Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little girl. “Hello, Bella!” “Hello!” said the child. “Remember me?” The child put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily pressed her head against the girl’s arm in bashful silence. Grace said some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs. Maynard, and passed on into the house.

  “You don’t mean that’s your doctor?” he scarcely more than whispered.

  “Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Maynard. “Is n’t she too lovely? And she’s just as good! She used to stand up at school for me, when all the girls were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this time, I just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me exactly what to do. And that’s the reason I’m here. I shall always recommend this air to anybody with lung difficulties. It’s the greatest thing! I’m almost another person. Oh, you need n’t look after her, Mr. Libby! There’s nothing flirtatious about Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard.

  The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. “So much the better for a fellow, I should say!”

  Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own room, where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.

  “Where is Mrs. Maynard?” asked Mrs. Breen.

  “Out on the croquet-ground,” answered the daughter.

  “I should think it would be damp,” suggested Mrs. Green.

  “She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn’t come in now, if I told her.”

  “Well,” said the elder lady, “for a person who lets her doctor pay her board, I think ‘she’s very independent.”

  “I wish you would n’t speak of that, mother,” said the girl.

  “I can’t help it, Grace. It’s ridiculous, — that’s what it is; it’s ridiculous.”

  “I don’t see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my guest here it’s quite the same as if she were my guest at home.”

  “I don’t like you to have such a guest,” said Mrs. Green. “I don’t see what claim she has upon your hospitality.”

  “She has a double claim upon it,” Grace answered, with a flush. “She is in sickness and in trouble. I don’t see how she could have a better claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had been treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do everything I could for her.”

  “I should want her to behave herself,” said Mrs. Breen dryly.

  “How behave herself? What do you mean?” demanded Grace, with guilty heat.

  “You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that her husband treated her badly.”

  “We ought n’t to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It’s essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I know that she’s impulsive, and she’s free in her manners with strangers; but I suppose that’s her Westernism. She’s almost distracted. She was crying half the night, with her troubles, and kept Bella and me both awake.”

  “Is Bella with her now?”

  “No,” Grace admitted. “Jane’s getting her ready to go down with us. Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with her; he’s camping on the beach near here. I didn’t wait to hear particulars.”

  When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Green took one hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs. Maynard was already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby abroad.

  Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly have owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have been pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner suffered a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her friend. Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in that casual and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made. Grace had heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from whom she was now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in his bachelor days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife’s pleasures, the supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and after nine o’clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with Mr. Libby.

  Grace sat waiting for her at the little one’s bedside, for Bella had been afraid to go to sleep alone.

  “How good you are!” cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her mouth.

  “Louise,” said Grace sternly, “this is shameful! You forget that you are married, and ill, too.”

  “Oh, I’m ever so much better, to-night. The air’s just as dry! And you needn’t mind Mr. Libby. He’s such an old friend! Besides, I’m sure to gain the case.”

  “No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn’t to go on in this way.”

  “Well, I would n’t, with every one. But it’s quite different with Mr. Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself somehow.”

  II.

  Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel, and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied, between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine distrust of a physician of their own sex. “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Maynard explained. “It’s just bronchial. The air will do me more good than anything. I’m keeping out in it all I can.”

  After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the doorway at her. He had one eye in unnatural fixity, and the other set at that abnormal slant which is said to qualify the owner for looking round a corner before he gets to it. A droll twist of his mouth seemed partly physical, but: there is no doubt that he had often a humorous intention. It was Barlow, the man-of-all-work, who killed and plucked the poultry, peeled the potatoes and picked the peas, pulled the sweet-corn and the tomatoes, kindled the kitchen fire, harnessed the old splayfooted mare, — safe for ladies and children, and intolerable for all others, which formed the entire stud of the Jocelyn House stables, — dug the clams, rowed and sailed the boat, looked after the bath-houses, and came in contact with the guests at so many points that he was on easy terms with them all. This ease tended to an intimacy which he was himself powerless to repress, and which, from time to time, required their intervention. He now wore a simple costume of shirt and trousers, the latter terminated by a pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows; his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus. “How do you do, this morning, Mrs. Maynard?” he said.

  “Oh, I’m first-rate, Mr. Barlow. What sort of day do you think it’s going to be for a sail?”

  Barlow came out to the edge of the piazza, and looked at the sea and sky. “First-rate. Fog’s most burnt away now. You don’t often see a fog at Jocelyn’s after ten o’clock in the mornin’.”

  He looked for approval to Mrs. Maynard, who
said, “That’s so. The air’s just splendid. It ‘s doing everything for me.”

  “It’s these pine woods, back o’ here. Every breath on ’em does ye good. It’s the balsam in it. D’ you ever try,” he asked, stretching his hand as far up the piazza-post as he could, and swinging into a conversational posture,— “d’ you ever try whiskey — good odd Bourbon whiskey — with white-pine chips in it?”

  Mrs. Maynard looked up with interest, but, shaking her head, coughed for no.

  “Well, I should like to have you try that.”

  “What does it do?” she gasped, when she could get her breath.

  “Well, it’s soothin’ t’ the cough, and it builds ye up, every ways. Why, my brother,” continued the factotum, “he died of consumption when I was a boy, — reg’lar old New England consumption. Don’t hardly ever hear of it any more, round here. Well, I don’t suppose there’s been a case of reg’lar old New England consumption — well, not the old New England kind — since these woods growed up. He used to take whiskey with white-pine chips in it; and I can remember hearin ’em say that it done him more good than all the doctor’s stuff. He’d been out to Demarary, and everywheres, and he come home in the last stages, and took up with this whiskey with whitepine chips in it. Well, it’s just like this, I presume it’s the balsam in the chips. It don’t make any difference how you git the balsam into your system, so ‘s ‘t you git it there. I should like to have you try whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”

  He looked convincingly at Mrs. Maynard, who said she should like to try it. “It’s just bronchial with me, you know. But I should like to try it. I know it would be soothing; and I’ve always heard that whiskey was the very thing to build you up. But,” she added, lapsing from this vision of recovery, “I couldn’t take it unless Grace said so. She’d be sure to find it out.”

  “Why, look here,” said Barlow. “As far forth as that goes, you could keep the bottle in my room. Not but what I believe in going by your doctor’s directions, it don’t matter who your doctor is. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against Miss Breen, you understand?”

  “Oh, no!” cried Mrs. Maynard.

  “I never see much nicer ladies than her and her mother in the house. But you just tell her about the whiskey with the white-pine chips in it. Maybe she never heard of it. Well, she hain’t had a great deal of experience yet.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Maynard. “And I think she’ll be glad to hear of it. You may be sure I’ll tell her, Mr. Barlow. Grace is everything for the balsamic properties of the air, down here. That’s what she said; and as you say, it doesn’t matter how you get the balsam into your system, so you get it there.”

  “No,” said the factotum, in a tone of misgiving, as if the repetition of the words presented the theory in a new light to him.

  “What I think is, and what I’m always telling Grace,” pursued Mrs. Maynard, in that confidential spirit in which she helplessly spoke of her friends by their first names to every one, “that if I could once get my digestion all right, then the cough would stop of itself. The doctor said — Dr. Nixon, that is — that it was more than half the digestion any way. But just as soon as I eat anything — or if I over-eat a little — then that tickling in my throat begins, and then I commence coughing; and I’m back just where I was. It’s the digestion. I oughtn’t to have eaten that mince pie, yesterday.”

  “No,” admitted Barlow. Then he said, in indirect defence of the kitchen, “I think you had n’t ought to be out in the night air, — well, not a great deal.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose it does do me much good,” Mrs. Maynard said, turning her eyes seaward.

  Barlow let his hand drop from the piazza post, and slouched in-doors; but he came out again as if pricked by conscience to return.

  “After all, you know, it did n’t cure him.”

  “What cure him?” asked Mrs. Maynard.

  “The whiskey with the white-pine chips in it.”

  “Cure who?”

  “My brother.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes! But mine’s only bronchial. I think it might do me good. I shall tell Grace about it.”

  Barlow looked troubled, as if his success in the suggestion of this remedy were not finally a pleasure; but as Mrs. Maynard kept her eyes persistently turned from him, and was evidently tired, he had nothing for it but to go in-doors again. He met Grace, and made way for her on the threshold to pass out.

  As she joined Mrs. Maynard, “Well, Grace,” said the latter, “I do believe you are right. I have taken some more cold. But that shows that it does n’t get worse of itself, and I think we ought to be encouraged by that. I’m going to be more careful of the night air after this.”

  “I don’t think the night air was the worst thing about it, Louise,” said Grace bluntly.

  “You mean the damp from the sand? I put on my rubbers.”

  “I don’t mean the damp sand,” said Grace, beginning to pull over some sewing which she had in her lap, and looking down at it.

  Mrs. Maynard watched her a while in expectation that she would say more, but she did not speak. “Oh — well!” she was forced to continue herself, “if you’re going to go on with that!”

  “The question is,” said Grace, getting the thread she wanted, “whether you are going on with it.”

  “Why, I can’t see any possible harm in it,” protested Mrs. Maynard. “I suppose you don’t exactly like my going with Mr. Libby, and I know that under some circumstances it would n’t be quite the thing. But did n’t I tell you last night how he lived with us in Europe? And when we were all coming over on the steamer together Mr. Libby and Mr. Maynard were together the whole time, smoking and telling stories. They were the greatest friends! Why, it isn’t as if he was a stranger, or an enemy of Mr. Maynard’s.”

  Grace dropped her sewing into her lap. “Really, Louise, you’re incredible!” She looked sternly at the invalid; but broke into a laugh, on which Mrs. Maynard waited with a puzzled face. As Grace said nothing more, she helplessly resumed: —

  “We did n’t expect to go down the cliff when he first called in the evening. But he said he would help me up again, and — he did, nicely. I was n’t exhausted a bit; and how I took more cold I can’t understand; I was wrapped up warmly. I think I took the cold when I was sitting there after our game of croquet, with my shawl off. Don’t you think so?” she wheedled.

  “Perhaps,” said Grace.

  “He did nothing but talk about you, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, with a sly look at the other. “He’s awfully afraid of you, and he kept asking about you.”

  “Louise,” said the other, gravely ignoring these facts, “I never undertook the care of you socially, and I object very much to lecturing you. You are nearly as old as I am, and you have had a great deal more experience of life than I have.” Mrs. Maynard sighed deeply in assent. “But it does n’t seem to have taught you that if you will provoke people to talk of you, you must expect criticism. One after another you’ve told nearly every woman in the house your affairs, and they have all sympathized with you and pitied you. I shall have to be plain, and tell you that I can’t have them sneering and laughing at any one who is my guest. I can’t let you defy public opinion here.”

  “Why, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, buoyed above offence at her friend’s words by her consciousness of the point she was about to make, “you defy public opinion yourself a good deal more than I do, every minute.”

  “I? How do I defy it?” demanded Grace indignantly.

  “By being a doctor.”

  Grace opened her lips to speak, but she was not a ready person, and she felt the thrust. Before she could say anything Mrs. Maynard went on: “There isn’t one of them that does n’t think you’re much more scandalous than if you were the greatest flirt alive. But, I don’t mind them, and why should you?”

  The serious girl whom she addressed was in that helpless subjection to the truth in which so many New England women pass their lives. She could not deny the truth which lurk
ed in the exaggeration of these words, and it unnerved her, as the fact that she was doing what the vast majority of women considered unwomanly always unnerved her when she suffered herself to think of it. “You are right, Louise,” she said meekly and sadly. “They think as well of you as they do of me.”

  “Yes, that’s just what I said!” cried Mrs. Maynard, glad of her successful argument.

  But however disabled, her friend resumed: “The only safe way for you is to take the ground that so long as you wear your husband’s name you must honor it, no matter how cruel and indifferent to you he has been.”

  “Yes,” assented Mrs. Maynard ruefully, “of course.”

  “I mean that you must n’t even have the appearance of liking admiration, or what you call attentions. It’s wicked.”

  “I suppose so,” murmured the culprit.

  “You have been brought up to have such different ideas of divorce from what I have,” continued Grace, “that I don’t feel as if I had any right to advise you about what you are to do after you gain your suit.”

  “I shall not want to get married again for one while; I know that much,” Mrs. Maynard interpolated self-righteously.

  “But till you do gain it, you ought not to regard it as emancipating you in the slightest degree.”

  “No,” came in sad assent from the victim of the law’s delays.

  “And I want you to promise me that you won’t go walking with Mr. Libby any more; and that you won’t even see him alone, after this.”

  “Why, but Grace!” cried Mrs. Maynard, as much in amazement as in annoyance. “You don’t seem to understand! Have n’t I told you he was a friend of the family? He’s quite as much Mr. Maynard’s friend as he is mine. I’m sure,” she added, “if I asked Mr. Libby, I should never think of getting divorced. He’s all for George; and it’s as much as I can do to put up with him.”