Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “What did you talk about?” asked Marcia, requiring an account of his enjoyment from him the next morning, after Bartley had gone down to his work.

  “Mostly about you, I guess,” said the Squire, with a laugh. “There was a large sandy-haired young woman there—”

  “Miss Kingsbury,” said Marcia, with vindictive promptness. Her eyes kindled, and she began to grow rigid under the coverlet. “Whom did she talk with?”

  “Well, she talked a little with me; but she talked most of the time to the young man. She engaged to him?”

  “No,” said Marcia, relaxing. “She’s a great friend of the whole family. I don’t know what they meant by telling you it was to be just a family party, when they were going to have strangers in,” she pouted.

  “Perhaps they didn’t count her.”

  “No.” But Marcia’s pleasure in the affair was tainted, and she began to talk of other things.

  Her father stayed nearly a week, and they all found it rather a long week. After showing him her baby, and satisfying herself that he and Bartley were on good terms again, there was not much left for Marcia. Bartley had been banished to the spare room by the presence of the nurse; and he gave up his bed there to the Squire, and slept on a cot in the unfurnished attic room; the cook and a small girl got in to help, had the other. The house that had once seemed so vast was full to bursting.

  “I never knew how little it was till I saw your father coming down stairs,” said Bartley. “He’s too tall for it. When he sits on the sofa, and stretches out his legs, his boots touch the mop-board on the other side of the room. Fact!”

  “He won’t stay over Sunday,” began Marcia, with a rueful smile.

  “Why, Marcia, you don’t think I want him to go!”

  “No, you’re as good as can be about it. But I hope he won’t stay over Sunday.”

  “Haven’t you enjoyed his visit?” asked Bartley.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve enjoyed it.” The tears came into her eyes. “I’ve made it all up with father; and he doesn’t feel hard to me. But, Bartley — Sit down, dear, here on the bed!” She took his hand and gently pulled him down. “I see more and more that father and mother can never be what they used to be to me, — that you’re all the world to me. Yes, my life is broken off from theirs forever. Could anything break it off from yours? You’ll always be patient with me, won’t you? and remember that I’d always rather be good when I’m behaving the worst?”

  He rose, and went over to the crib, and kissed the head of their little girl. “Ask Flavia,” he said from the door.

  “Bartley!” she cried, in utter fondness, as he vanished from her happy eyes.

  The next morning they heard the Squire moving about in his room, and he was late in coming down to breakfast, at which he was ordinarily so prompt. “He’s packing,” said Marcia, sadly. “It’s dreadful to be willing to have him go!”

  Bartley went out and met him at his door, bag in hand. “Hollo!” he cried, and made a decent show of surprise and regret.

  “M-yes!” said the old man, as they went down stairs. “I’ve made out a visit. But I’m an old fellow, and I ain’t easy away from home. I shall tell Mis’ Gaylord how you’re gettin’ along, and she’ll be pleased to hear it. Yes, she’ll be pleased to hear it. I guess I shall get off on the ten-o’clock train.”

  The conversation between Bartley and his father-in-law was perfunctory. Men who have dealt so plainly with each other do not assume the conventional urbanities in their intercourse without effort. They had both been growing more impatient of the restraint; they could not have kept it up much longer.

  “Well, I suppose it’s natural you should want to be home again, but I can’t understand how any one can want to go back to Equity when he has the privilege of staying in Boston.”

  “Boston will do for a young man,” said the Squire, “but I’m too old for it. The city cramps me; it’s too tight a fit; and yet I can’t seem to find myself in it.”

  He suffered from the loss of identity which is a common affliction with country people coming to town. The feeling that they are of no special interest to any of the thousands they meet bewilders and harasses them; after the searching neighborhood of village life, the fact that nobody would meddle in their most intimate affairs if they could, is a vague distress. The Squire not only experienced this, but, after reigning so long as the censor of morals and religion in Equity, it was a deprivation for him to pass a whole week without saying a bitter thing to any one. He was tired of the civilities that smoothed him down on every side.

  “Well, if you must go,” said Bartley, “I’ll order a hack.”

  “I guess I can walk to the depot,” returned the old man.

  “Oh, no, you can’t.” Bartley drove to the station with him, and they bade each other adieu with a hand-shake. They were no longer enemies, but they liked each other less than ever.

  “See you in Equity next summer, I suppose?” suggested the Squire.

  “So Marcia says,” replied Bartley. “Well, take care of yourself. — You confounded, tight-fisted old woodchuck!” he added under his breath, for the Squire had allowed him to pay the hack fare.

  He walked home, composing variations on his parting malison, to find that the Squire had profited by his brief absence while ordering the hack, to leave with Marcia a silver cup, knife, fork, and spoon, which Olive Halleck had helped him choose, for the baby. In the cup was a check for five hundred dollars. The Squire was embarrassed in presenting the gifts, and when Marcia turned upon him with, “Now, look here, father, what do you mean?” he was at a loss how to explain.

  “Well, it’s what I always meant to do for you.”

  “Baby’s things are all right,” said Marcia. “But I’m not going to let Bartley take any money from you, unless you think as well of him as I do, and say so, right out.”

  The Squire laughed. “You couldn’t quite expect me to do that, could you?”

  “No, of course not. But what I mean is, do you think now that I did right to marry him?”

  “Oh, you’re all right, Marcia. I’m glad you’re getting along so well.”

  “No, no! Is Bartley all right?”

  The Squire laughed again, and rubbed his chin in enjoyment of her persistence. “You can’t expect me to own up to everything all at once.”

  “So you see, Bartley,” said Marcia, in repeating these words to him, “it was quite a concession.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the concession, but I guess there’s no doubt about the check,” replied Bartley.

  “Oh, don’t say that, dear!” protested his wife. “I think father was pleased with his visit every way. I know he’s been anxious about me, all the time; and yet it was a good deal for him to do, after what he had said, to come down here and as much as take it all back. Can’t you look at it from his side?”

  “Oh, I dare say it was a dose,” Bartley admitted. The money had set several things in a better light. “If all the people that have abused me would take it back as handsomely as your father has,” — he held the check up,— “why, I wish there were twice as many of them.”

  She laughed for pleasure in his joke. “I think father was impressed by everything about us, — beginning with baby,” she said, proudly.

  “Well, he kept his impressions to himself.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing but his way. He never was demonstrative, — like me.”

  “No, he has his emotions under control, — not to say under lock and key, — not to add, in irons.”

  Bartley went on to give some instances of the Squire’s fortitude when apparently tempted to express pleasure or interest in his Boston experiences.

  They both undeniably felt freer now that he was gone. Bartley stayed longer than he ought from his work, in tacit celebration of the Squire’s departure, and they were very merry together; but when he left her, Marcia called for her baby, and, gathering it close to her heart, sighed over it, “Poor father! poor father!”

  XXIII. />
  When the spring opened, Bartley pushed Flavia about the sunny pavements in a baby carriage, while Marcia paced alongside, looking in under the calash top from time to time, arranging the bright afghan, and twitching the little one’s lace hood into place. They never noticed that other perambulators were pushed by Irish nurse-girls or French bonnes; they had paid somewhat more than they ought for theirs, and they were proud of it merely as a piece of property. It was rather Bartley’s ideal, as it is that of most young American fathers, to go out with his wife and baby in that way; he liked to have his friends see him; and he went out every afternoon he could spare. When he could not go, Marcia went alone. Mrs. Halleck had given her a key to the garden, and on pleasant mornings she always found some of the family there, when she pushed the perambulator up the path, to let the baby sleep in the warmth and silence of the sheltered place. She chatted with Olive or the elder sisters, while Mrs. Halleck drove Cyrus on to the work of tying up the vines and trimming the shrubs, with the pitiless rigor of women when they get a man about some outdoor labor. Sometimes, Ben Halleck was briefly of the party; and one morning when Marcia opened the gate, she found him there alone with Cyrus, who was busy at some belated tasks of horticulture. The young man turned at the unlocking of the gate, and saw Marcia lifting the front wheels of the perambulator to get it over the steps of the pavement outside. He limped hastily down the walk to help her, but she had the carriage in the path before he could reach, her, and he had nothing to do but to walk back at its side, as she propelled it towards the house. “You see what a useless creature a cripple is,” he said.

  Marcia did not seem to have heard him. “Is your mother at home?” she asked.

  “I think she is,” said Halleck. “Cyrus, go in and tell mother that Mrs. Hubbard is here, won’t you?”

  Cyrus went, after a moment of self-respectful delay, and Marcia sat down on a bench under a pear-tree beside the walk. Its narrow young leaves and blossoms sprinkled her with shade shot with vivid sunshine, and in her light dress she looked like a bright, fresh figure from some painter’s study of spring. She breathed quickly from her exertion, and her cheeks had a rich, dewy bloom. She had pulled the perambulator round so that she might see her baby while she waited, and she looked at the baby now, and not at Halleck, as she said, “It is quite hot in the sun to-day.” She had a way of closing her lips, after speaking, in that sweet smile of hers, and then of glancing sidelong at the person to whom she spoke.

  “I suppose it is,” said Halleck, who remained on foot. “But I haven’t been out yet. I gave myself a day off from the Law School, and I hadn’t quite decided what to do with it.”

  Marcia leaned forward, and brushed a tendril of the baby’s hair out of its eye. “She’s the greatest little sleeper that ever was when she gets into her carriage,” she half mused, leaning back with her hands folded in her lap, and setting her head on one side for the effect of the baby without the stray ringlet. “She’s getting so fat!” she said, proudly.

  Halleck smiled. “Do you find it makes a difference in pushing her carriage, from day to day?”

  Marcia took his question in earnest, as she must take anything but the most obvious pleasantry concerning her baby. “The carriage runs very easily; we picked out the lightest one we could, and I never have any trouble with it, except getting up curbstones and crossing Cambridge Street. I don’t like to cross Cambridge Street, there are always so many horse-cars. But it’s all down-hill coming here: that’s one good thing.”

  “That makes it a very bad thing going home, though,” said Halleck.

  “Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other side; it isn’t so steep there.”

  There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them on the baby’s afghan.

  “Your mother won’t like your spoiling her pear-tree,” said Marcia, seriously.

  “She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard.”

  “Miss Hubbard!” repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond derision. “How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!”

  Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young man’s ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried to make him take the baby. Little by little his compassion adjusted itself to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage. His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise, infused itself into his sense of her.

  He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his reverie: Marcia had said something. “I beg your pardon?” he queried.

  “Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?”

  Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions, had done. “No, I don’t,” he answered.

  “I was at your church.”

  “I ought to have been there myself,” he returned, gravely, “and then I should have known.”

  She took his self-reproach literally. “You couldn’t have seen me. I was sitting pretty far back, and I went out before any of your family saw me. Don’t you go there?”

  “Not always, I’m sorry to say. Or, rather, I’m sorry not to be sorry. What church do you generally go to?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes to one, and sometimes to another. Bartley used to report the sermons, and we went round to all the churches then. That is the way I did at home, and it came natural to me. But I don’t like it very well. I want Flavia should belong to some particular church.”

  “There are enough to choose from,” said Halleck, with pensive sarcasm.

  “Yes, that’s the difficulty. But I shall make up my mind to one of them, and then I shall always keep to it. What I mean is that I should like to find out where most of the good people belong, and then have her be with them,” pursued Marcia. “I think it’s best to belong to some church, don’t you?”

  There was something so bare, so spiritually poverty-stricken, in these confessions and questions, that Halleck found nothing to say to them. He was troubled, moreover, as to what the truth was in his own mind. He answered, with a sort of mechanical adhesion to the teachings of his youth, “I should be a recreant not to think so. But I’m not sure that I know what you mean by belonging to some church,” he added. “I suppose you would want to believe in the creed of the church, whichever it was.”

  “I don’t know that I should be particular,” said Marcia, with perfect honesty.

  Halleck laughed sadly. “I’m afraid they would, then, unless you joined the Broad Church.”

  “What is that?” He explained as well as he could. At the end she repeated, as if she had not followed him very closely: “I should like her to belong to the church where most of the good people went. I think that would be the right one, if you could only find which it is.” Halleck laughed again. “I suppose what I say must sound very queer to you; but I’ve been thinking a good deal about this lately.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Hall
eck. “I had no reason to laugh, either on your account or my own. It’s a serious subject.” She did not reply, and he asked, as if she had left the subject, “Do you intend to pass the summer in Boston?”

  “No; I’m going down home pretty early, and I wanted to ask your mother what is the best way to put away my winter things.”

  “You’ll find my mother very good authority on such matters,” said Halleck. Through an obscure association with moths that corrupt, he added, “She’s a good authority on church matters, too.”

  “I guess I shall talk with her about Flavia,” said Marcia.

  Cyrus came out of the house. “Mis’ Halleck will be here in a minute. She’s got to get red of a lady that’s calling, first,” he explained.

  “I will leave you, then,” said Halleck, abruptly.

  “Good by,” answered Marcia, tranquilly. The baby stirred; she pushed the carriage to and fro, without glancing after him as he walked away.

  His mother came down the steps from the house, and kissed Marcia for welcome, and looked under the carriage-top at the sleeping baby. “How she does sleep!” she whispered.

  “Yes,” said Marcia, with the proud humility of a mother, who cannot deny the merit of her child, “and she sleeps the whole night through. I’m never up with her. Bartley says she’s a perfect Seven-Sleeper. It’s a regular joke with him, — her sleeping.”

  “Ben was a good baby for sleeping, too,” said Mrs. Halleck, retrospectively emulous. “It’s one of the best signs. It shows that the child is strong and healthy.” They went on to talk of their children, and in their community of motherhood they spoke of the young man as if he were still an infant. “He has never been a moment’s care to me,” said Mrs. Halleck. “A well baby will be well even in teething.”

  “And I had somehow thought of him as sickly!” said Marcia, in self-derision.

  Tears of instant intelligence sprang into his mother’s eyes. “And did you suppose he was always lame?” she demanded, with gentle indignation. “He was the brightest and strongest boy that ever was, till he was twelve years old. That’s what makes it so hard to bear; that’s what makes me wonder at the way the child bears it! Did you never hear how it happened? One of the big boys, as he called him, tripped him up at school, and he fell on his hip. It kept him in bed for a year, and he’s never been the same since; he will always be a cripple,” grieved the mother. She wiped her eyes; she never could think of her boy’s infirmity without weeping. “And what seemed the worst of all,” she continued, “was that the boy who did it never expressed any regret for it, or acknowledged it by word or deed, though he must have known that Ben knew who hurt him. He’s a man here, now; and sometimes Ben meets him. But Ben always says that he can stand it, if the other one can. He was always just so from the first! He wouldn’t let us blame the boy; he said that he didn’t mean any harm, and that all was fair in play. And now he says he knows the man is sorry, and would own to what he did, if he didn’t have to own to what came of it. Ben says that very few of us have the courage to face the consequences of the injuries we do, and that’s what makes people seem hard and indifferent when they are really not so. There!” cried Mrs. Halleck. “I don’t know as I ought to have told you about it; I know Ben wouldn’t like it. But I can’t bear to have any one think he was always lame, though I don’t know why I shouldn’t: I’m prouder of him since it happened than ever I was before. I thought he was here with you,” she added, abruptly.