Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I hope you don’t think so!” he pleaded. “I counted on your being pleased.”

  “So I am pleased,” she returned. She opened the basket again, and looked within.

  “You must have hated to come back to the country,” she said, after a silence, “if you like the city so much.”

  “No. For once I was willing to come back. If the country hadn’t threatened to keep me, I shouldn’t have hated it. I never hated the country about here. What have you been doing this afternoon? It seems a great while.”

  “Does it? Yes, it does! I suppose there’s such a sameness here that anything that breaks it up makes the time longer. Sister Frances says that it’s so when any of them are gone. After you went I came in and stayed with father. He didn’t know that I had been trying to get him some grapes. Your going away seemed to fret him, and that made me a little anxious to — to — see if you had come.”

  “I never thought of not coming back.”

  “Yes, I know. Silas went down to the post-office with me: but Humphrey came along in his buggy, and Silas went back with him. He couldn’t wait for you, and I said I would.”

  “Thanks. But you took too much trouble. I expected to walk up from the station.”

  “I didn’t believe you’d want to carry the basket.”

  “Yes, I should. But what would you have done if you had had to drive home alone in the dusk?”

  “Oh, I knew you would be there.”

  The lamps were lit in the office, and the window was red with cheerful light where the doctor lay in the infirmary, when they drew up before the gate, and Ford helped Egeria down. Then he took the paper in which the bouquet was wrapped, and handed it to her. “There are a few flowers, too.”

  “I thought it must be flowers,” she said. “I’ll put them round the grapes.”

  “The flowers are for you,” said Ford, with dogged resolution.

  Laban came across the street from the office, and took the horse by the bridle. “The sisters want you should take your tea at the office, to-night. They Ve got it ready for you, and they’ve sent word to Friend Williams not to be expectin’ you.”

  While Ford waited a few moments in the office parlor, Egeria came, and he heard her talking with Rebecca and Diantha in the sitting-room. When the latter came to tell him that tea was ready, he perceived that his gift was already a matter of family approval. He sat down at the table, and Egeria came out of the kitchen adjoining with the polished tin tea-pot in her hand. Then he saw that the table was set for two. Her face was flushed, as if she had been near the heat; but she sat down quietly, saying, “He was asleep, and Frances was with him. I must run back in a minute, for I want him to have them as soon as he wakes.” He knew that she meant the grapes. When she was handing him his cup, she half drew it back. “I didn’t ask you whether you like cream and sugar both, and I’ve put them in.”

  “I like it so,” said Ford.

  She ate with more appetite than he, and was gayer than he had seen her before. A happy light was in her eyes, and when they met his this light seemed to suffuse her face. She talked, and he listened dreamily. It was very strange to a man of his solitary life. He did not remember to have seen any one pour tea. At the boarding-house they came and asked if you would have tea or coffee, and brought it to you in a cup; at the restaurant they set it before you in a pot, and you helped yourself, or the waiter reached over your shoulder and poured it out. Ford looked round the sincerely bare dining-room; the windows were shut to keep out the evening chill, and the curtains were snugly drawn. The door to the kitchen was open, and he could hear Diantha moving about there; now and then she made a little rattling at the stove; once she came in with a plate of rice-cakes, and offered to wait upon them; but Egeria passed the plate to Ford herself, and then gave him the butter and syrup. He tried to make her one with the frightened and joyless creature whom he had first seen in Boston; then he perceived that she had fallen silent under his silent scrutiny.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, “is anything the matter?”

  “Oh, no!” she answered. “But I must go back to father. Will you come over and see him?”

  “Yes.”

  He walked across the road with her under the stars, keen as points of steel in the moonless sky; but at the gate he said, “No, I won’t go in tonight. I will come to see your father to-morrow.”

  She said “Well,” as if she understood that he wished to delay being thanked.

  As he lingered, she faltered too, and they stood confronted without speaking. Then he said, “Goodnight,” and made an offer of offering his hand. She saw it, and stretched hers towards him; but by this time he had let his hand fall, thinking it unnoticed. The manœuvre was reciprocally repeated; by a common impulse they both broke into a low, nervous laugh, and their hands met in a quick clasp.

  “Thank you for the flowers,” she said, when he had got a few paces away.

  A little farther off, he glanced back. She seemed to be standing yet at the door; but the light was uncertain, and it might have been a shadow. He delayed a little, and then went back; but she was now gone, and he saw her head reflected against the curtain within.

  XXI.

  FORD expected that they would meet next in the mood of their parting; but she received him with a sort of defensive scrutiny that puzzled him and estranged her from him. He fancied that she avoided being alone with him, and made haste to shelter herself from him in her father’s presence, where she sat and knitted while they talked. If he glanced at her, he found her eye leaving him with a look of anxious quest. He went away feeling that she was capricious. Other days followed when she was different, and met him with eager welcome; but then he did not think her capricious, and he forgot from time to time the inquisition that vexed him and that seemed to weary and distress her.

  He commonly wrote in the morning and came in the afternoon. She sat on the threshold of the infirmary, and if her father was awake she invited him in-doors; if her father was asleep, she drew Ford off a little way into the orchard. There had been a change in Boynton. He never spoke hopefully of his condition to Ford; but although he still showed a great feebleness, there were often days when he left his bed and sat up in a rocking-chair to receive his visitor. He did not remain long afoot, and he never showed any wish to go out-of-doors. Sometimes Egeria and Frances, in their zeal for his convalescence, urged him in the mild fall weather to go out for the air; but after a glance at the landscape he said, “Yes, yes, to-morrow, if it’s fair. I’m hardly equal to it to-day.” When Ford was not with him, or some of the more metaphysical of the Shakers, he read or mused in his chair. At first he had wished to talk of the questions that perplexed him with Egeria, but she had fondly evaded them; later, when she showed herself willing to afford him this resource, he had no longer the wish for it, and did not respond to her promptings.

  His mind must have been dwelling upon this change in himself and her, one afternoon, when Ford came in and sat down with him. “You see,” he said, “how they have tricked out my room for me?” and he indicated the boughs of colored leaves, varied with bunches of wild asters and tops of golden-rod, in which the Shakers had carried him the autumn. “There isn’t healing in my leaves, as there was in the flowers which they brought Egeria this spring,” he added, with a slight sigh, “but there is sympathy — sympathy.” Ford left him to the pleasure he evidently found in the analogy and contrast, and Boynton presently resumed: “There is an experiment which I should have liked to try, if she had continued the same. I should have liked to see if we could not change places, and she exert upon me that influence which I once had over her. There is no telling how sanative it might be in a case like mine, in which there is a certain obscurity of origin and character. But I am convinced that it would be useless to attempt the experiment. I see now that the psychic force must have left her entirely during her sickness. Not a trace of it remains. The fact is a very interesting one, which I should hope to investigate with important results, if I coul
d live to do so. It may be that we approach the other world only through some abnormal condition here. You have observed this remarkable change in my daughter?”

  “You know I only saw Miss Boynton two or three times before I came here,” said Ford. “She seems very much better.”

  “That is the change. Her power has escaped in this return to health. I saw it, — I almost noted its flight. Day by day, after the crisis of her fever, when convalescence began, I perceived that she grew more and more rebellious to my influence, without knowing it. If I had obeyed my intuitions, I should never have put her powers to the final test. I see now that you had nothing to do with our failure here, whatever the effect of your sphere was in Boston. Her gift, rare and wonderful as it was, was the perishable efflorescence of a nervous morbidity. I might have known this before, — perhaps I did know it, and refused to accept it as a fact. It was hard, it was impossible, to relinquish my belief in her continued powers just when I had brought them to the most favorable conditions for their exercise. But I don’t give up ray belief in what has been. I know that she once possessed the power that has been withdrawn, if ever it existed on earth. You will get out of the matter very easily by saying that it never did exist,” added Boynton bitterly. “I should once have said so; but now I say, whoever keeps it or loses it, this power has never ceased to exist. Has my daughter ever spoken to you of this matter?” he demanded abruptly.

  “Yes,” said Ford.

  “It would be intolerable if she knew how great her loss was. But she never realized the preciousness of her gift while she possessed it.”

  The color of superiority, of censure, which tinged these words irritated the young man. “As far as I could understand, she seemed to dislike ghosts.”

  “Yes, I know that. I had that to contend with in her.”

  “It seemed to me that she had a terror of them, and that your researches had cost her” — Ford stopped.

  “What?” asked Boynton.

  “She has never complained,” answered the other. “I could only conjecture” —

  “Oh, I can believe that she never complained!” cried Boynton; and now he lay a long space silent. At last, “Yes,” he groaned, with an indescribable intensity of contrition in his tone, “I see what you mean! I seized upon a simple, loving nature, good and sweet in its earthliness, and sacred in it, and alienated it from all its possible happiness to the uses of my ambition. I have played the vampire!” Ford rose in alarm at the effect of his words, and essayed what reparation he could. “No,” he protested. “The harm is less than you think. I don’t believe that any one but ourselves can do us essential injury here. We may make others unhappy, but we can’t destroy the possibility of happiness in them; we can only do that in ourselves. Your conscience has to do with your motives; it judges you by them, and God — if we suppose Him —— will not judge you by anything else. The effect of misguided actions belongs to the great mass of impersonal evil.”

  It was the second time that he had presumed to distinguish between Boynton and Egeria, and he had again committed a cruel impertinence. He continued with a sort of remorseful rage to launch upon Boynton such fragments of consolation as came into his head; and he hurried from him without knowing that his phrases about impersonal evil had already floated that buoyant spirit beyond the regrets in which he had plunged it.

  Still heated and ashamed, he issued from the infirmary, and, as if it were strange that she should be there, he started at sight of Egeria under one of the orchard trees. But in that fascination which makes us hover about the victim of some wrong or the witness of some folly of ours, he pressed towards her. She was leaning against the trunk of the tree, with some knitting in her hand, and he flung himself on the grass at her feet. He thought that he meant to confess to her what had just passed, but he made no attempt to do so. “Are you so very tired?” she asked, smiling down at him.

  “Not very,” he answered, “but I know no reason why I shouldn’t sit down, — except one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you ‘re standing.”

  It was pretty, and she was a girl, and she softly laughed as she began to knit. “That’s work in real earnest,” he said, looking at the substantial gray sock mounted on her needles.

  “Yes; the Shakers sell them,” she explained. “I suppose you have got through your work for the day.”

  “I’ve got through my writing, if you call that work. It’s so dull it can’t be play.” Again he thought he would speak of what had passed between him and her father, but he did not.

  “Do you write stories?” she asked, with her eyes on her knitting.

  “Oh, not so bad as that! I do what they call social topics, — perhaps because I never go into society; and I do them with difficulty, as I deserve, for I’m only making literature a means. I understand that if you want to be treated well by it you must make it an end, and be very serious and respectful with it.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the girl, as if she did not understand.

  “I’m serious enough,” he continued, “but I don’t respect my writing as it goes on. It’s as good as most; but it ought to be as good as the least.”

  “What are social topics?” she asked presently.

  “I suppose I’m treating a social topic now. I’m writing about some traits of New England country life. I began it — do you care to hear?”

  “Yes, I should like to hear about it if you will tell me.”

  “It’s nothing. I was telling you the other day of our start from Boston. I couldn’t help noticing some things on the way; my ten years in town had made me a sort of foreigner in the country, and I noticed the people and their way of living; and after I got here I sent a letter to a newspaper about it. You might think that would end it; but you don’t know the economies of a hack-writer. I’ve taken my letter for a text, and I’m working it over into an article for a magazine. If I were a real literary man I should turn it into a lecture afterwards, and then expand it into a little book.” Egeria knitted on in silence, as if her mind were away, or had not strength to deal with these abstractions. “Who is that?” asked Ford, as a young Shakeress with a gentle face looked out of a window of the nearest family house, and nodded in pleasant salutation to Egeria.

  “That is the school-teacher.”

  “They all look alike to me, — the sisters. I don’t see how you tell them apart, so far off.”

  “Yes, they all have the same expression, — the Shaker look. But they ‘re very different.”

  “Why, of course. And the Shaker look is a very good look. It’s peaceful. I suppose they have their bickerings, though.”

  “Not often. They ‘re what they seem. That’s their great ambition.”

  “It’s an immense comfort. You must be quite at home among them.”

  “Yes,” said the girl.

  “Do you mean no?”

  “They do everything they can to make me; but they have their own world, and I don’t belong to it. They feel that as well as I do; but they can’t help it.”

  “Of course not. That’s the nature of worlds, big and little. You can’t be at home near them; you have to be in them to be comfortable. I have a world in my own neighborhood that I don’t belong to. I like to abuse it; but it’s quite as good a neighbor as I deserve, and it would be civil if I made an effort to fit into it. But I suppose I was a sort of born outcast.”

  “Does Mr. Phillips write, too?” asked the girl. The abruptness of the transition was a little bewildering; but Ford answered, “My Phillips? No; he talks.”

  “But hasn’t he any business?”

  “None of his own. Did he amuse you?”

  “I don’t think I understood him,” said Egeria.

  “He would be charmed with your further acquaintance. He would tell you that he could meet you on common ground, — that he didn’t understand himself.”

  She left Phillips by another zigzag. “I suppose,” said she, “you like the influence that a writer has. It mus
t be a pleasure to feel your power over people.”

  “No,” said Ford, “I don’t care anything about the influence. It shocks me to think of people being turned this way or that by my stuff.”

  “Then you believe,” she said, with that recurrent intensity, “that we can have power over others without knowing it, and even without wishing it?”

  “Oh,” he answered carelessly, “we all control one another in the absurdest way.”

  “Yes.” She turned quite pale, and looked away, passing her hand over her forehead as if she were giddy. Then she rose quickly, and hurried down the path to the infirmary. The young man followed.

  “Did you think you heard your father’s bell?”

  “I’d better see if he rang.” She went into the little house, but came out directly. “No; he’s trying to sleep.”

  “Then we must go back, so as not to disturb him.”

  “Yes,” she said, but with an accent of interrogation and reluctance. “I don’t believe I ought to leave him.”

  “We shall be near enough,” he rejoined with a kind of willfulness. “Here comes Sister Frances; she will stay with him.”

  “I might speak to her,” murmured Egeria, hesitating, as Frances came across the road.

  “It isn’t worth while. She will find him alone, and will naturally stay till you come in.” Ford glanced about him. “Which is the apple-tree they call yours?”

  “The one they brought me out under the first day I was well enough?”

  “Yes; I have heard a great deal of that tree. It is famous in the community annals.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t look the least now as it did then.” She led the way far up the orchard slope. But when they came to the tree, and she said, putting her hand on the trunk, “This is it,” neither of them spoke of it. She glanced at the hill on the brow of which some chestnut-trees stood.

  “We could get a better view from that place,” he suggested.

  “Do you think so?” She climbed half up the wall that divided the orchard from a meagre pasture above, and looked back. He passed her and helped her over the wall. “I forgot that this meadow was so wet,” she said, hesitating near the wall.