Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She ran it through in the presence of the Elmores, before whom she received it, and then, with a cry of “I think Mr. Hoskins is too bad!” she threw it into Mrs. Elmore’s lap, and, catching her handkerchief to her eyes, she broke into tears and went out of the room. The note read: —

  Dear Miss Lily, — Your kind interest in me gives me courage to say something that will very likely make me hateful to you forevermore. But I have got to say it, and you have got to know it; and it’s all the worse for me if you have never suspected it. I want to give my whole life to you, wherever and however you will have it. With you by my side, I feel as if I could really do something that you would not be ashamed of in sculpture, and I believe that I could make you happy. I suppose I believe this because I love you very dearly, and I know the chances are that you will not think this is reason enough. But I would take one chance in a million, and be only too glad of it. I hope it will not worry you to read this: as I said before, I had to tell you. Perhaps it won’t be altogether a surprise. I might go on, but I suppose that until I hear from you I had better give you as little of my eloquence as possible.

  Clay Hoskins.

  “Well, upon my word,” said Elmore, to whom his wife had transferred the letter, “this is very indelicate of Hoskins! I must say, I expected something better of him.” He looked at the note with a face of disgust.

  “I don’t know why you had a right to expect anything better of him, as you call it,” retorted his wife. “It’s perfectly natural.”

  “Natural!” cried Elmore. “To put this upon us at the last moment, when he knows how much trouble I’ve — —”

  Lily re-entered the room as precipitately as she had left it, and saved him from betraying himself as to the extent of his confidences to Hoskins. “Professor Elmore,” she said, bending her reddened eyes upon him, “I want you to answer this letter for me; and I don’t want you to write as you — I mean, don’t make it so cutting — so — so — Why, I like Mr. Hoskins! He’s been so kind! And if you said anything to wound his feelings—”

  “I shall not do that, you may be sure; because, for one reason, I shall say nothing at all to him,” replied Elmore.

  “You won’t write to him?” she gasped.

  “No.”

  “Why, what shall I do-o-o-o?” demanded Lily, prolonging the syllable in a burst of grief and astonishment.

  “I don’t know,” answered Elmore.

  “Owen,” cried his wife, interfering for the first time, in response to the look of appeal that Lily turned upon her, “you must write!”

  “Celia,” he retorted boldly, “I won’t write. I have a genuine regard for Hoskins; I respect him, and I am very grateful to him for all his kindness to you. He has been like a brother to you both.”

  “Why, of course,” interrupted Lily, “I never thought of him as anything but a brother.”

  “And though I must say I think it would have been more thoughtful and — and — more considerate in him not to do this—”

  “We did everything we could to fight him off from it,” interrupted Mrs. Elmore, “both of us. We saw that it was coming, and we tried to stop it. But nothing would help. Perhaps, as he says, he did have to do it.”

  “I didn’t dream of his — having any such — idea,” said Elmore. “I felt so perfectly safe in his coming; I trusted everything to him.”

  “I suppose you thought his wanting to come was all unconscious cerebration,” said his wife disdainfully. “Well, now you see it wasn’t.”

  “Yes; but it’s too late now to help it; and though I think he ought to have spared us this, if he thought there was no hope for him, still I can’t bring myself to inflict pain upon him, and the long and the short of it is, I won’t.”

  “But how is he to be answered?”

  “I don’t know. You can answer him.”

  “I could never do it in the world!”

  “I own it’s difficult,” said Elmore coldly.

  “Oh, I will answer him — I will answer him,” cried Lily, “rather than have any trouble about it. Here, — here,” she said, reaching blindly for pen and paper, as she seated herself at Elmore’s desk, “give me the ink, quick. Oh, dear! What shall I say? What date is it? — the 25th? And it doesn’t matter about the day of the week. ‘Dear Mr. Hoskins — Dear Mr. Hoskins — Dear Mr. Hosk’ — Ought you to put Clay Hoskins, Esq., at the top or the bottom — or not at all, when you’ve said Dear Mr. Hoskins? Esquire seems so cold, anyway, and I won’t put it! ‘Dear Mr. Hoskins’ — Professor Elmore!” she implored reproachfully, “tell me what to say!”

  “That would be equivalent to writing the letter,” he began.

  “Well, write it, then,” she said, throwing down the pen. “I don’t ask you to dictate it. Write it, — write anything, — just in pencil, you know; that won’t commit you to anything; they say a thing in pencil isn’t legal, — and I’ll copy it out in the first person.”

  “Owen,” said his wife, “you shall not refuse! It’s inhuman, it’s inhospitable, when Lily wants you to, so! Why, I never heard of such a thing!”

  Elmore desperately caught up the sheet of paper on which Lily had written “Dear Mr. Hoskins,” and groaning out “Well, well!” he added, —

  I have your letter. Come to the station to-morrow and say good-by to her whom you will yet live to thank for remaining only

  Your friend,

  Elizabeth Mayhew.

  “There! there, that will do beautifully — beautifully! Oh, thank you, Professor Elmore, ever and ever so much! That will save his feelings, and do everything,” said Lily, sitting down again to copy it; while Mrs. Elmore, looking over her shoulder, mingled her hysterical excitement with the girl’s, and helped her out by sealing the note when it was finished and directed.

  It accomplished at least one purpose intended. It kept Hoskins away till the final moment, and it brought him to the station for their adieux just before their train started. A consciousness of the absurdity of his part gave his face a humorously rueful cast. But he came pluckily to the mark. He marched straight up to the girl. “It’s all right, Miss Lily,” he said, and offered her his hand, which she had a strong impulse to cry over. Then he turned to Mrs. Elmore, and while he held her hand in his right, he placed his left affectionately on Elmore’s shoulder, and, looking at Lily, he said, “You ought to get Miss Lily to help you out with your history, Professor; she has a very good style, — quite a literary style, I should have said, if I hadn’t known it was hers. I don’t like her subjects, though.” They broke into a forlorn laugh together; he wrung their hands once more, without a word, and, without looking back, limped out of the waiting-room and out of their lives.

  They did not know that this was really the last of Hoskins, — one never knows that any parting is the last, — and in their inability to conceive of a serious passion in him, they quickly consoled themselves for what he might suffer. They knew how kindly, how tenderly even, they felt towards him, and by that juggle with the emotions which we all practise at times, they found comfort for him in the fact. Another interest, another figure, began to occupy the morbid fancy of Elmore, and as they approached Peschiera his expectation became intense. There was no reason why it should exist; it would be by the thousandth chance, even if Ehrhardt were still there, that they should meet him at the railroad station, and there were a thousand chances that he was no longer in Peschiera. He could see that his wife and Lily were restive too: as the train drew into the station they nodded to each other, and pointed out of the window, as if to identify the spot where Lily had first noticed him; they laughed nervously, and it seemed to Elmore that he could not endure their laughter.

  During that long wait which the train used to make in the old Austrian times at Peschiera, while the police authorities viséd the passports of those about to cross the frontier, Elmore continued perpetually alert. He was aware that he should not know Ehrhardt if he met him; but he should know that he was present from the looks of Lily and Mrs. Elmore,
and he watched them. They dined well in waiting, while he impatiently trifled with the food, and ate next to nothing; and they calmly returned to their places in the train, to which he remounted after a last despairing glance around the platform in a passion of disappointment. The old longing not to be left so wholly to the effect of what he had done possessed him to the exclusion of all other sensations, and as the train moved away from the station he fell back against the cushions of the carriage, sick that he should never even have looked on the face of the man in whose destiny he had played so fatal a part.

  XIII.

  In America, life soon settled into form about the daily duties of Elmore’s place, and the daily pleasures and cares which his wife assumed as a leader in Patmos society. Their sojourn abroad conferred its distinction; the day came when they regarded it as a brilliant episode, and it was only by fitful glimpses that they recognized its essential dulness. After they had been home a year or two, Elmore published his Story of Venice in the Lives of her Heroes, which fell into a ready oblivion; he paid all the expenses of the book, and was puzzled that, in spite of this, the final settlement should still bring him in debt to his publishers. He did not understand, but he submitted; and he accepted the failure of his book very meekly. If he could have chosen, he would have preferred that the Saturday Review, which alone noticed it in London with three lines of exquisite slight, should have passed it in silence. But after all, he felt that the book deserved no better fate. He always spoke of it as unphilosophized and incomplete, without any just claim to being.

  Lily had returned to her sister’s household, but though she came home in the heyday of her young beauty, she failed somehow to take up the story of her life just where she had left it in Patmos. On the way home she had refused an offer in London, and shortly after her arrival in America she received a letter from a young gentleman whom she had casually seen in Geneva, and who had found exile insupportable since parting with her, and was ready to return to his native land at her bidding; but she said nothing of these proposals till long afterwards to Professor Elmore, who, she said, had suffered enough from her offers. She went to all the parties and picnics, and had abundant opportunities of flirtation and marriage; but she neither flirted nor married. She seemed to have greatly sobered; and the sound sense which she had always shown became more and more qualified with a thoughtful sweetness. At first, the relation between her and the Elmores lost something of its intimacy; but when, after several years, her health gave way, a familiarity, even kinder than before, grew up. She used to like to come to them, and talk and laugh fondly over their old Venetian days. But often she sat pensive and absent, in the midst of these memories, and looked at Elmore with a regard which he found hard to bear: a gentle, unconscious wonder it seemed, in which he imagined a shade of tender reproach.

  When she recovered her health, after a journey to the West one winter, they saw that, by some subtile and indefinable difference, she was no longer a young girl. Perhaps it was because they had not met her for half a year. But perhaps it was age, — she was now thirty. However it was, Elmore recognized with a pang that the first youth at least had gone out of her voice and eyes. She only returned to arrange for a long sojourn in the West. She liked the climate and the people, she said; and she seemed well and happy. She had planned starting a Kindergarten school in Omaha with another young lady; she said that she wanted something to do. “She will end by marrying one of those Western widowers,” said Mrs. Elmore.

  “I wonder she didn’t take poor old Hoskins,” mused Elmore aloud.

  “No, you don’t, dear,” said his wife, who had not grown less direct in dealing with him. “You know it would have been ridiculous; besides, she never cared anything for him, — she couldn’t. You might as well wonder why she didn’t take Captain Ehrhardt after you dismissed him.”

  “I dismissed him?”

  “You wrote to him, didn’t you?”

  “Celia,” cried Elmore, “this I cannot bear. Did I take a single step in that business without her request and your full approval? Didn’t you both ask me to write?”

  “Yes, I suppose we did.”

  “Suppose?”

  “Well, we did, — if you want me to say it. And I’m not accusing you of anything. I know you acted for the best. But you can see yourself, can’t you, that it was rather sudden to have it end so quickly—”

  She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the miserable absence into which he lapsed. “Celia,” he asked at last, “do you think she — she had any feeling about him?”

  “Oh,” cried his wife restively, “how should I know?”

  “I didn’t suppose you knew,” he pleaded. “I asked if you thought so.”

  “What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can’t be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you—”

  “She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could make them, that she wished him dismissed.”

  “Well, then, very likely she did.”

  “Very likely, Celia?”

  “Yes. At any rate, it’s too late now.”

  “Yes, it’s too late now.” He was silent again, and he began to walk the floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke forth. “I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I’m afraid I did wrong! Yes, I’m afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder, — it was a crime!”

  “Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any differently under the circumstances?”

  “Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance.”

  “We wouldn’t let you give him any,” interrupted his wife.

  “Don’t try to deceive yourself, don’t try to deceive me, Celia! I know well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I would not even show him the poor grace of passing his offer in silence, if I must refuse it. I couldn’t spare him even so much as that!”

  “We decided — we both decided — that it would be better to cut off all hope at once,” urged his wife.

  “Ah, it was I who decided that — decided everything. Leave me to deal honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe that it was not I who did it!” The pent-up doubt of years, the long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. “Oh, I have suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him — I wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance to see her once more at that masquerade—”

  “No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago. It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he had told about the affair—”

  “No matter! no matter! If I thought it was he, my blame is the same. And she, poor girl, — in my lying compassion for him, I used to accuse her of cold-heartedness, of indifference! I wonder she did not abhor the sight of me. How has she ever tolerated the presence, the friendship, of a man who did her this irreparable wrong? Yes, it has spoiled her life, and it was my work. No, no, Celia! you and she had nothing to do with it, except as I forced your consent — it was my work; and, however I have tried openly and secretly to shirk it, I must bear this fearful responsibility.”

  He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had done the only t
hing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never had blamed him. “Why, I don’t believe she would ever have married Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about Dick Burton, all the time, — you know how she used always to be talking about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she had to refuse him, and I suppose it’s that that’s made her rather melancholy.” She explained that Major Burton had become extremely fat, that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too conscientious to marry him merely for that.

  In fact, Elmore’s regret did reflect a monstrous and distorted image of his conduct. He had really acted the part of a prudent and conscientious man; he was perfectly justifiable at every step: but in the retrospect those steps which we can perfectly justify sometimes seem to have cost so terribly that we look back even upon our sinful stumblings with better heart. Heaven knows how such things will be at the last day; but at that moment there was no wrong, no folly of his youth, of which Elmore did not think with more comfort than of this passage in which he had been so wise and right.

  Of course the time came when he saw it all differently again; when his wife persuaded him that he had done the best that any one could do with the responsibilities that ought never to have been laid on a man of his temperament and habits; when he even came to see that Lily’s feeling was a matter of pure conjecture with him, and that so far as he knew she had never cared anything for Ehrhardt. Yet he was glad to have her away; he did not like to talk of her with his wife; he did not think of her if he could help it.

  They heard from time to time through her sister that her little enterprise in Omaha was prospering, and that she was very contented out West; at last they heard directly from her that she was going to be married. Till then, Elmore had been dumbly tormented in his sombre moods with the solution of a problem at which his imagination vainly toiled, — the problem of how some day she and Ehrhardt should meet again and retrieve the error of the past for him. He contrived this encounter in a thousand different ways by a thousand different chances; what he so passionately and sorrowfully longed for accomplished itself continually in his dreams, but only in his dreams.