while as Phillips. “Hallo!” he said. “I thought you were somewhere in the country.”

  “Theoretically I am in the country,” Phillips admitted, “but practically ‘I am here,’ — as Ruy Blas says.” He neatly imitated the accent of the late Charles Fechter in pronouncing the words. “It occurred to me, before committing myself to the country irretrievably, that I would stop in Boston and try to commit you with me.”

  “Who told you I was sick?” asked Ford, with displeasure.

  “Nobody. If I knew it, I divined it. If you are sick, so much the better. My plan is just the thing for you. I am going to drive in a buggy to Brattleboro’, where I underwent the water cure — for my first passion. It was a great while ago. I want you to come, too.”

  Ford shook his head stupidly. “The doctor said the White Mountains.”

  “Yes, White Mountains, Green Mountains; it’s all one. It’s air that you ‘re after. All you want is change of air. This journey will make another man of you. It’s to be a journey for the sake of going and coming; and we will loiter or hurry on the way, just as we like. Come! I’ve planned it all out. It’s to be an affair of weeks. I propose to make it an exploration, — a voyage of discovery. I wish to form the acquaintance of my native State, and of those men and brethren, her children, who have never left the domestic hearth. You had better come. It will be literary material to you, and money in your pocket. I thought of striking for Egerton, and looking in on the Perhams there, first; but we ought to stop on our way at Sudbury to see the Wayside Inn; and I must deflect a little to show you Concord, and the local history and philosophy; there are Shakers and all sorts of novelties at Vardley and Harshire; beyond Egerton is Princeton, with its Wachusett Mountain; and after that there is anything northwestwardly that you like; I haven’t the map by me. My mare is pining on the second floor of her stable, and would ask nothing better than to form a third in our party.”

  “Oh, I’ll go with you,” said Ford listlessly.

  “Good!” cried Phillips. “This is the fire of youth. If we get sick of it, we can send the mare back from any given point, and take to the rails. That is one of the advantages of having rails. It makes travel by the country roads a luxury, and not a necessary. I fancy we shall feel almost wicked in the pursuit of our journey, — it will be such unalloyed pleasure.”

  Phillips’s mare was the remains of an establishment which he had set up some years before. It had included a man and a coupé, and he had relinquished these because of their expensiveness. The man, especially, had been unable to combine the advantages of outside man and inside man; he made Phillips’s lodgings smell of the mare, and he made the stable smell of Phillips’s wine. The man was paid off and sent away, and the coupe was sold at auction; but with a conservative unthrift that curiously combined with his frugal instincts, Phillips had suffered the mare to linger on his hands. Sometimes he took her out for exercise from the club stable, where he had lodged her; but he had intervals of forgetfulness, in which the club-groom found it his duty to warn him that the mare’s legs were swelling. She was consequently boarded out of town a good deal, and Phillips awoke to her possession only when the farmers’ bills came in. At these times he said he should sell that mare.

  Like men who are rarely out of sorts, Ford was eager to be well at once, and he chafed under Phillips’s delays in getting off. But the latter, having secured Ford’s company, began to arrange the details of their journey with minuteness, and it was several days before they started. Their progress had then even more than the promised slowness. Phillips was intent not only upon the pleasure of the journey, but also upon the search for colonial bric-a-brac, and this began as soon as they struck the real country beyond the suburban villages. All that was colonial was to his purpose, from tall standing clocks to the coarsest cracked blue delft: spinning-wheels, andirons, shovels and tongs, clawfooted furniture, battered pewter plates, door-latches and door-knockers, tin lanterns, fiddle-back chairs — his craze generously embraced them all. He did not buy much, but he talked as long over what he left as what he took. He was not the first connoisseur who had visited these farm-houses; the people sometimes knew the worth of their wares; in certain cases, he traced the earlier presence of rival collectors whom he knew. Ford had nothing to do but to note the growth of the bargaining passion in the wary farm-wives. There were some who would sell nothing, and some had nothing they would not sell, and they asked too much or too little with the same simplicity. What most struck him was the entire rusticity of their thought and life. Off the lines of railroad, and out of the localities frequented by summer boarders, the people were as rural, within fifteen or twenty miles of Boston, as they would have been among the Vermont or New Hampshire hills. But the country was itself occasionally very wild, especially as they got southward in Sudbury, among overflowed meadows and long stretches of solitary pine woods. The sparse farmhouses and the lonesome villages afflicted him with the remembrance of his own youth; whatever his life had been since, it had not been embittered with the sense of hopeless endeavor, with the galled pride, with the angry ambition, which had once made it a torment i
n such places. But when they chanced upon some bit of absolute wilderness his heart relented towards the country; his jealous spirit found no more intrusion there than in the town; and he liked the wild odors, the tangle of vegetation, the life of the sylvan things. A hawk winging to covert under the avenging pursuit of small birds, a woodchuck lumpislily skurrying across an open field, the chase of chipmucks and squirrels along the walls, were sights that touched a remote and deep tenderness in his breast. As they drew near the old inn, which was the first monument Phillips had proposed to inspect, it was late in the afternoon, and the landscape grew more consolingly savage. No other house was near enough to be seen, and they approached the storied mansion through a long stretch of pine and sand, by a road which must be lonelier now than it was a hundred years ago. They dismounted under the elm before the vast yellow hostelry, and explored its rambling chambers: they saw Lafayette’s room and Washington’s room; the attic for the slaves and common folk; the quaint ball-room; the bar; the parlor where Longfellow and his friends used to sit before the fire that forever warms the rhyme celebrating the Wayside Inn. They found it not an inn any more, though it appeared from the assent of the tenant that they might command an elusive hospitality for the night. The back-door opened upon the fading memories of a garden, and the damp of late rains struck from it into the sad old house.

  “It would be delightful,” Phillips said, “to stay, but I think we must push on to Sudbury for the night.” He lingered over an old chest of drawers in the dining-room; not claw-footed, certainly, but with a bulging front, and with some fragmentary relics of its former brasses. But, “It has carried antiquity to the point where it ceases to be a virtue,” he sighed at last. “It might be re-created; it couldn’t be restored.”

  At Sudbury Village they found that there was no inn; though provision was occasionally made for wayfarers at the outlying farm-houses. They could be lodged in that way, or they could return for the night to the tavern at Way land where they had dined. It was now twilight. “I think it will give an agreeable flavor of hardship to our adventure if we push on to Concord,” said Phillips, and Ford willingly consented. They were no better assorted than ever in their strange companionship; but they had a good deal of talk. Phillips was volubly philosophical; and Ford, under the stimulus of the novelty, was more than commonly responsive, and pointed his comment, as was very unusual in him, with bits of his own history and observation. But the next day, after looking over Concord together, and making their start upon an early dinner, they had almost as little to say to each other as the tramps they met on the road, who had the air of not wishing to be disturbed in their meditations upon burglary and arson. They gave up their plan of stopping over night with the Harshire Shakers, and pushed on as far as Vardley instead, where they trusted to finding shelter in the community. They could spend the next morning there, Phillips said, and dine at Egerton; and Ford assented to anything.

  XVII.

  Boynton had passed the night wandering up and down the roads, and trying to puzzle out the causes of his discomfiture. Towards morning he had gone as far as the Elm Tavern and walked to and fro before it a long time, debating whether he should go in and confront the landlord with his lie. The house was brilliantly lighted upon one side, where there seemed to be a hall running its whole length, and a sound of clattering feet and laughing voices, mingled with the half-suppressed squeak of a fiddle, came out of the open windows. It was the landlord who was fiddling; Boynton recognized his tones in the harsh voice that called out the figures of the dance. From time to time a panting couple came to the door for breath. Several women came together, presently, and catching sight of Boynton, as he lurked in the shadow of the elms, one of them called out, “Lord, girls, there’s a ghost!” and they all fled in-doors again with hysterical cries and laughter. The word thrilled him with hope: what he had declared in regard to the phenomena there must be matter of general belief in the neighborhood. He stole away, borne forward as if on air by the tumult of cogitation that inflated his brain. He found himself, he knew not how, again on the long street of the Shaker village. The day was breaking, when he sat down near the granite bowl, still struggling hopefully for a clue to the mystery of his failure. His waking dreams began to mix with those of sleep, and an hour later Ford and Phillips, roused by a common foreboding of early breakfast, and strolling down the road a little for a glimpse of the village and a breath of the fresh morning air, halted at sight of this strange figure, clothed in Shaker habiliments, and with the broad-brimmed Shaker hat on the grass at its feet; the eyes were closed, and the head rested against the trunk of one of the willows. A chilly horror crept over Ford, who whispered, “Is he dead?” but Phillips had no emotion save utter astonishment.

  “Great heavens!” he cried. “It’s Dr. Boynton!”

  At the sound of his name, Boynton opened his eyes with a start, and sprang to his feet. He recognized them instantly, but he took no heed of Phillips as he launched himself upon Ford.

  “You here! You here! You here!” he screamed. “Now I understand! Now I see! Where were you last night? Were you in this place, this neighborhood, this region? I see it! I know why we failed, — why we were put to shame, destroyed, annihilated, in the very hour of our triumph! I might have thought of it! I might have known you were here! Did you hunt us up? Did you follow us? You have ruined me! You have blasted my life!”

  With whatever wild impulse, he caught at Ford’s throat, and clung to his collar, while the young man’s iron clutch tightened upon either of his wrists.

  “Let go, you maniac! If you don’t let go, I’ll” —

  Boynton flung up his hands, and reeling several steps backward, fell. He struck heavily against the sharp rim of the stone bowl, and seemed about to fall into the water, but dropped at the base, motionless.

  “My God, you’ve killed him!” shouted Phillips, as he stepped out from behind one of the trees.

  “Go and get help!” Ford fell on his knees beside Boynton, and searched his breast with a trembling hand for the beating of his heart; he put his ear to his mouth, and heard him breathe before he dipped his hand in the bowl, and dashed Boynton’s face with the water. He was kneeling beside him, and lifting his head upon his arm, when he looked up and saw the anxious visages of those whom Phillips’s clamors had summoned about them. Then Egeria had made her way through the circle. She pushed Ford away with an awful look and stooping over her father caught up his head in her arms, and now swiftly scanned his face, and now swiftly pressed it against her breast, in those shuddering impulses with which a mother will see and will not see if her child be hurt.

  The Shakers pushed a wagon down to the place where Boynton lay, and Ford afterward remembered helping to lift him into it.

  “I’m glad you didn’t strike him; I thought at first you had,” said Phillips, as they followed the wagon back to the village.

  “So did I,” said Ford, mentally struggling to realize what had happened.

  “What are they going to do, I wonder?” resumed Phillips, looking about him. “They ought to send for a doctor.”

  “Yee,” said a Shaker at his elbow, whom neither of them had noticed, “we have sent.”

  The doctor came quickly; and Boynton, whom they had got into the infirmary upon the bed where Egeria had lain sick, began to show signs of consciousness. From time to time, scraps of hopeful report were passed through the group outside to Ford and Phillips on its skirts. When the doctor reappeared at last from within the infirmary, the brothers and sisters by twos and threes waylaid him in the yard and the street with anxious demand. The young men walking apart ambushed him farther down the road.

  “It’s a faint — I can’t tell what it’s complicated with. He received some contusions in his fall — about the head. He’s an elderly man. He’s stout.”

  “Do you mean that he’s in danger?” Ford asked.

  “Well, these apoplectic seizures are serious things for any one after thirty. Still it’s a slight attack —— compar
atively. The contusions — I’m obliged to leave him for another patient just now. I shall be back again directly. Which of you is Mr. Ford?”

  “My name is Ford.”

  “He wanted to know where you were. You a friend of his?”

  “No. I met him in Boston this spring.”

  “Know his friends?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Get up!” said the doctor to his horse.

  “If we knew any of his people,” said Phillips, “I suppose we ought to telegraph.”

  “Yes,” assented Ford.

  “But, as we don’t know them,” continued Phillips, “what are we going to do?”

  “I can’t say.” When they reached the office on their walk back, Ford went in, and left Phillips to get their horse put to. In a little while he came out again, and said abruptly, “I’m going to stay here. I can’t say that I am responsible for the misfortunes of this man, but somehow I am entangled with him, and I can’t break away without playing the brute. I’ve been talking with these people about Boynton. He’s been trying some of his experiments here, and has failed. The thing happened last night, and I suppose that when he saw me, this morning, his mind recurred to his old delusion that I had something to do with his failure.”

  “I imagined as much,” said Phillips, “from a remark that he made.”