Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, it’s a cruel, cruel law!” she moaned, deprived of this moral support. “To suppose that such a notice as this is sufficient! Women couldn’t have made such a law.”

  “No, women only profit by such laws after they’re made: they work both ways. But it’s not such a bad law, as divorce laws go. We do worse, now, in some New England States.”

  They found the Squire alone in the parlor, and, with a few words of explanation, Atherton put the paper in his hands, and he read the notice in emotionless quiet. Then he took off his spectacles, and shut them in their case, which he put back into his waistcoat pocket. “This is all right,” he said. He cleared his throat, and, lifting the fierce glimmer of his eyes to Atherton’s, he asked, drily, “What is the law, at present?”

  Atherton briefly recapitulated the points as he had them from Halleck.

  “That’s good,” said the old man. “We will fight this, gentlemen.” He rose, and from his gaunt height looked down on both of them, with his sinuous lips set in a bitter smile. “Bartley must have been disappointed when he found a divorce so hard to get in Indiana. He must have thought that the old law was still in force there. He’s not the fellow to swear to a lie if he could help it; but I guess he expects to get this divorce by perjury.”

  Marcia was putting little Flavia to bed. She heard the talking below; she thought she heard Bartley’s name. She ran to the stairs, and came hesitantly down, the old wild hope and wild terror fluttering her pulse and taking her breath. At sight of the three men, apparently in council, she crept toward them, holding out her hands before her like one groping his way. “What — what is it?” She looked from Atherton’s face to her father’s; the old man stopped, and tried to smile reassuringly; he tried to speak; Atherton turned away.

  It was Halleck who came forward, and took her wandering hands. He held them quivering in his own, and said gravely and steadily, using her name for the first time in the deep pity which cast out all fear and shame, “Marcia, we have found your husband.”

  “Dead?” she made with her lips.

  “He is alive,” said Halleck. “There is something in this paper for you to see, — something you must see—”

  “I can bear anything if he is not dead. Where — what is it? Show it to me—” The paper shook in the hands which Halleck released; her eyes strayed blindly over its columns; he had to put his finger on the place before she could find it. Then her tremor ceased, and she seemed without breath or pulse while she read it through. She fetched a long, deep sigh, and passed her hand over her eyes, as if to clear them; staying herself unconsciously against Halleck’s breast, and laying her trembling arm along his arm till her fingers knit themselves among his fingers, she read it a second time and a third. Then she dropped the paper, and turned to look up at him. “Why!” she cried, as if she had made it out at last, while an awful, joyful light of hope flashed into her face. “It is a mistake! Don’t you see? He thinks that I never came back! He thinks that I meant to abandon him. That I — that I — But you know that I came back, — you came back with me! Why, I wasn’t gone an hour, — a half-hour, hardly. Oh, Bartley, poor Bartley! He thought I could leave him, and take his child from him; that I could be so wicked, so heartless — Oh, no, no, no! Why, I only stayed away that little time because I was afraid to go back! Don’t you remember how I told you I was afraid, and wanted you to come in with me?” Her exaltation broke in a laugh. “But we can explain it now, and it will be all right. He will see — he will understand — I will tell him just how it was — Oh, Flavia, Flavia, we’ve found papa, we’ve found papa! Quick!”

  She whirled away toward the stairs, but her father caught her by the arm. “Marcia!” he shouted, in his old raucous voice, “You’ve got to understand! This” — he hesitated, as if running over all terms of opprobrium in his mind, and he resumed as if he had found them each too feeble— “Bartley hasn’t acted under any mistake.”

  He set the facts before her with merciless clearness, and she listened with an audible catching of the breath at times, while she softly smoothed her forehead with her left hand. “I don’t believe it,” she said when he had ended. “Write to him, tell him what I say, and you will see.”

  The old man uttered something between a groan and a curse. “Oh, you poor, crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid of you, and that he’s just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and so he accuses you of that, but he’d just as soon accuse you of anything else. Write to him? You’ve got to go to him! You’ve got to go out there and fight him in open court, with facts and witnesses. Do you suppose Bartley Hubbard wants any explanation from you? Do you think he’s been waiting these two years to hear that you didn’t really abandon him, but came back to this house an hour after you left it, and that you’ve waited for him here ever since? When he knows that, will he withdraw this suit of his and come home? He’ll want the proof, and the way to do is to go out there and let him have it. If I had him on the stand for five minutes,” said the old man between his set teeth,— “just five minutes, — I’d undertake to convince him from his own lips that he was wrong about you! But I am afraid he wouldn’t mind a letter! You think I say so because I hate him; and you don’t believe me. Well, ask either of these gentlemen here whether I’m telling you the truth.”

  She did not speak, but, with a glance at their averted faces, she sank into a chair, and passed one hand over the other, while she drew her breath in long, shuddering respirations, and stared at the floor with knit brows and starting eyes, like one stifling a deadly pang. She made several attempts to speak before she could utter any sound; then she lifted her eyes to her father’s: “Let us — let us — go — home! Oh, let us go home! I will give him up. I had given him up already; I told you,” she said, turning to Halleck, and speaking in a slow, gentle tone, “only an hour ago, that he was dead. And this — this that’s happened, it makes no difference. Why did you bring the paper to me when you knew that I thought he was dead?”

  “God knows I wished to keep it from you.”

  “Well, no matter now. Let him go free if he wants to. I can’t help it.”

  “You can help it,” interrupted her father. “You’ve got the facts on your side, and you’ve got the witnesses!”

  “Would you go out with me, and tell him that I never meant to leave him?” she asked simply, turning to Halleck. “You — and Olive?”

  “We would do anything for you, Marcia!”

  She sat musing, and drawing her hands one over the other again, while her quivering breath came and went on the silence. She let her hands fall nervelessly on her lap. “I can’t go; I’m too weak; I couldn’t bear the journey. No!” She shook her head. “I can’t go!”

  “Marcia,” began her father, “it’s your duty to go!”

  “Does it say in the law that I have to go, if I don’t choose?” she asked of Halleck.

  “No, you certainly need not go, if you don’t choose!”

  “Then I will stay. Do you think it’s my duty to go?” she asked, referring her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the silence by which they tried to leave her free. “I don’t care for my duty, any more. I don’t want to keep him, if it’s so that he — left me — and — and meant it — and he doesn’t — care for me any — more.”

  “Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he doesn’t care for you now.”

  “Then let him go, and let us go home.”

  “Very well!” said the old man. “We will go home, then, and before the week’s out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist.”

  “Bigamist?” Marcia leaped to her feet.

  “Yes, bigamist! Don’t you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out there before he began this suit?”

  The languor was gone from Marcia’s limbs. As she confronted her father, the wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His
was dark and wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and the hoarded hate in the old man’s soul seemed to speak in Marcia’s thick whisper, “I will go.”

  XXXVIII.

  The Athertons sat late over their breakfast in the luxurious dining-room where the April sun came in at the windows overlooking the Back Bay, and commanding at that stage of the tide a long stretch of shallow with a flight of white gulls settled upon it.

  They had let Clara’s house on the hill, and she had bought another on the new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of her own unless it was that there seemed to be no great things she could do for him. One day when she whimsically complained of this, he said: “I’m very glad of that. Let’s try to be equal to the little sacrifices we must make for each other; they will be quite enough. Many a woman who would be ready to die for her husband makes him wretched because she won’t live for him. Don’t despise the day of small things.”

  “Yes, but when every day seems the day of small things!” she pouted.

  “Every day is the day of small things,” said Atherton, “with people who are happy. We’re never so prosperous as when we can’t remember what happened last Monday.”

  “Oh, but I can’t bear to be always living in the present.”

  “It’s not so spacious, I know, as either the past or the future, but it’s all we have.”

  “There!” cried Clara. “That’s fatalism! It’s worse than fatalism!”

  “And is fatalism so very bad?” asked her husband.

  “It’s Mahometanism!”

  “Well, it isn’t necessarily a plurality of wives,” returned Atherton, in subtle anticipation of her next point. “And it’s really only another name for resignation, which is certainly a good thing.”

  “Resignation? Oh, I don’t know about that!”

  Atherton laughed, and put his arm round her waist: an argument that no woman can answer in a man she loves; it seems to deprive her of her reasoning faculties. In the atmosphere of affection which she breathed, she sometimes feared that her mental powers were really weakening. As a girl she had lived a life full of purposes, which, if somewhat vague, were unquestionably large. She had then had great interests, — art, music, literature, — the symphony concerts, Mr. Hunt’s classes, the novels of George Eliot, and Mr Fiske’s lectures on the cosmic philosophy; and she had always felt that they expanded and elevated existence. In her moments of question as to the shape which her life had taken since, she tried to think whether the happiness which seemed so little dependent on these things was not beneath the demands of a spirit which was probably immortal and was certainly cultivated. They all continued to be part of her life, but only a very small part; and she would have liked to ask her husband whether his influence upon her had been wholly beneficial. She was not sure that it had; but neither was she sure that it had not. She had never fully consented to the distinctness with which he classified all her emotions and ideas as those of a woman: in her heart she doubted whether a great many of them might not be those of a man, though she had never found any of them exactly like his. She could not complain that he did not treat her as an equal; he deferred to her, and depended upon her good sense to an extent that sometimes alarmed her, for she secretly knew that she had a very large streak of silliness in her nature. He seemed to tell her everything, and to be greatly ruled by her advice, especially in matters of business; but she could not help observing that he often kept matters involving certain moral questions from her till the moment for deciding them was past. When she accused him of this, he confessed that it was so; but defended himself by saying that he was afraid her conscience might sway him against his judgment.

  Clara now recurred to these words of his as she sat looking at him through her tears across the breakfast table. “Was that the reason you never told me about poor Ben before?”

  “Yes, and I expect you to justify me. What good would it have done to tell you?”

  “I could have told you, at least, that, if Ben had any such feeling as that, it wasn’t his fault altogether.”

  “But you wouldn’t have believed that, Clara,” said Atherton. “You know that, whatever that poor creature’s faults are, coquetry isn’t one of them.”

  Clara only admitted the fact passively. “How did he excuse himself for coming back?” she asked.

  “He didn’t excuse himself; he defied himself. We had a stormy talk, and he ended by denying that he had any social duty in the matter.”

  “And I think he was quite right!” Clara flashed out. “It was his own affair.”

  “He said he had a concrete purpose, and wouldn’t listen to abstractions. Yes, he talked like a woman. But you know he wasn’t right, Clara, though you talk like a woman, too. There are a great many things that are not wrong except as they wrong others. I’ve no doubt that, as compared with the highest love her husband ever felt for her, Ben’s passion was as light to darkness. But if he could only hope for its return through the perversion of her soul, — through teaching her to think of escape from her marriage by a divorce, — then it was a crime against her and against society.”

  “Ben couldn’t do such a thing!”

  “No, he could only dream of doing it. When it came to the attempt, everything that was good in him revolted against it and conspired to make him help her in the efforts that would defeat his hopes if they succeeded. It was a ghastly ordeal, but it was sublime; and when the climax came, — that paper, which he had only to conceal for a few days or weeks, — he was equal to the demand upon him. But suppose a man of his pure training and traditions had yielded to temptation, — suppose he had so far depraved himself that he could have set about persuading her that she owed no allegiance to her husband, and might rightfully get a divorce and marry him, — what a ruinous blow it would have been to all who knew of it! It would have disheartened those who abhorred it, and encouraged those who wanted to profit by such an example. It doesn’t matter much, socially, what undisciplined people like Bartley and Marcia Hubbard do; but if a man like Ben Halleck goes astray, it’s calamitous; it ‘confounds the human conscience,’ as Victor Hugo says. All that careful nurture in the right since he could speak, all that life-long decency of thought and act, that noble ideal of unselfishness and responsibility to others, trampled under foot and spit upon, — it’s horrible!”

  “Yes,” answered Clara, deeply moved, even as a woman may be in a pretty breakfast-room, “and such a good soul as Ben always was naturally. Will you have some more tea?”

  “Yes, I will take another cup. But as for natural goodness—”

  “Wait! I will ring for some hot water.”

  When the maid had appeared, disappeared, reappeared, and finally vanished, Atherton resumed. “The natural goodness doesn’t count. The natural man is a wild beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast basking in the sun when his stomach is full. The Hubbards were full of natural goodness, I dare say, when they didn’t happen to cross each other’s wishes. No, it’s the implanted goodness that saves, — the seed of righteousness treasured from generation to generation, and carefully watched and tended by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have dropped it. The flower of this implanted goodness is what we call civilization, the condition of g
eneral uprightness that Halleck declared he owed no allegiance to. But he was better than his word.”

  Atherton lifted, with his slim, delicate hand, the cup of translucent china, and drained off the fragrant Souchong, sweetened, and tempered with Jersey cream to perfection. Something in the sight went like a pang to his wife’s heart. “Ah!” she said, “it is easy enough for us to condemn. We have everything we want!”

  “I don’t forget that, Clara,” said Atherton, gravely. “Sometimes when I think of it, I am ready to renounce all judgment of others. The consciousness of our comfort, our luxury, almost paralyzes me at those times, and I am ashamed and afraid even of our happiness.”

  “Yes, what right,” pursued Clara, rebelliously, “have we to be happy and united, and these wretched creatures so—”

  “No right, — none in the world! But somehow the effects follow their causes. In some sort they chose misery for themselves, — we make our own hell in this life and the next, — or it was chosen for them by undisciplined wills that they inherited. In the long run their fate must be a just one.”

  “Ah, but I have to look at things in the short run, and I can’t see any justice in Marcia’s husband using her so!” cried Clara. “Why shouldn’t you use me badly? I don’t believe that any woman ever meant better by her husband than she did.”

  “Oh, the meaning doesn’t count! It’s our deeds that judge us. He is a thoroughly bad fellow, but you may be sure she has been to blame. Though I don’t blame the Hubbards, either of them, so much as I blame Halleck. He not only had everything he wished, but the training to know what he ought to wish.”

  “I don’t know about his having everything. I think Ben must have been disappointed, some time,” said Clara, evasively.

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” replied Atherton, with the contented husband’s indifference to sentimental grievances.