Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Would you like to go?” asked Marcia, listlessly.

  “Yes, I should, very much,” said Halleck, scrambling to his feet, “if it won’t tire you too much?”

  “Oh, no,” said Marcia, gently, and led the way. She kept ahead of him in the climb, as she easily could, and she answered briefly to all he said. When they arrived at the top, “There is the view,” she said coldly. She waved her hand toward the valley; she made a sound in her throat as if she would speak again, but her voice died in one broken sob.

  Halleck stood with downcast eyes, and trembled. He durst not look at her, not for what he should see in her face, but for what she should see in his: the anguish of intelligence, the helpless pity. He beat the rock at his feet with the ferule of his stick, and could not lift his head again. When he did, she stood turned from him and drying her eyes on her handkerchief. Their looks met, and she trusted her self-betrayal to him without any attempt at excuse or explanation.

  “I will send Hubbard up to help you down,” said Halleck.

  “Well,” she answered, sadly.

  He clambered down the side of the bluff, and Bartley started to his feet in guilty alarm when he saw him approach. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. But I think you had better help Mrs. Hubbard down the bluff.”

  “Oh!” cried Mrs. Macallister. “A panic! how interesting!”

  Halleck did not respond. He threw himself on the grass, and left her to change or pursue the subject as she liked. Bartley showed more savoir-faire when he came back with Marcia, after an absence long enough to let her remove the traces of her tears.

  “Pretty rough on your game foot, Halleck. But Marcia had got it into her head that it wasn’t safe to trust you to help her down, even after you had helped her up.”

  “Ben,” said Olive, when they were seated in the train the next day, “why did you send Marcia’s husband up there to her?” She had the effect of not having rested till she could ask him.

  “She was crying,” he answered.

  “What do you suppose could have been the matter?”

  “What you do: she was miserable about his coquetting with that woman.”

  “Yes. I could see that she hated terribly to have her come; and that she felt put down by her all the time. What kind of person is Mrs. Macallister?”

  “Oh, a fool,” replied Halleck. “All flirts are fools.”

  “I think she’s more wicked than foolish.”

  “Oh, no, flirts are better than they seem, — perhaps because men are better than flirts think. But they make misery just the same.”

  “Yes,” sighed Olive. “Poor Marcia, poor Marcia! But I suppose that, if it were not Mrs. Macallister, it would be some one else.”

  “Given Bartley Hubbard, — yes.”

  “And given Marcia. Well, — I don’t like being mixed up with other people’s unhappiness, Ben. It’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t like it either. But you can’t very well keep out of people’s unhappiness in this world.”

  “No,” assented Olive, ruefully.

  The talk fell, and Halleck attempted to read a newspaper, while Olive looked out of the window. She presently turned to him. “Did you ever fancy any resemblance between Mrs. Hubbard and the photograph of that girl we used to joke about, — your lost love?”

  “Yes,” said Halleck.

  “What’s become of it, — the photograph? I can’t find it any more; I wanted to show it to her one day.”

  “I destroyed it. I burnt it the first evening after I had met Mrs. Hubbard. It seemed to me that it wasn’t right to keep it.”

  “Why, you don’t think it was her photograph!”

  “I think it was,” said Halleck. He took up his paper again, and read on till they left the cars.

  That evening, when Halleck came to his sister’s room to bid her good night, she threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his plain, common face, in which she saw a heavenly beauty.

  “Ben, dear,” she said, “if you don’t turn out the happiest man in the world, I shall say there’s no use in being good!”

  “Perhaps you’d better say that after all I wasn’t good,” he suggested, with a melancholy smile.

  “I shall know better,” she retorted.

  “Why, what’s the matter, now?”

  “Nothing. I was only thinking. Good night!”

  “Good night,” said Halleck. “You seem to think my room is better than my company, good as I am.”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing in that breathless way which means weeping next, with women. Her eyes glistened.

  “Well,” said Halleck, limping out of the room, “you’re quite good-looking with your hair down, Olive.”

  “All girls are,” she answered. She leaned out of her doorway to watch him as he limped down the corridor to his own room. There was something pathetic, something disappointed and weary in the movement of his figure, and when she shut her door, and ran back to her mirror, she could not see the good-looking girl there for her tears.

  XXVIII.

  “Hello!” said Bartley, one day after the autumn had brought back all the summer wanderers to the city, “I haven’t seen you for a month of Sundays.” He had Ricker by the hand, and he pulled him into a doorway to be a little out of the rush on the crowded pavement, while they chatted.

  “That’s because I can’t afford to go to the White Mountains, and swell round at the aristocratic summer resorts like some people,” returned Ricker. “I’m a horny-handed son of toil, myself.”

  “Pshaw!” said Bartley. “Who isn’t? I’ve been here hard at it, except for three days at one time and live at another.”

  “Well, all I can say is that I saw in the Record personals, that Mr. Hubbard, of the Events, was spending the summer months with his father-in-law, Judge Gaylord, among the spurs of the White Mountains. I supposed you wrote it yourself. You’re full of ideas about journalism.”

  “Oh, come! I wouldn’t work that joke any more. Look here, Ricker, I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to dine with me.”

  “Dines people!” said Ricker, in an awestricken aside.

  “No, — I mean business! You Ve never seen my kid yet: and you’ve never seen my house. I want you to come. We’ve all got back, and we’re in nice running order. What day are you disengaged?”

  “Let me see,” said Ricker, thoughtfully. “So many engagements! Wait! I could squeeze your dinner in some time next month, Hubbard.”

  “All right. But suppose we say next Sunday. Six is the hour.”

  “Six? Oh, I can’t dine in the middle of the forenoon that way! Make it later!”

  “Well, we’ll say one P.M., then. I know your dinner hour. We shall expect you.”

  “Better not, till I come.” Bartley knew that this was Ricker’s way of accepting, and he said nothing, but he answered his next question with easy joviality. “How are you making it with old Witherby?”

  “Oh, hand over hand! Witherby and I were formed for each other. By, by!”

  “No, hold on! Why don’t you come to the club any more?”

  “We-e-ll! The club isn’t what it used to be,” said Bartley, confidentially.

  “Why, of course! It isn’t just the thing for a gentleman moving in the select circles of Clover Street, as you do; but why not come, sometimes, in the character of distinguished guest, and encourage your humble friends? I was talking with a lot of the fellows about you the other night.”

  “Were they abusing me?”

  “They were speaking the truth about you, and I stopped them. I told them that sort of thing wouldn’t do. Why, you’re getting fat!”

  “You’re behind the times, Kicker,” said Bartley. “I began to get fat six months ago. I don’t wonder the Chronicle Abstract is running down on your hands. Come round and try my tivoli on Sunday. That’s what gives a man girth, my boy.” He tapped Ricker lightly on his hollow waistcoat, and left him with a wave of his hand.

  Ricker leaned out of the doorwa
y and followed him down the street with a troubled eye. He had taken stock in Bartley, as the saying is, and his heart misgave him that he should lose on the investment; he could not have sold out to any of their friends for twenty cents on the dollar. Nothing that any one could lay his finger on had happened, and yet there had been a general loss of confidence in that particular stock. Ricker himself had lost confidence in it, and when he lightly mentioned that talk at the club, with a lot of the fellows, he had a serious wish to get at Bartley some time, and see what it was that was beginning to make people mistrust him. The fellows who liked him at first and wished him well, and believed in his talent, had mostly dropped him. Bartley’s associates were now the most raffish set on the press, or the green hands; and something had brought this to pass in less than two years. Ricker had believed that it was Witherby; at the club he had contended that it was Bartley’s association with Witherby that made people doubtful of him. As for those ideas that Bartley had advanced in their discussion of journalism, he had considered it all mere young man’s nonsense that Bartley would outgrow. But now, as he looked at Bartley’s back, he had his misgivings; it struck him as the back of a degenerate man, and that increasing bulk seemed not to represent an increase of wholesome substance, but a corky, buoyant tissue, materially responsive to some sort of moral dry-rot.

  Bartley pushed on to the Events office in a blithe humor. Witherby had recently advanced his salary; he was giving him fifty dollars a week now; and Bartley had made himself necessary in more ways than one. He was not only readily serviceable, but since he had volunteered to write those advertising articles for an advance of pay, he was in possession of business facts that could be made very uncomfortable to Witherby in the event of a disagreement. Witherby not only paid him well, but treated him well; he even suffered Bartley to bully him a little, and let him foresee the day when he must be recognized as the real editor of the Events.

  At home everything went on smoothly. The baby was well and growing fast; she was beginning to explode airy bubbles on her pretty lips that a fond superstition might interpret as papa and mamma. She had passed that stage in which a man regards his child with despair; she had passed out of slippery and evasive doughiness into a firm tangibility that made it some pleasure to hold her.

  Bartley liked to take her on his lap, to feel the spring of her little legs, as she tried to rise on her feet; he liked to have her stretch out her arms to him from her mother’s embrace. The innocent tenderness which he experienced at these moments was satisfactory proof to him that he was a very good fellow, if not a good man. When he spent an evening at home, with Flavia in his lap for half an hour after dinner, he felt so domestic that he seemed to himself to be spending all his evenings at home now. Once or twice it had happened, when the housemaid was out, that he went to the door with the baby on his arm, and answered the ring of Olive and Ben Halleck, or of Olive and one or both of the intermediary sisters.

  The Hallecks were the only people at all apt to call in the evening, and Bartley ran so little chance of meeting any one else, when he opened the door with Flavia on his arm, that probably he would not have thought it worth while to put her down, even if he had not rather enjoyed meeting them in that domestic phase. He had not only long felt how intensely Olive disliked him, but he had observed that somehow it embarrassed Ben Halleck to see him in his character of devoted young father. At those times he used to rally his old friend upon getting married, and laughed at the confusion to which the joke put him. He said more than once afterwards, that he did not see what fun Ben Halleck got out of coming there; it must bore even such a dull fellow as he was to sit a whole evening like that and not say twenty words. “Perhaps he’s livelier when I’m not here, though,” he suggested. “I always did seem to throw a wet blanket on Ben Halleck.” He did not at all begrudge Halleck’s having a better time in his absence if he could.

  One night when the bell rung Bartley rose, and saying, “I wonder which of the tribe it is this time,” went to the door. But when he opened it, instead of hearing the well-known voices, Marcia listened through a hesitating silence, which ended in a loud laugh from without, and a cry from her husband of “Well, I swear! Why, you infamous old scoundrel, come in out of the wet!” There ensued, amidst Bartley’s voluble greetings, a noise of shy shuffling about in the hall, as of a man not perfectly master of his footing under social pressure, a sound of husky, embarrassed whispering, a dispute about doffing an overcoat, and question as to the disposition of a hat, and then Bartley reappeared, driving before him the lank, long figure of a man who blinked in the flash of gaslight, as Bartley turned it all up in the chandelier overhead, and rubbed his immense hands in cruel embarrassment at the beauty of Marcia, set like a jewel in the pretty comfort of the little parlor.

  “Mr. Kinney, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Bartley; and having accomplished the introduction, he hit Kinney a thwack between the shoulders with the flat of his hand that drove him stumbling across Marcia’s footstool into the seat on the sofa to which she had pointed him. “You old fool, where did you come from?”

  The refined warmth of Bartley’s welcome seemed to make Kinney feel at home, in spite of his trepidations at Marcia’s presence. He bobbed his head forward, and stretched his mouth wide, in one of his vast, silent laughs. “Better ask where I’m goin’ to.”

  “Well, I’ll ask that, if it’ll be any accommodation. Where you going?”

  “Illinois.”

  “For a divorce?”

  “Try again.”

  “To get married?”

  “Maybe, after I’ve made my pile.” Kinney’s eyes wandered about the room, and took in its evidences of prosperity, with simple, unenvious admiration; he ended with a furtive glimpse of Marcia, who seemed to be a climax of good luck, too dazzling for contemplation; he withdrew his glance from her as if hurt by her splendor, and became serious.

  “Well, you’re the last man I ever expected to see again,” said Bartley, sitting down with the baby in his lap, and contemplating Kinney with deliberation. Kinney was dressed in a long frock-coat of cheap diagonals, black cassimere pantaloons, a blue necktie, and a celluloid collar. He had evidently had one of his encounters with a cheap clothier, in which the Jew had triumphed; but he had not yet visited a barber, and his hair and beard were as shaggy as they were in the logging-camp; his hands and face were as brown as leather. “But I’m as glad,” Bartley added, “as if you had telegraphed you were coming. Of course, you’re going to put up with us.” He had observed Kinney’s awe of Marcia, and he added this touch to let Kinney see that he was master in his house, and lord even of that radiant presence.

  Kinney started in real distress. “Oh, no! I couldn’t do it! I’ve got all my things round at the Quincy House.”

  “Trunk or bag?” asked Bartley.

  “Well, it’s a bag; but—”

  “All right. We’ll step round and get it together. I generally take a little stroll out, after dinner,” said Bartley, tranquilly.

  Kinney was beginning again, when Marcia, who had been stealing some covert looks at him under her eye lashes, while she put together the sewing she was at work on, preparatory to going upstairs with the baby, joined Bartley in his invitation.

  “You wont make us the least trouble, Mr. Kinney,” she said. “The guest-chamber is all ready, and we shall be glad to have you stay.”

  Kinney must have felt the note of sincerity in her words. He hesitated, and Bartley clinched his tacit assent with a quotation: “‘The chief ornament of a house is the guests who frequent it.’ Who says that?”

  Kinney’s little blue eyes twinkled. “Old Emerson.”

  “Well, I agree with him. We don’t care anything about your company, Kinney; but we want you for decorative purposes.”

  Kinney opened his mouth for another noiseless laugh, and said, “Well, fix it to suit yourselves.”

  “I’ll carry her up for you,” said Bartley to Marcia, who was stooping forward to take the baby from him, “if Mr. Kinney
will excuse us a moment.”

  “All right,” said Kinney.

  Bartley ventured upon this bold move, because he had found that it was always best to have things out with Marcia at once, and, if she was going to take his hospitality to Kinney in bad part, he wanted to get through the trouble. “That was very nice of you, Marcia,” he said, when they were in their own room. “My invitation rather slipped out, and I didn’t know how you would like it.”

  “Oh, I’m very glad to have him stay. I never forget about his wanting to lend you money that time,” said Marcia, opening the baby’s crib.

  “You’re a mighty good fellow, Marcia!” cried Bartley, kissing her over the top of the baby’s head as she took it from him. “And I’m not half good enough for you. You never forget a benefit. Nor an injury either,” he added, with a laugh. “And I’m afraid that I forget one about as easily as the other.”

  Marcia’s eyes suffused themselves at this touch of self-analysis which, coming from Bartley, had its sadness; but she said nothing, and he was eager to escape and get back to their guest. He told her he should go out with Kinney, and that she was not to sit up, for they might be out late.

  In his pride, he took Kinney down to the Events office, and unlocked it, and lit the gas, so as to show him the editorial rooms; and then he passed him into one of the theatres, where they saw part of an Offenbach opera; after that they went to the Parker House, and had a New York stew. Kinney said he must be off by the Sunday-night train, and Bartley thought it well to concentrate as many dazzling effects upon him as he could in the single evening at his disposal. He only regretted that it was not the club night, for he would have liked to take Kinney round, and show him some of the fellows.

  “But never mind,” he said. “I’m going to have one of them dine with us to-morrow, and you’ll see about the best of the lot.”

  “Well, sir,” observed Kinney, when they had got back into Bartley’s parlor, and he was again drinking in its prettiness in the subdued light of the shaded argand burner, “I hain’t seen anything yet that suits me much better than this.”