Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Ford frowned at the levity, and then continued. “That’s all. I’ve explained to their head men, here, as well as I could, what relation he fancied I had to him, and they understood it better than I could have expected; they’ve seen enough of him to understand that his superstition about me would account for the assault. I’m not bound to respect his mania, but I don’t see how I can leave till I know how it goes with him.” Phillips shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing. “The Shakers tell me that I can be lodged at a house of theirs down the road here. I must stay, and be of what use I can, though I don’t know what. I’ll come away when I can do so decently.” —

  “Oh, if you ‘re going in for decency,” said Phillips, “I’ve nothing to say. But that sort of thing can be carried too far, you know. Do you really mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then there’s nothing for me to say. But what do you expect me to do?” he asked, glancing at the horse, which was now brought up.

  “I expect you to go on. There’s no reason why you should stay.”

  “No, I can’t see how I’m involved. And it’s a brisk drive to Egerton, — and breakfast. There’s no prospect of breakfast here, I suppose,” he said, looking wistfully at the office windows. “Well; if you’ve made up your mind, I shall be off at once. I’m sorry for our excursion.”

  “Yes, it’s a pity for that,” said Ford.

  “It promised everything. Perhaps you could join me at Egerton, to-morrow?”

  “Yes; if I can.”

  “I’ll give you day’s grace. Then I shall push on to Brattleboro’, and perhaps drop down this way with the falling leaf. I wish you’d write to me at Brattleboro’, and let me know how the doctor gets on.” —

  They shook hands. Ford pulled his bag out of the back of his wagon; and as Phillips drove off, he set out under the guidance of one of the brothers, to find his quarters in the house of which he had spoken. It had been the dwelling of a family of Shakers, which in the decay of their numbers was absorbed into the other branches of the community, and it stood half a mile away from the office, quite empty, but kept in perfect neatness and repair. He was given his choice of its many dormitories, but he preferred to have his bed set up in the meeting-room, which opened by folding-doors into an ante-room as large, and thus extended the whole length of the building. It was low ceiled, but cool currents of air swept through it from the windows at either end, and it was a still haven of refuge from the heat by night and by day. Hardly a fly sang in its expanse, dimmed by the shade of the elms before it; and it was indescribably remote from noise. The passing even of an ox-cart on the street before it was hushed by the thick bed of sand that silenced the road-way; and the heavy voice of the driver in hawing and geeing came like some lulling sound of animal life. A tenant of the Shakers lived in a farm-house across the way, and his wife had agreed to give Ford his meals and bestow what care his room needed; but these people were childless, and except for the plaintive lament of their broods of young turkeys pursuing the grasshoppers through the ranks of sweet-corn, their presence involved hardly an interruption of the quiet.

  Ford hung up some clothes in a closet, and after a hurried breakfast went again to the office. He found Boynton’s doctor there with Humphrey and the sisters, and presently Egeria came in from another room with a slip of paper in her hand; her eyes were swollen with weeping, but she said in a low, steady voice, “This is grandfather’s address.”

  “I don’t want you to feel,” said the doctor, “that the case is immediately alarming. There is no necessity for your grandfather’s coming” —

  “Oh, no! But I know that he would like to be told.” She gave the slip of paper to Humphrey, and without looking at Ford went out at the door, and he saw her cross the street to the infirmary. There was some talk as to how this dispatch should be sent, and Ford said he was going over to the village, and would carry it to the operator at the station. Outside, the doctor beckoned to him from his buggy, and said, “He has asked again if you were here. If he wishes to see you, you had better let him. Humphrey has told me what you explained to him. You can humor a sick man’s whim, I suppose.”

  Ford really had another errand at Vardley; he wanted some ink and paper; for if he were to remain he must set to work as soon as possible. It was noon before he returned. With the lapse of time, that working mind, of which the operations are so obscure and incalculable, had unconsciously arranged its material in him, and when he sat down in his strange lodging he was able to put it all on paper, in spite of the remote, dull ache of anxiety which accompanied his writing.

  His tea was ready by the time the work was done, but with the revival of his restlessness, upon the conclusion of his task and the release of the faculties devoted to it, he slighted the meal, and hastily started with his copy to the post-office.

  He was met there by the telegraph operator, who asked him to carry back to the Shakers the reply to the telegram he had sent. He saw that he must be already identified with the Boyntons in the village gossip; but he did not observe the kindly interest expressed in some words dropped by the operator, as he put the dispatch into his pocket, and walked away with it.

  There was a light in Humphrey’s room at the office when he returned, and he carried the telegram in to him, and waited while the Shaker brought his lamp to bear upon the sheet. Humphrey remained reading it as if it were a long, closely-written letter.

  “You don’t know what it says?” he asked at last, looking up over his spectacles.

  “Why, no,” said Ford. “I had no authority to open it.”

  “I thought may be the telegrapher might told ye. It appears as if Friend Boynton’s father-in-law had been dead two months.”

  The dispatch, which Humphrey handed to Ford, was signed by “Rev. Frederick Armstrong,” who promised that he “would write.”

  “I suppose,” said Humphrey, “it’s the minister.”

  “I suppose so,” Ford admitted absently. He came to himself to ask, “What’s to be done?” Humphrey scratched his head. “I d’ know as I’m rightly prepared to say. You don’t know nothin’ about Friend Boynton’s other folks, do ye?”

  “No,” said Ford.

  Another silence followed. “Seems to come kind o’ hard, right on top of the other Providence,” mused Humphrey, aloud. “Would it be your judgment to tell ‘em?”

  “Really, I don’t know,” said Ford, quite unable to shake off his sterile dismay.

  “You don’t feel,” suggested Humphrey, “as if you’d like to break the news to ‘em?”

  “I doubt,” answered Ford, glad to be able to lay hold of any idea, “whether Dr. Boynton is in a condition to know even that we’ve telegraphed, much less what the answer is.”

  “Yee,” assented Humphrey, “that is so. Then it comes to tellin’ Egery. If you was an old friend of the family” —

  “I’m not,” said Ford. “I told you that I saw them for the first time in Boston, this spring. Why need you say anything at all?”

  “Why,” returned Humphrey, with a gleam of hope, “I s’pose, if she asks, we’ll have to.”

  “She may not ask at once. Don’t speak till she does.”

  “That’s so,” mused Humphrey. “It could be done that way. I d’ know as anybody could say they was deceived, either.”

  Certainly not.”

  Humphrey put the telegram into a drawer and turned the key upon it. “She can have it when she asks for it,” he said doggedly, like a man who has made up his mind to accept the consequences of his transgression.

  Ford drew a long breath; a little time had been gained, at any rate. “Can I be of any use over there to-night?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the infirmary. “Have you watchers?”

  “Yee: Laban’s settin’ up with him, to-night; and Frances is there with Egery.”

  “If he asks for me,” said Ford, “I should like you to call me at any hour.”

  He went out, and walked down the dark, silent, road to his stran
ge domicile. Hearing him approach, the farmer came across the road, and opened the door for him, and gave him matches to light his lamp. He found his way to his vast chamber; but after he had blown out his light, it was long before he slept.

  XVIII.

  The next morning, while Ford sat, after breakfast, at his writing-table, trying to put his mind upon his work, one of the little Shaker boys came to say that Friend Boynton wished to see him. He obeyed the summons with a stricture at the heart. The boy could not say whether Boynton was better or worse, but Ford conceived that he was called in a final moment. He had never seen any one die, and all through his childhood and his earlier youth the thought of death had been agony to him, probably because it was related to fears of the life after death, which survived in his blood after they ceased to be part of his belief. The confirmed health of his adolescence, as well as his accepted theories of existence, had now for years quieted these fears. The sleep and the forgetting which the future had been reasoned so clearly to be could not be terrible to any man of good health, and in the rare moments in which he lifted his mind from the claims of duty here it reposed tranquilly enough in the logical refuge of nullity provided for it. Annihilation was not dreadful, but the instant preceding it, the last breath of consciousness, in which his personality should be called to cease, to release its strong clutch upon reality, might contain a spiritual anguish, to which an eternity of theologically fancied pangs were nothing. He did not shrink from the consequences of his own mental position; there could be no consequences of belief or disbelief; but he was cold with the thought of confronting the image of his own dissolution in another. Life was not a good, he knew that; but he felt now that it was something, and beyond it there was not even evil. He touched first the swelling muscle of one arm, and then of the other; he laid his hand upon the trunk of a large maple as he passed; he swept the sky with a glance; he smiled to find himself behaving like a man on his way to execution; if he had himself been about to die, he could not have realized more intensely the preciousness of the existence which was slipping into shadow from the grasp of yonder stricken man.

  If his face expressed anything of this dark sympathy when he entered the room where Boynton lay, the sick man did not see it. His doctor was there, seated at the bedside, and Boynton lifted one of the limp hands that lay upon the coverlet and gave it to Ford, saying, with his blandness diluted by physical debility, “You’ll excuse my sending for you, Mr. Ford, but I fancied that you would like to see that I was not in such bad case as I might be.”

  “You are very good,” said Ford, touching his hand, and then taking the chair which the country doctor set for him. The exchange of civilities relieved the tension of his feelings, and he found it no longer possible to regard Boynton with the solemnity with which he had approached him.

  “Dr. Wilson and I,” Boynton continued, “are treating my case together. By that means we draw the sting of the old proverb about having a fool for one’s patient, and we get the benefit of our combined experience. The doctor is inclined to take an optimistic view of my condition, which I don’t find myself able to share. I have spent a summer —— I may almost say a year — of intense excitements, and I am sure that an obscure affection of the heart with which I was once troubled has made progress.” He spoke of it with a courteous lightness and haste, as if not to annoy his listener, while Ford gazed at him dumbly. “I have been anxious to say that I regretted the expressions — the exasperation — into which I was betrayed on first meeting you, the other morning.” Dr. Wilson rose. “Ah! Going, doctor?” asked Boynton. “Don’t let me send you away. Mr. Ford and I have no confidences to make each other. I am only offering him the reparation which is due between gentlemen where there has been a misunderstanding.”

  “Thank you,” said Dr. Wilson, “I must go, now. I will see you again to-morrow.”

  “And in the mean time we will continue the same treatment? Good-morning, doctor. Dr. Wilson,” he added, when the latter had withdrawn, “is a man of uncommon qualifications for his profession. I have been much pleased with the manner in which he has taken hold of my case, though we could not agree in all points of our diagnosis.” Boynton’s voice was feeble, and from time to time he paused from weakness; but he was careful as ever to round his sentences and polish his diction. “As I was saying,” he continued, “I used certain expressions for which I wish to apologize.”

  “There is no occasion for that,” Ford began.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, but there is!” retorted the other. “My language, even in view of your possible intention of antagonizing me, was ridiculous and unjustifiable; for I ought to have been only too glad of the solution of a painful mystery which your presence afforded me. The fact is,” he explained, “I met you yesterday after the entire failure of an experiment in psychology which I had been making here under conditions more favorable than I could expect to recur if I should live a thousand years. The experiment was by no means of an advanced character; it was of the simplest character, — the exhibition of a few of the most ordinary phenomena of animal magnetism, in which mere tyros succeed. The failure dumfounded me. At sight of you, my theory of your opposite control, of the necessary antagonism of your sphere, rushed into my mind, and I yielded to an impulse to resent my failure, when I ought, logically, to have hailed your presence as relief, as rescue from an annihilating despair.” —

  “I am very sorry,” Ford began again.

  “Not at ail, not at all!” cried Boynton. “Was I right in supposing that you had spent the previous evening in this vicinity?”

  “Mr. Phillips and I had slept at the office — you call it?”

  “Is it possible!” Boynton lay quiet for a moment, before he added, musingly, “Yes, that might account for it, if my premises were correct. But,” he continued sadly, “it is impossible to verify them now. Some one else must take up my work at the very point — You here, and under conditions favorable to the most complete and thorough investigation! This question of antagonization could be settled in a manner absolutely final; and here I lie, fettered and manacled!” ‘He heaved a passionate sigh, and Ford, in spite of the fact that he knew himself regarded for the moment as a mere instrumentality, an impersonal force, felt a sharp regret for the overthrow of this absurd dreamer.

  “Is there — is there any way in which I can be of use to you, Dr. Boynton?” he asked presently.

  Boynton did not reply at once. He moved his head uneasily on the pillow, and weakly knotted his fingers together. Then he said, “Yes, there is. I would rather you transacted the business than any of our good friends here, for I am afraid that it might get from them to my daughter. In fact, I should not know how to communicate with them without alarming her.”

  He looked beseechingly at Ford, who said, “Well?”

  “What are your religious beliefs?” —

  “I have none,” said Ford.

  “At your age I had none,” rejoined Boynton. “Afterward, in circumstances of great sorrow, I embraced the philosophy of spiritualism, because it promised immediate communion and reunion with the wife I had lost. Neither before nor since that time has my theory admitted the necessity of certain — certain — formalities to which the Christian world attaches importance. But the influence of early teachings is very strong, and I cannot resist an inclination — It is entirely illogical, upon either hypothesis, I know! If there is no life hereafter, then it is of no consequence whatever whether any reconciliation takes place. If there is a life hereafter, and it is a mere continuation of this, a progress, a development, under certain new conditions, then the reconciliation can take place there as well as here. This is what my reason tells me, and yet I am not at rest. My dear friend, if you were about to die,” — the hand which Boynton unexpectedly laid upon Ford’s sent a thrill to his heart,—” and you had parted with some one upon terms of mutual injury, what should you wish?”

  “I should wish to see him before I died,” answered Ford, gravely.

  “And
make peace with him, — ask and offer forgiveness. Precisely. There is no doubt an element of superstition in the impulse; it seems childish and unreasonable; and yet I cannot help it. What is it? First, be reconciled to thy brother,... agree with thine adversary quickly — I don’t remember. My adversary is the father of my child’s mother. We quarreled very bitterly, about this — philosophy of mine. I think he used me harshly; but he is an old man, and doubtless I grieved and thwarted him more than I understood. I don’t justify myself. I would like to see him again, and ask him to forgive. I wish you would be so good, Mr. Ford, as to telegraph him — there’s an office at Vardley Station — that I am seriously sick, and would like to see him.” Ford could not reply, and Boynton took his silence for reluctance. “I hope I haven’t asked too much of you?”

  “Oh, no! No. What,” he contrived to ask, “is your father-in-law’s name?” Boynton gave the name and that of the village in which he lived, and Ford mechanically took them down in his notebook. He remained with this in his hand, seated beside the bed, and not knowing what to do; but he rose at last, and murmured something about not losing time, when Egeria entered. He would have passed her with a bow, but the cheery voice of Boynton turned him motionless.

  “Egeria,” he said, as the girl went up to his bedside, “I have been asking a favor of Mr. Ford, — something that I intended for a surprise and pleasure to you. But I think that the surprise might be too much, — might alarm you, — and I had better not let it be a surprise. Don’t you think that if your grandfather knew that I was so disposed he would like to make up our little quarrel? Mr.

  Ford is going to telegraph him to come here! There is no occasion for anxiety” —

  Egeria turned upon Ford, with swift self-betrayal. “They telegraphed yesterday. Haven’t they heard?” Ford glanced at her father in despair, and bent on her a look of compassion that he was conscious became an appeal for her pity. “Oh, what is it?” she cried, quivering under his imploring scrutiny. “Won’t he come? Oh, he is harder than I ever believed! Yes, yes! You were right, father; I will never forgive him!”