Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I think I had better tell you the truth,” Ford said. “Some one must do it. Your grandfather is dead.”

  A light of relief, almost of joy, shone in her face. “Oh! I was afraid — I was afraid — Oh, poor grandfather! How could I think it!” She put up her hands to her face, like a child, and wept with sobs that shook the young man’s heart.

  “When did he die?” she asked at last.

  “Two months ago. The telegram was from the minister. He promised to write.”

  “Do you hear?” cried Egeria. “He would have come, but — he is dead!”

  “Oh!” breathed her father, speaking for the first time, “I am very sorry!”

  “And now, now do you forgive him?” demanded the girl. “Now” ——

  “Oh, poor soul! I wanted him to forgive me” said Boynton. “Well, well! I must wait.”

  His daughter dropped on her knees beside his bed, and hid her face in the coverlet. “Poor grandfather! Poor grandfather!” she moaned. “How could you think he wouldn’t come?” she said, lifting her face. “Do you think now that he was cruel?”

  “We quarreled,” answered her father. “I was to blame.”

  “No, you were not to blame,” she retorted, with swift revulsion. “You believed you did right, and you never pretended that you didn’t. Oh, if you could only have seen each other again!”

  “Yes,” answered the sick man; “the wish to see him has been heavy on my soul ever since I came to myself.”

  The word recalled her, and she looked fondly into her father’s face. “Oh, father, have I made you feel badly? I am so sorry for grandfather” —

  “No, my poor girl! I can sympathize with your feeling about him; I can understand it.” He smoothed her hair with his gentle, weak, small hand. “I can understand, and I can approve of your feeling. But don’t be troubled. Your grandfather and I will be friends when we meet. It will make little difference there what theories or creeds we hold. They cannot separate us.”

  “Why, father!” exclaimed the girl. “What do you mean? You are not going to die! The doctor said” —

  Boynton smiled in recovering himself. “We are all mortal. Dr. Wilson is very hopeful about me. I am not going to die at once.”

  He took one of her hands while she bent over him. “I had mentioned to our good friend here,” he said, indicating Ford, “in requesting him to notify your grandfather, my special reasons for wishing to see him, and some little statement — explanation — was necessary in regard to the terms of our separation. I was saying that I wished they had been different. But in the light of this new fact, does my part really appear worse to you than it did before? You can speak freely; I can bear —— I ought even to court — the truth.”

  The girl threw her arms about his neck. “Father! You never had one selfish thought in it. I know that, and I always knew it. I didn’t mean to blame you; I only wanted you to excuse him. Oh, nobody needs excusing but me! I stood up before them all, and denied you. I am the one to blame!”

  “No, no,” protested her father, “you were true to yourself. In the long run we could have succeeded upon no other conditions. You did right.”

  “Oh, I did long so to please you! You can’t think how hard I tried! But something kept me” — She rose and looked at Ford, the obstruction of whose involuntary presence no effort of his had sufficed to remove, and panted, as if about to make some appeal to him. But her lips could not shape it; a piteous, formless, low cry broke from them, and she ran from the room, leaving him in a frowning daze.

  “I hope, my dear sir,” said Boynton, “that you will be able to make allowance for the excitement under which we have been laboring. My daughter’s distress on my account, and her affection for her grandfather — But we don’t intend to make you the victim of our unhappiness.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Ford, not knowing what else to say.

  “You were very considerate, with regard to me,” said Boynton gratefully. “I thank you for your good feeling relative to the telegram. But it is well that I should know the worst at once. In asking your patience for what has just occurred, I am sure that I am only anticipating my daughter’s wish. I am by no means as confident as I have been,” he added, “that I was correct in my theory of your influence. But you have somehow been strangely involved in our destiny. It is something that I hardly know how to apologize for.”

  “There is no necessity,” said Ford.

  “Thanks.” The doctor lifted his hand in gratitude, and Ford took it. “Are you comfortable in your quarters? It was a place that I had sometimes thought, under happier auspices, of devoting to my investigations; but now — My dear sir, I appreciate your kindness, your delicacy, in staying!” Ford made a murmur of civility, and Sister Frances came in. Then, with a parting pressure of the hand which Boynton had kept in his, he went out. He half dreaded to encounter Egeria again, at the outer threshold; but she was not there.

  XIX.

  They came to those last fervid days to which August often reverts after the shiver that passes over her at the beginning of her second fortnight. The noons were cloudless, and the nights were lit with a moon that hung lightly, like an airy ball, in the sky, whose unfathomable blue the vision must search for the faint stars. The unbroken splendor of these days and nights would be intolerably silent but for the hissing of the grasshoppers in the sun, and the hollow din in which the notes of the crickets sum themselves under the moon. While Ford was busy in the morning he could resist certain influences at work upon him, but at other times he was the prey of a wild restlessness, which he could not charge to his shaken health, for he had begun to grow strong again. He said to himself, as he lay under the sun-smitten pines, or when he walked beneath the maples that broke the glare of the moon on the village street, that he was waiting here for a man to die, and he tried to quell his restlessness with that cold fact. But he was not able to keep Boynton’s danger in his thoughts. There was, indeed, a suspense in Boynton’s condition for which neither he nor his fellow physician could account. His mind even grew more vivid under such peril as threatened his body, and in his immunity from pain he was more cheerfully speculative than ever. As the days passed, a curious sort of affectionate confidence grew up between Ford and the fantastic theorist, and the young man listened to his talk with a kindliness which he did not trouble himself to reason. He submitted patiently to the analysis which Boynton made of him and of his metaphysical condition, and heard without a smile certain analogies which he discovered. “Yes,” Boynton said, one day, “I find a great similarity of mind and temperament in us. At your age, I thought and felt as you do. There is a fascination, which I can still recognize, in the clean surface which complete negation gives. The refusal of science to believe what it cannot subject to its chemic tests has its sublime side. It is at least absolute devotion to the truth, and it involves martyrdom, like the devotion to any other religion. For it is a religion, and you cannot get away from religion. Whether you say, I believe, or whether you say, I do not believe, still you formulate a creed. The question whether we came from the Clam or the Ancient of Days, whether we shall live forever, or rot forever, remains; you cannot put it aside by saying there is no such question. From this vantage-ground of mine — a sick-bed is a vantage-ground — I can see that when I stood where you are I occupied a position not essentially different from that which I assumed afterwards. Light shone on me from one side, and I cast a shadow in this direction; light shone on me from the other side, and I cast a shadow in that direction. My mistake was to fancy at both times that the shadow was I.”

  Ford evaded the issue as to the identity of their opinions. He admitted that faith in a second life might nerve a man to greater enterprises here; and that one might not so often flag in the pursuit of truth if the horizon did not shut down so close all round. But he said that we had the comfort of knowing that the work of each was delegated to the whole race, and that whoever failed his work could not fail.

  “Ah, don’t delude yo
urself!” cried Boynton. “There is no comfort in that. What is the race to you or me? You are the race; I am the race; and no one else of all the myriad atoms of humanity could take up our work and keep it the same work.”

  “You said, just now,” said Ford, with a smile, “that you and I were the same.”

  “I was wrong,” promptly admitted Boynton. “We are not the same, and could not be, to all eternity. But if you accept the hypothesis of a second life, in which the objects of this shall remain dear to us, you establish an infrangible, a perpetual, continuity of endeavor. The man with whom a great idea has its inception becomes a disembodied spirit. By influx from the spirit world to which he goes, he becomes the partner of the man to whom his work falls here; and that man dying enlarges the partnership in his turn, and so on ad infinitum. It must be in this way that civilization is advanced, that the world-reforms are accomplished.”

  Boynton’s eyes shone, and Ford listened with kindly neutrality. On some sides he was compelled to respect Boynton’s extraordinary alertness. In many things he was grotesquely ignorant; he was a man of very small literature, and he had the limitations of a country-bred person in his conceptions of the world; but his mind, in the speculations on which it habitually dwelt, had a vast and bold sweep, and his theories sprang up fully formed, under his breath, like those plants which the Japanese conjurer fans to flower in the moment after he has put the seed in the ground.

  He tossed his head upon the pillow impatiently. “When I think of those things,” he said, “I can hardly wait for the slow process of decay to unfold the truth to me. Perhaps I approached the unseen world with too arrogant a confidence,” he continued. “At any rate, I have been found unworthy, and my progress on earth has been arrested forever.”

  Ford could not withhold the expression of the senseless self-accusal in his heart. “I should be very sorry,” he said, “if I had been the means of crossing your purposes.”

  “You never were willfully so,” said Boynton. “Besides, as I told you, I have begun to have my misgivings as to my theory of you. I suspect that I may have exaggerated my daughter’s powers; that they were of a limited nature, terminable by the lapse of time. What do you think,” he asked, after a silence, as if willing to break away from these thoughts, “of our Shaker friends? Does their life strike you as the solution of the great difficulty?”

  “No,” said Ford; “it strikes me as begging the question.”

  “Yes, so it is,” assented Boynton; “so it is, in some views. It is a life for women rather than men.”

  An indefinable pang seized Ford. “I don’t quite understand you. Do you think it is a happy life for a woman?”

  “There is no happy life for a woman — except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride and ambition. The advantage that the world offers her — and it does not always offer that — is her choice in self-sacrifice; the Shakers prescribe it for her.”

  Ford said nothing for a time, while the pain still rankled. Then he asked, “Don’t you think the possible power of choosing is a great advantage? I don’t know that as a man I expect to be happy; but I like to make my ventures in unhappiness. It saves me from the folly of accusing fate. If I surrendered myself to Shakerism, I should feel myself a prisoner; I should not run the risk of wounds, but I should have no chance of escape.”

  “A woman doesn’t like to fight,” replied Boynton. “Besides, there are no irrevocable vows in Shakerism. When you do not like it you leave it. It is no bad fate for a woman. For most women it would be a beneficent fate.”

  An image of Egeria in the Shaker garb, with her soft young throat hidden to the chin, and the tight gauze cap imprisoning her beautiful hair, rose in the young man’s thought, and would not pass at his willing. It was with something like the relief of waking from an odious dream that he saw the girl enter the room in her usual dress. He involuntarily rose.

  She had a spray of sumac in her hand, and she put it lightly beside her father on the bed. The leaves were already deeply tinged with crimson. “Ah, yes,” he said, taking it up and holding it before him, “I am glad you found it. I thought I saw it the last time I walked that way; but it was only partly red, then. I had intended to get it for you. After my daughter was sick here, this spring,” he added, turning his eyes upon Ford, “she showed a singular predilection during her convalescence for wild flowers. They wouldn’t come fast enough for her; all the family were set to looking for them. Do you remember, Egeria, the day when we got you out under the apple-blossoms? What is the apple-tree like, now? Some yellow leaves on it, here and there?”

  “Yes, but the red apples burn like live coals among them,” said Egeria.

  “Fruition, fruition,” murmured her father dreamily. “Not so sweet as hope. But autumn was always my favorite season, — my favorite season. I suppose the long grass is limp and the clover-heads are black in the alleys of the orchard. All those aspects of nature — The sumac is first to feel the fall. Have you seen any other red leaves, Egeria?” —

  “I saw a young maple in the swamp that was almost as red in places as this,” said Egeria. “But they were too high to reach.”

  “Ah,” returned her father, “they will soon be red enough everywhere.”

  “Couldn’t Miss Boynton tell me where her maple is?” Ford interposed. “I could get you the leaves.”

  “Oh, no, — no,” began the doctor.

  “I do a certain amount of walking every day. If Miss Boynton will tell me where the maple is, and begin with the swamp” —

  “The swamp,” said Egeria, “is just back of the south pasture; but I should have to look for the tree myself.”

  “Take me with you then,” said the young man, with what he thought a great boldness.

  “I could do that,” returned Egeria, simply. “If Frances were here, I could go with you now. It isn’t far.”

  “I don’t need any one, now, my dear,” said her father. “You can put the bell here by my pillow, and I can ring.”

  “Well,” said Egeria to Ford. “We will stop at the office, and tell them, father,” she added. Frances promised to listen for the bell, and stood at the office door watching them as they walked away together.

  “I think you can easily bend the tree,” Egeria said. “It’s very slim, and I thought at first I could bend it myself. I should hate to have you break it.”

  “I will try not to break it,” answered Ford. They crossed the meadow in desultory talk, but before they reached the edge of the swamp she abruptly halted him, and said with a sort of fearful resolution, “Did you know that my father was here when you came?” She searched his face with a piercing intensity of gaze, her lips apart with eagerness and her breathing fluttered.

  “No,” said Ford, “my coming here was purely accidental.” Her eyes studied his a moment longer: then she dropped them, and hurried on again as abruptly as she had stopped. “But I always hoped I might see you again,” he continued, “ and tell you — I went to tell your father in Boston — that I never dreamt it was you I hurt there, that night. I wanted to tell him that nothing in the world — But we quarreled” —

  “I know, I know,” interrupted the girl. “There is the tree,” she said, hastily, pointing out a young maple with reddened boughs, that stood some yards beyond the wall. “Do you think you can get to it? Do you think you can bend it down?”

  Every nerve in him thrilled with the wrench of leaving half said what had been so long in his heart; but he must obey her will. “I think so,” he replied, and he got over the wall. He stepped from one quaking bed of mossy decay to another, till he reached the tree. He caught it about the slender stem well up towards the limbs, and, bending it over, began to break them away and fling them on the ground.

  “Oh, no!” cried Egeria from where she stood. “Don’t!”

  “Don’t what?” asked Ford, turning half round, without releasing the tree.

  “You seemed to tear it so. You h
ave enough. That branch at the top” —

  “Shall I break it off?”

  “No — no. Let it stay.”

  “Would you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  Ford took out his knife, and slitted the branch from the tree with a downward stroke, and drove the blade into the thick of the hand with which he held the tree. He gathered up the branches, and putting them into the wounded hand gripped it with the other, and returned to Egeria.

  She started at sight of the blood. “I made you cut yourself.” —

  “I don’t see how that is,” answered Ford. “But I cut myself.” He stood holding his hand, while the blood dropped to the ground.

  “I will tie it up for you,” said Egeria, quelling a shudder. “You ought to have something wet next to it. That will keep it from inflaming.”

  “Yes?” said Ford.

  She made search for her handkerchief, and drew forth the stout square of linen which the kindness of the community had provided for her. She shook out its tough expanse. “That is a Shaker handkerchief,” she said.

  “It looks rather grandiose for the purpose,” Ford remarked. “If you will take mine” — He touched as nearly as he could the breast pocket of his coat with his elbow. She soberly obeyed his gesture, and pulled it out. “Can you tear it?”

  “I needn’t tear it,” she answered, folding it into a narrow strip. “I can wet this end in the water, here, and wrap the rest round it.”

  She stooped to a little pool near the wall, and dipped the handkerchief into it; then she laid the wet corner over the cut, which he had washed in the same pool, and folded the dry part firmly around it. Her finger-tips, soft and warm, left the sensation of their touch upon his hand.

  They walked rapidly away. “Better hold it up,” she said, seeing that he let his arm hang at his side.

  “Oh,” he answered stupidly, and obeyed for a moment, and then dropped his hand again.