Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She was still busy unpacking when Margaret came up to say that her father was awake now, and then she left off at once to go to him. The gas had been lighted in the hall and library, and that made life another thing. Her father was in his arm-chair, and was feeling decidedly better, he said; he had told Margaret to have tea there in the library. Helen laughed at him for having two teas within two hours; he owned to being hungry, and that reminded her that she had eaten nothing since an early dinner. When the tea and toast came in, and the cloth was laid half across the round table, in the mellow light of the study lamp, they were very cosy. Helen, who was always thinking of Robert, whatever else she thought of, began to play in fancy at a long life of devotion to her father, in which she should never marry. She had always imagined him living with her, but now she was living with him, and they were to grow old together; in twenty years, when he was eighty, she would be forty-three, and then there would not be much difference between them. She now finally relinquished the very last idea of Robert, except as a brother. She did not suppose she should ever quite like his wife, but she should pet their children.

  “Helen,” said her father, breaking in upon these ideas, “how should you like to live in the country?”

  “Why, papa, I was just thinking of it! That is, not in the country exactly, but somewhere off by ourselves, just you and I. Of course, I should like it.”

  “I don’t mean on a farm,” pursued her father, “but in some of the suburban towns, where we could have a bit of ground and breathing space. I think it grows closer and closer in town; at times it seems as if I could hardly catch my breath. I believe it would agree with me in the country. I can’t get away from business entirely for a few years yet — if the times continue so bad, I must bend all my energies to it, in fact — and I have a fancy that the coming in and out of town would do me good. And I have a notion that I should like to build. I should like a new house — a perfectly new house. We could live on a simpler scale in the country.”

  “O yes, indeed!” said Helen. “I should come into town to shop, with my initials worked in worsted on the side of my bag, and I should know where the bargains were, and lunch at Copeland’s. I should like it.”

  “Well, we must think about it. I daresay we could let the house here without much trouble. I feel it somehow a great burden upon me, but I shouldn’t like to sell it.”

  “O no, papa! We couldn’t think of selling it. I should just like to let it, and then never go near it, or look in the same direction, till we were ready to come back to it.”

  “I have lived here so long,” continued her father, making her the listener to his musings rather than speaking to her, “that I should like a change. I used to think that I should never leave the house, but a place may become overcrowded with associations. You are too young, Helen, to understand how terrible it is to find one’s own past grow into the dumb material things about one, and become, as it were, imprisoned in them.”

  “O yes,” sighed the girl, “there are some dresses of mine that I can’t bear the sight of, just because I felt, or said, or did certain things when I wore them.”

  “An old house like this,” Mr. Harkness went on, “gets to be your body, and usurps all your reality, which doesn’t seem to live in it either, while you move round like a ghost. The past is so much more than the present. Think how much more these walls and these old chairs and tables have known of us than we now are!”

  “No, no! Don’t think of it, papa, or we shall be getting into the depths again,” pleaded Helen.

  “Well, I won’t,” consented her father, coming back to himself with a smile, which presently faded. “But it all makes me restless and impatient. I should like to begin a new life somewhere else, in a new house.” He was silent a while, trifling with the toast on his plate; his appetite had passed at the sight of the food, and he had eaten scarcely anything. He looked at Helen, and then at a portrait on the wall, and than at Helen again.

  “I’m not much like mamma, am I, papa?” she asked.

  “Not much in face,” said Mr. Harkness.

  “Do you wish I was more?” she pursued timidly.

  “No, I don’t think I do,” said her father.

  “It would only make me more painful, if I looked more like her, such a helpless, selfish thing as I am,” morbidly assented Helen. “I should only make you miss her the more.”

  “Why, Helen, you ‘re a very good girl — the best child in the world,” said her father.

  “O no, I’m not, papa. I’m one of the worst. I never think of anybody but myself,” said Helen, who was thinking of Robert. “You don’t know how many times I’ve gone down on my mental knees to you and asked you to have patience with me.”

  “Asked me to have patience with you?” said her father, taking her by the chin, and pressing against his cheek the beautiful face which she leaned toward him. “Poor child! There’s hardly a day since you were born that I haven’t done you a greater wrong than the sum of all your sins would come to. Papas are dreadful fellows, Helen; but they sometimes live in the hope of repairing their misdeeds.”

  “Write them on a slip of paper, and hide it in a secret drawer that opens with a clasp and spring, when you don’t know they’re there,” said Helen, glad of his touch of playfulness. “We’ve both been humbugging, and we know it.”

  He stared at her and said, “Your voice is like your mother’s; and just now, when you came in, your movement was very like hers. I hadn’t noticed it before. But she has been a great deal in my mind of late.”

  If he had wished to talk of her mother, whom Helen could not remember, and who had been all her life merely the shadow of a sorrow to her, a death, a grave, a name upon a stone, a picture on the wall, she would not spare herself the duty of encouraging him to do so. “Was she tall, like me?” she asked.

  “Not so tall,” answered her father. “And she was dark.”

  “Yes,” said Helen, lifting her eyes to the picture on the wall “She had a great passion for the country,” continued Mr. Harkness, “and I liked the town. It was more convenient for me, and I was born in Boston. It has often grieved me to think that I didn’t yield to her. I must have been dreaming of her, for when I woke a little while ago, this regret was like a physical pang at my heart. As long as we live, we can’t help treating each other as if we were to live always. But it’s a mistake. I never refused to go into the country with her,” he said as if to appease this old regret. “I merely postponed it. Now I should like to go.”

  He rose from the table, and taking the study-lamp in his hand, he feebly pushed apart the sliding-doors that opened into the drawing-room. He moved slowly down its length, on one side, throwing the light upon this object and that, before which he faltered, and so returned on the other side, as if to familiarise himself with every detail. Sometimes he held the lamp above, and sometimes below his face, but always throwing its age and weariness into relief. Helen had remained watching him As he came back she heard him say, less to her as it seemed than to himself, “Yes, I should like to sell it. I’m tired of it.”

  He set the lamp down upon the table again, and sank into his chair, and lapsed into a reverie which left Helen solitary beside him. “Ah,” she realised, as she looked on his musing, absent face, “he is old and I am young, and he has more to love in the other world, with my mother and both my brothers there, than he has in this. Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert!”

  But perhaps his absent mind was not so much bent upon the lost as she thought. He had that way fathers have of treating his daughter as an equal, of talking to her gravely and earnestly, and then of suddenly dropping her into complete nothingness, as if she were a child to be amused for a while, and then set down from his knee and sent out of doors. Helen dutifully accepted this condition of their companionship; she cared for it so little as never to have formulated it to herself; when she was set down she went out, and ordinarily she did not think of it.

  A peremptory ring at the door startled them both, and
when Margaret had opened it there entered all at the same instant, a loud, kindly voice, the chirp of boots, heavily trodden upon by a generous bulk, that rocked from side to side in its advance, and a fragrance of admirable cigars, that active and passive perfume, which comes from smoking and being smoked in the best company. “At home, Margaret?” asked the voice, whose loudness was a husky loudness, in a pause of the boots. “Yes? Well, don’t put me in there, Margaret,” which was apparently in rejection of the drawing-room. “I’ll join them in the library.”

  The boots came chirping down the hall in that direction, with a sound of heavy breathing. Helen sprang from her chair, and fled to meet the cheerful sound; there was the noise of an encountering kiss, and a jolly laugh, and “Well, Helen!” and “Oh, Captain Butler!” and later, “Harkness!” and “Butler!” as Helen led the visitor in.

  “Well!” said this guest, for the third time. He straightened his tall mass to its full height, and looked out over his chest with eyes of tender regard upon Harkness’s thin and refined face, now lit up after the hand-shaking with cordial welcome. “Do you know,” he said, as if somehow it were a curious fact of natural history, “that you have it uncommonly close in here?” He went over to the window that opened upon the little grassy yard, and put it up for himself, while Harkness was explaining that it had been put down while he was napping. Then he planted himself in a large leathern chair beside it, and went on smoking the cigar on the end of which he had been chewing. He started from the chair with violence, coughing and gesturing to forbid Helen, who was hospitably whispering to Margaret. “No, no; don’t do it. I won’t have anything. I couldn’t. I’ve just dined at the club. Yes, you may do that much,” he added to Helen, as she set a little table with an ash-holder at his elbow. “You’ve no idea what a night it is. It’s cooler, and the air’s delicious. I say, I want to take Helen back with me. I wish she’d go alone, and leave us two old fellows together here. There’s no place like Boston in the summer, after all. But you haven’t told me whether you’re surprised to see me.” Captain Butler looked round at them with something of the difficulty of a sea-turtle in a lateral inspection.

  “Never surprised, but always charmed,” said Helen, with just the shade of mockery in her tone which she knew suited this visitor.

  “Charmed, eh?” asked Captain Butler. Apparently he meant to say something satirical about the word, but could not think of anything. He turned again to her father: “How are you, Harkness?”

  “Oh, I’m very well,” said Harkness evasively. “I’m as well as usual.”

  “Then you have yourself fetched home in a hack by a policeman every day, do you?” remarked Captain Butler, blowing a succession of white rings into the air. “You were seen from the club window. I’ll tell you what; you ‘re sticking to it too close.”

  “O yes, Captain Butler, do get him away,” sighed Helen, while her father, who had not sat down, began to walk back and forth in an irritated, restless way.

  “For the present I can’t leave it,” said Harkness, fretfully. He added more graciously: “Perhaps in a week or two, or next month, I can get off for a few days. You know I was one of the securities for Bates and Mather,” he said, looking at Captain Butler over Helen’s head.

  “I had forgotten that,” answered Captain Butler gravely.

  “They left things in a complete tangle. I can’t tell just where I am yet, and, of course, I’ve no peace till I know.”

  “Of course,” assented Captain Butler. “I won’t vex you with retroactive advice, Joshua,” he added affectionately, “but I hope you won’t do anything of that kind again.”

  “No, Jack, I won’t. But you know under the circumstances it would have been black ingratitude to refuse.”

  “Yes,” said Captain Butler. He smoked a while in silence. Then he said, “I suppose it’s no worse with the old trade than with everything else, at present.”

  “No, we’re all in the same boat, I believe,” said Harkness.

  “How is Marian?” asked Helen, a little restive under the cross firing.

  “Oh, Marian’s all right. But if she were not, she wouldn’t know it.”

  “I suppose she’s very much engaged,” said Helen, with a faint pang of something like envy.

  “Yes,” said Captain Butler. “I thought you were at Bye Beach, young lady.”

  “I thought you were at Beverley, old gentleman,” retorted Helen; she had been saucy to Captain Butler from infancy.

  “So I was. But I came up unexpectedly to-day.”

  “So did I.”

  “Did you? Good! Now I’ll tell you why I came, and you shall tell me why you did. I came because I got to thinking of your father, and had a fancy I should like to see him. Did you?”

  Helen hung her head. “No,” she said at length. The Captain laughed. “Whom had you a fancy to see here, then, at this time of year?”

  “Oh, I didn’t say I should tell. You made that bargain all yourself,” mocked Helen. “But it was very kind of you to come on papa’s account,” she added softly.

  “What are you making there?” asked the Captain, bending forward to look at the work Helen had taken into her lap.

  “Who — I?” she asked, as if she had perhaps been asked what Robert was making. Her mind had been running upon him since Captain Butler asked her why she had come up to Boston. “Oh!” she recovered herself. “Why, this,” she said, taking the skeleton frame-work of gauze and wire on her finger-tips, and holding it at arm’s-length, with her head aslant surveying it, “this is a bonnet for Margaret.”

  “A bonnet, hey?” said the Captain. “It looks like a Shaker cap.”

  “Yes?” Helen clapped it on her head, and looked jauntily at the captain, dropping her shoulders, and putting her chin out. “Now, does it?”

  “No, not now. The Shaker sisters don’t wear crimps, and they don’t smile in that wicked way.” Helen laughed, and took the bonnet-frame off. “So you make Margaret’s bonnets, do you? Do you make your own?”

  “Sometimes. Not often. But I like millinery. It’s what I should turn to if I were left to take care of myself.”

  “I’m afraid you wouldn’t find it such fun,” said the Captain.

  “Oh, milliners make lots of money,” returned Helen. “They must. Why, when this bonnet is done, you couldn’t get it for ten dollars. Well, the materials don’t cost three.”

  “I wish my girls had your head for business,” said the Captain honestly. Helen made him a burlesque obeisance. “Yes, I mean it,” he insisted. “You know that I always admired your good sense. I’m always talking it into Marian.”

  “Better not,” said Helen, with a pin between her teeth.

  “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t got it, and it’d make her hate me if I had.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you ‘re not a sensible girl?” inquired the Captain.

  Helen nodded, and made “Yes” with her lips, as well as she could with the pin between her teeth. She took it out to say, “You should have seen my performances in my room a little while ago.” She was thinking of that rehearsal before the mirror.

  “What were they?” asked the Captain.

  “Oh, as if I should tell!” Helen bowed herself over the bonnet, and blushed, and laughed. Her father liked to hear the banter between her and his old friend. They both treated her as if she were a child, and she knew it and liked it; she behaved like a child.