Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I didn’t always think,” she whispered. “I — I was afraid” —

  “But what made you afraid that such a thing could be? I am a brute, — I know that; I gave you early proof of that, — but I hoped there was nothing covert in me.”

  “You said once that people influenced others without knowing it; and once — that night when we came from the woods — you said it was a spell that made me lose the way, and wouldn’t let me blame you” —

  “And you really had those black doubts of me in your heart? I thought you were suffering me here because you were good and merciful, and you were always watching me to find out whether I was not using some vile magic against you.”

  “No, no! Not always,” she protested, lifting her face. “Did I say that?”

  “No, you didn’t say it! Well, you had the right to hurt me in any way you could; and I give you the satisfaction of knowing that nothing could hurt me worse than this.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to wound you! Don’t think that! And I forgave you; yes, I did forgive you! I never hated you — not even that morning there by the fountain when I thought you had hurt him. And when you said I ought, it made me wonder if what he used to say — And then I couldn’t get it out of my mind! But I never meant to tell you by a single word or look, if it killed me.”

  “I believe you. It was something not to be spoken. I think now I can go without your pardon. It seems to me that we are quits.”

  Once more he turned to go, but she implored, all her face red with generous remorse, “Oh, not till you’ve forgiven me! I never thought how it would seem to you. Indeed I never did!”

  He smiled sadly. “Forgive you? Oh, that’s easy. But even if it were very hard, I could do it. I can see how it has been with you from the first, and how, with what you had been taught to think of me by your father, — I don’t blame him for it; he was as helpless as you were, — you perverted my careless words and gave them a sinister meaning that I never dreamt of. But what can I do, or say, to leave you with better thoughts of me?”

  “I could see that you were kind and good even when I was the most afraid,” she murmured. “But after the way we had begun together, and all that you had done to us, — and said to him, — sometimes I couldn’t understand why you were here, or why you stayed, and then” —

  “I don’t wonder! I hadn’t given you cause to expect any good of me; and if I were to tell you why I stayed, as I once hoped I might, I couldn’t make it appear an unselfish reason. Oh, my dearest!” he cried, “I loved you so that I couldn’t have taken your love itself against your will! Ever since I first saw you, and all the time that I had lost you, my whole life was for you; and when I found you again how could I help staying till you drove me from you? Good-by, and if any thought of yours has injured me, let me set it against my telling you this now.” She had slowly averted her face; she did not shrink from him, but she did not return his good-by, and he waited in vain for her to speak. Then, “Shall I go?” he asked in foolish anti-climax.

  “No” —

  The blood rioted in his heart. “And do you still believe that of me?”

  “I believe — what you say,” she whispered.

  “But why do you believe me? Do I make you do it?”

  “I don’t know — yes, something makes me.”

  “Against your will?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Do you think it is a spell, now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And are you afraid of it?” —

  “No” ——

  “What is it, Egeria?” he cried, and in the beseeching look which she lifted to his, their eyes tenderly met. “Oh, my darling! Was this the spell” —

  The rapture choked him; he caught her hand and drew her towards him.

  But at this bold action, Sister Frances, who had not ceased to watch them, threw her apron over her head.

  XXVIII.

  The powers of the family were heavily taxed by the consideration of a case without precedent in its annals. On the report of Sister Frances and the subsequent knowledge of Elihu, it became necessary to act at once. Probably no affair of such delicate importance had ever presented itself to a society vowed to celibacy as the fact of a courtship and proposal of marriage which had taken place with their privity, and with circumstances so peculiar that they could not wholly feel that they had withheld their approval.

  “What I look at, Elihu,” said Frances, “is this: that we can’t any of us say but what it’s the best thing that can happen to Egery, so long as she ain’t going to be gathered in. And what I want to know is whether we’ve got to turn our backs on her because she’s doin’ the best she can, or whether we ‘re goin’ to show out that we feel to rejoice with her.” —

  “Nay, we can’t do that,” replied Elihu, in sore embarrassment. “There are no two ways about it but what our natural feelings do go with her, — to some extent. I’m free to confess that when Friend Ford came and told me just now I felt” — Elihu apparently found himself not so free to confess after all. He stopped abruptly, and added, “But that’s neither here nor there. What we’ve got to do now is not to withhold our sympathy from these young people who are doing right in their order, and at the same time not to relax our opposition to the principle.”

  “Love the sinner and condemn the sin,” suggested Laban.

  “Nay,” replied Elihu, rejecting the phraseology rather than the idea, “not exactly that.”

  “I can’t understand,” interposed Rebecca, with her sex’s abhorrence of an abstraction, “where and how they ‘re goin’ to get married. There ain’t any Shaker way of marryin’, and I don’t know what we should do with our young folks, if they got married here. I don’t suppose we should have one of ’em left by spring.”

  “Nay,” said Elihu, “we might as well give up at once.” He rocked himself vigorously to and fro; but his hardening face did not lose its anxious expression.

  “Where will they get married?” asked Rebecca. “She hasn’t got anywheres to go. Her own folks are all dead, at home, and she hasn’t got any home.”

  “I don’t know. They can’t get married here,” returned Elihu.

  “They can’t go right off to a minister and get married now, so soon after her father’s death. And besides, she ain’t ready. She hasn’t got anything made up.”

  The question of clothes agitated even these unworldly women, and they debated and deplored Egeria’s unprepared condition, urging that she must have this, and could not do without that, till Elihu could bear it no longer. “I feel,” he cried, “that it is unseemly for us to consider these things Î It identifies us practically with a state which we only tolerate as part of the earthly order. We must not have anything to do with it from this time forth.”

  “Well, Elihu, what shall we do?” demanded Diantha. “We might send him away, but we can’t turn her out-of-doors. Do you want he should go on courtin’ her here?” Elihu opened his lips to speak, but only emitted a groan. “We have got to bear our part. I guess the rule against marriage ain’t any stronger than the rule of love and charity, —— so long as we don’t any of us marry, ourselves.”

  “Well, well!” cried Elihu, “settle it amongst you. Only remember, they can’t marry here.” He took his hat, and went into Humphrey’s room, where the latter had remained, discreetly absorbed in his accounts; and Laban, finding himself alone with the sisters, hastened to follow Elihu. Their withdrawal was inspiration to Frances: —

  “I guess I can go down to Boston with Egery, and fix it with my sister so’t she can stay and be married from her house whenever she gets ready.” When the sensation following her solution of the problem allowed her to speak she added, “The question is how much it’ll be right for us to do for her. She hasn’t got a thing.”

  The sisters justly understood this to mean their degree of complicity in decking Egeria for the unholy rite, and they entered into the question with the seriousness it merited. They began by agreei
ng with Elihu that the only way was to have nothing to do with the matter; and having appeased their consciences, they each made such concessions and sacrifices to the exigency as they must. Before spring, when the wedding took place, the sisters had found it consistent with an enlarged sense of duty to present the bride with a great number of little gifts, of an exemplary usefulness, for the most part, but not wholly inexpressive of a desire, if not a sense, of beauty. Their conceptions of the world’s fashions were too vague to allow of their contributing to the trousseau, and such small attempts as they made in that direction were overruled by Frances’s sister, a decisive and notable lady, who, however, ordained that certain of the decorative objects, as hooked rugs and embroidered tidies, were as worthy a place in Mrs. Ford’s simple house as most of the old-fashioned things that people like nowadays. With Frances, the question whether she should or should not be present at the wedding remained a cross which she bore all winter, and which grew sorer as the day approached. When it actually came, she meekly bowed her spirit and remained away. But she found compensation in the visit which she paid her sister directly afterwards, and which she spent chiefly in helping Egeria set in order the cottage Ford had taken in one of the suburbs. He had worked hard at his writing all winter, and they had no misgivings in beginning life on his earnings, and on the small sum Egeria had inherited from her grandfather.

  It is now several years since their marriage, and they have never regretted their courage. They had their day of carefulness and of small things — that happy day, which all who have known it remember so fondly — but this is already past. One of those ignoble discoveries which chemists sometimes make in their more ambitious experiments has turned itself to profit, almost without his agency, and chiefly at the suggestion of his wife, whose more practical sense perceived its general acceptability; and the sale of an ingenious combination known to all housekeepers now makes life easy to the Fords. He has given up his newspaper work, and has built himself a laboratory at the end of his garden, where the income from his invention enables him to pursue the higher chemistry, without as yet any distinct advantage to the world, but to his own content. It is observed by those who formerly knew him that marriage has greatly softened him, and Phillips professes that, robbed of his former roughness, he is no longer so fascinating. Their acquaintance can scarcely be said to have been renewed since their parting in Vardley. Ford was able to see Phillips’s innocence in what occurred; but they could never have been easy in each other’s presence after that scene, though they have met on civil terms. Phillips accounts in his own way for not seeing his former friend any more. “As bric-a-brac,” he explains, when ladies inquire after their extinct acquaintance, “Ford was perpetually attractive; but as part of the world’s ordinary furniture he can’t interest me. When he married the Pythoness, I was afraid there was too much bric-a-brac; but really, so far as I can hear, they have neutralized each other into the vulgarest commonplace. Do you use the Ford Fire Kindler? He doesn’t put his name to it, and that isn’t exactly the discovery that is making his fortune. He has come to that, — making money. And imagine a Pythoness with a prayer-book, who goes to the Episcopal church, and hopes to get her husband to go, too! No, I don’t find my Bohemia in their suburb.” From time to time Phillips proposes to seek that realm in what he calls his native Europe; but he does not go. Perhaps because Mrs. Perham is there, widowed by Mr. Perham’s third stroke of paralysis, and emancipated to the career of travel and culture, which she has illustrated in the capitals of several Latin countries. To do her justice, she never turned the water-proof affair to malicious account, nor failed to speak well of Ford, for whom she always claimed to feel an unrequited respect.

  As to Hatch, one of the first of those deep and full confidences between Ford and Egeria which follow engagement related to the man in whom Ford had feared a rival. Egeria knew merely that Hatch had repaid with constant services some favors that her father had been able to do him in 27 their old home, and that he had continued faithful to Boynton when all others had dropped away from him.

  “I wish I had understood how it was when he came to me there in Boston,” said Ford. He added simply, “I treated him very badly, because I thought he was in love with you.”

  “Was that any reason why you should treat him badly?” asked Egeria.

  Ford reflected. “Yes, I suppose it was. I was in love with you, too. But he’s had his turn. He’s left me with the feeling that perhaps” —

  “Perhaps what?”

  “Perhaps — nothing!”

  Egeria divined what he did not say. “He hasn’t left me with that feeling,” she said reproachfully.

  Since that time Hatch is no longer on the road, as he would phrase it, but has gone into business for himself at Denver, where he married last year, with duly interviewed pomp and circumstance, the daughter of one of the early settlers, a hoary patriarch of forty-three, who went to Denver as remotely as 1870. He called upon the Fords when he came East on his wedding journey, and he and Ford found themselves friends. The Western lady thought Egeria a little stiff, but real kind-hearted, and one of the most stylish-appearing persons she ever saw. In fact, Egeria shows a decided fondness for dress, and after the long hunger of her solitary girlhood she enters, with a zest which Ford cannot always share, into all the innocent pleasures of life.

  She likes parties and dinners and theatres; since their return from Europe she has given several picnic breakfasts, where her morning costume has been the marvel of her guests. The tradition of her life before marriage is locally very dim; it is supposed that she left the stage to marry. This is not altogether reconcilable with the appearance of quaint people in broad-brims, or in gauze caps and tightsleeved straight drab gowns, with whom she is sometimes seen in her suburb; but as the Fords are known to go every summer to pass a month in an old house belonging to the Vardley Shakers, their visitors are easily accounted for.

  The grass has already grown long over Boynton’s grave. They who keep his memory think compassionately of his illusions, if they were wholly illusions, but they shrink with one impulse from the dusky twilight through which he hoped to surprise immortality, and Ford feels it a sacred charge to keep Egeria’s life in the full sunshine of our common day. If Boynton has found the undiscovered country, he has sent no message back to them, and they do not question his silence. They wait, and we must all wait.

  A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  I.

  Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble. But when Owen Elmore sailed, no one else seemed to think that he needed excuse. All his friends said it was the best thing for him to do; that he could have leisure and quiet over there, and would be able to go on with his work.

  At the risk of giving a farcical effect to my narrative, I am obliged to confess that the work of which Elmore’s friends spoke was a projected history of Venice. So many literary Americans have projected such a work that it may now fairly be regarded as a national enterprise. Elmore was too obscure to have been announced in the usual way by the newspapers as having this design; but it was well known in his town that he was collecting materials when his professorship in the small inland college with which he was connected lapsed through the enlistment of nearly all the students. The president became colonel of the college regiment; and in parting with Elmore, while their boys waited on the campus without, he had said, “Now, Elmore, you must go on with your history of Venice. Go to Venice and collect your materials on the spot. We’re coming through this all right. Mr. Seward puts it at sixty days, but I’ll give them six months to lay down their arms, and
we shall want you back at the end of the year. Don’t you have any compunctions about going. I know how you feel; but it is perfectly right for you to keep out of it. Good-by.” They wrung each other’s hands for the last time, — the president fell at Fort Donelson; but now Elmore followed him to the door, and when he appeared there one of the boyish captains shouted, “Three cheers for Professor Elmore!” and the president called for the tiger, and led it, whirling his cap round his head.

  Elmore went back to his study, sick at heart. It grieved and vexed him that even these had not thought that he should go to the war, and that his inward struggle on that point had been idle so far as others were concerned. He had been quite earnest in the matter; he had once almost volunteered as a private soldier: he had consulted his doctor, who sternly discouraged him. He would have been truly glad of any accident that forced him into the ranks; but, as he used afterward to say, it was not his idea of soldiership to enlist for the hospital. At the distance of five hundred miles from the scene of hostilities, it was absurd to enter the Home Guard; and, after all, there were, even at first, some selfish people who went into the army, and some unselfish people who kept out of it. Elmore’s bronchitis was a disorder which active service would undoubtedly have aggravated; as it was, he made a last effort to be of use to our Government as a bearer of dispatches. Failing such an appointment, he submitted to expatriation as he best could; and in Italy he fought for our cause against the English, whom he found everywhere all but in arms against us.