Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “O my poor, poor child! It’s the one certain thing in all the world. It will be known, and it will be seen. What wouldn’t I have given to keep it from you for ever, Helen? You and my Marian were babies together. I used to know your mother. You are like a daughter to me.” Helen passively submitted to the caresses, to the kisses, dropped with tears upon her pale cheeks, but she did not say anything, or try to reply. “But it was not to be kept,” Mrs. Butler went on. “It could not be hidden, and it seemed the mercifullest and best way not to try to keep it from you in foolish self-pity for a moment, more or less.”

  “O yes, yes,” said Helen, like another person hearing of her own case. “It was best,” and she found herself toying with the strings of her hat, curling them round her finger, and running them out in a long roll.

  “It doesn’t kill, my dear. It brings its own cure with it. It’s sorrow, but it isn’t trouble! It passes over us like a black wave, but it doesn’t destroy us. You don’t realise it yet, Helen, my poor girl, but even when you do, you will bear it. Put your head down on my shoulder, dear, and I will tell you. It was in his office, where he had spent so many years at the work which had given him his honoured name and place in the world. My husband was there with him. They were turning over some books together. He saw your father put his hand over his heart, and then your father sank down in his armchair, and gave a little sigh, and — that was all.”

  Mrs. Butler broke into a fresh sobbing on the girl’s neck, but Helen remained silent and still, letting herself be clutched tight to that loving breast. “There was no pain, Helen, there was no suffering. It was a falling into rest. But before he rested — before he drew that last little sigh, my dear — he spoke one word. Do you know what it was, Helen?” She felt the girl tremble, and, as it were, lapse in her arms. “It was just your name: it was, ‘Helen.’ You were the last thing in his thoughts upon earth — the first in heaven.”

  Helen broke into a long, low wail. She rose from where she sat, and flung off the kind clinging arms, as if their pity stifled her, and fled up and down the verandah, a storm of grief that beat forth in thick sobs, and escaped in desolate moans.

  Mrs. Butler did not try to stay her, or even to approach her, as she wavered to and fro, and wrung her hands, or pressed them to her streaming eyes. At last, after many moments, as long as hours of common life, Helen suddenly checked herself, and dried the tears that drenched her face. There had come the lull which must succeed such a passion. She stopped before Mrs. Butler, and asked in a husky, changed voice, “Isn’t there any train up tonight?”

  “Why, Helen—”

  “Because if there is, I must take it. I know what you will say, but don’t say it. If you try to stop me, I will walk. I am going home.”

  It was too soon yet for her to realise that she should never go home again, but the word went to the mother-heart that ached for her with the full measure of its tragic irony, and she perceived with a helpless throe of compassion how alone in the world this fair young stricken creature stood.

  Ray had sent word to his English friend that he should not join him again on board the yacht that night, briefly explaining the trouble that kept him, and promising to see him again on the morrow. He directed the yacht to put in to Salem, as had been arranged, and instructed his men to tell Lord Rainford about the trains for Boston. He was with Captain Butler and the awe-stricken girls in the parlour, while Mrs. Butler kept Helen on the verandah, and he had gathered from the captain such part of the story as he had not already divined.

  ‘‘Edward!” called Mrs. Butler from without, and he went to her where she stood with Helen, now perfectly silent and tearless. “Miss Harkness wishes to go home to-night. I shall go with her. Mr. Butler has just got home, and—” She hesitated to say before Helen’s affliction that he had had too hard a day already, and she could not let him incur the further excitement and fatigue; but Ray seemed to know.

  “Captain Butler had better stay here,” he said promptly, “and let me go. We haven’t time for the seven o’clock at Beverley,” he added, glancing at his watch, “but we can catch the eight o’clock express at Salem if we start at once.”

  “I am ready,” said Helen quietly. “My trunk can come to-morrow. I haven’t even unlocked it.” Ray had turned away to ring the stable bell. “Jerry, put my mare into the two-seated phaeton. Don’t lose any time,” he called out, stopping Jerry’s advance up the walk for orders, and the phaeton was at the steps a minute or two after Mrs. Butler appeared in readiness to go.

  Helen went into the lighted dining-room, where Captain Butler and the girls had fearfully grouped themselves, waiting what motion of farewell she should make. Her face was pale, and somewhat stem. She went round and kissed them, beginning and ending with Marian, and she did not give way, though they each broke out crying at her touch, or at her turning from them. When she came to the Captain she put out her arms, and took him into them, and pressed herself to his breast in a succession of quick embraces, while he hid his face, and could not look at her.

  “Good-bye all,” she said, in a firm tone, and went out and got into the phaeton, where Mrs. Butler was sitting. Ray sprang to the place beside the driver. “Salem, Jerry. Quick!” and they flew forward through the evening air, cold and damp in currents, and warm in long stretches over the smooth road. She smelt the heavy scent of the spiraea in the swampy places, and of the milkweed in the sand. She said no, she was not chilly, to Mrs. Butler; and from time to time they talked together: about the days beginning to get a little shorter now, and its not being so late as it seemed. Once Ray struck a match and looked at his watch, and the driver looked at Ray, who said, “All right,” and did not say anything else during the drive. Again, after silence, Helen spoke —

  “You know I wouldn’t let you come with me, if I could help it, Mrs. Butler.”

  “You couldn’t help it, dear,” answered the other. “Don’t talk of it.”

  The station was a blur and dance of lights; she was pushed into the train as it moved away. She sat next the window in the seat with Mrs. Butler, and Ray in the seat before them. He did not look round, nor did Mrs. Butler sit very close, or take her hand, or try in any futile way to offer her comfort. The train seemed to go forward into the night by long leaps. Once it stopped somewhere on the track remote from a station, and Ray went out with some other passengers to see what had happened. Helen was aware of a wild joy in the delay, and of a wish that it might last for ever. She did not care to know what had caused it. As the cars drew into the Boston depot, she found her handkerchief, soaked with tears, in her hand, and she pulled down her veil over her swollen eyes.

  At her own door, she said, “Well, Margaret,” like a ghostly echo of her wonted greetings, and found Margaret’s eyes red and swollen too.

  “I knew you would come, Miss Helen,” said Margaret. “I told them you never would let the night pass over your head.”

  “Yes, I would come, of course,” answered Helen. She led the way back into the library, where there were lights, and where the study-lamp burnt upon the table at which last night she had sat with her father. Then, while the others stood there, she took up the lamp, and pushed open the drawing-room doors, as she had seen him do, and, as she felt, with something of his movement, and walked forward under the dimly-burning gas to the place where she had known he would be lying. Everything had been done decorously, and he appeared, as they say, very natural. She stood with the lamp lifted high, and looked down at the face, slowly and softly wiping the tears, and shaken now and then with a sob. She did not offer to kiss or touch him. She turned from the clay out of which he had departed, and walked back to the library, where it seemed as if he should meet her, and speak to her of what had happened.

  There were Mrs. Butler and Mr. Ray, and behind them there was Margaret. She felt how pitifully she must be looking at them. Some one caught the lamp, which had grown so light, from her hand, and some one had thrown up the window. That was right; she should not faint now; and now s
he was opening her eyes, and Ray’s arm was under her neck, where she lay upon the floor, and Mrs. Butler was dashing her face with cologne.

  IV.

  In those days Helen came to understand what her father had meant by saying, that after her mother and her little brothers died, the house seemed full of them, and that it did not make him afraid. Now that he had died, the house seemed full of him, and she was not afraid. She grew to be weak and sore, and almost blind from weeping; but even when she cowered over the dead face, and cried and moaned to it, it seemed something earthly and perishable in her love bewailing only the earthly and perished part of him, while what was really himself beheld her grief with a high, serene compassion, and an intelligence with some immortal quiet in her own soul. Whatever it was, whether the assurance of his life after death, or the mere blind effect of custom, prolonging his presence, as the severed nerves refer sensation to the amputated limb, and rehabilitate and create it anew, this sense of his survival and nearness to her was so vivid at times that she felt as if she might, could she but turn quickly enough, see him there before her; that the inward voice must make itself audible — the airy presence tangible. It was strongest with her that first night, but it did not cease for long afterwards.

  He was with her as she followed him to the grave; and he came back with her to the house from which they had borne him.

  In this sense of his survival, which neither then nor afterwards had any fantastic quality to her, she seemed to draw nearer to him than ever before. He understood now, he knew the depth and truth of her love, through all her vanities and follies. Something inexpressibly sweet and dear was in this consciousness, and remained always, when its vividness had faded with the keen anguish of her grief. Such things, the common experience of all bereavement, are hard to put in words. Said, they seem crude and boastful, and more than what is felt; but what is felt is more than can ever be said.

  Captain Butler came up the morning after Helen’s return home, and he and Mrs. Butler remained in the house with her till all was over. Marian came up too, and Ray was there with his silent vigilance, from which everything seemed done without his agency. Helen had but to weep, to sorrow up and down the house; they gave her anguish way, and did not mock it with words of comfort When the tempests of her grief swept over her, they left her ‘to herself; when the calm that follows such paroxysms came, they talked to her of her father, and led her to talk of him. Then she was tranquil enough. At some droll things that forced themselves into remembrance in their talk, she even laughed without feeling it treason to her grief; and it was not what she thought or recalled of him that touched the springs of her sorrow. It was meeting Margaret, downcast and elusive on the stairs, and saying sadly to her, “Well, Margaret;” or catching sight of Captain Butler sitting opposite her father’s vacant chair in the library, his grizzled head sunk on his breast, and looking suddenly aged, and, at the same time, awkward in his bereavement, like a great boy, that moved her with intolerable pathos.

  Mrs. Butler went home and had out the headache which she had kept back while she must, by force of will, but every day some of them came up to see Helen, and reminded her without urgence that she was to come to them soon. She said yes, she would come very soon, and so remained without going abroad, or looking into the light of the sun. At night, when she lay down she wept, and in the morning when she woke, but through the day her tears were dried. She brooded upon what her father had said and done in the last hours they had spent together, his longing for change and for a new life that now seemed to have been prophetic of death. His weariness of the house that had been his home took a new meaning; he must long have been more in the other world than in this, and but for his pitying love for her, he must have been glad when his swift summons came. She realised at last that he had been an old man. She had known without realising it that his ways were the ways of one who has outlived himself, and who patiently remains in the presence of things that no longer interest him. She wondered if the tie by which she, who was so wholly of the earth, had bound her father to it, had not sometimes been a painful one. She remembered all the little unthinking selfishnesses of the past, and worse than these, the consolations which she had tried to offer him. She thought of the gentleness with which he always listened to her and consented, and ended by comforting her; and she bitterly accused herself for not having seen all this long ago. But she had not even seen that he had a mortal disorder about him; she had merely thought him wearied with work, or spent with the heat, in those sinkings which had at first so much alarmed her.

  The hand carried so often to his heart that she now recognised it as an habitual gesture, had given her no warning, and she blamed herself that it had not. But in truth she was not to blame. The sources of his malady were obscure, and even its nature had been so dimly hinted to him that doubtless her father had justified himself in keeping his fear of it from her. Perhaps he had hoped that yet somehow he could struggle to a better footing in other things, before he need cloud her young life with the shadow that hung upon his own; perhaps the end of many resolutions was that he could not do it. She wondered if he had himself known his danger, and if it was of that which he so often began to speak to her. But all now was dark, and this question and every other searched the darkness in vain.

  She seemed to stand somewhere upon a point of time between life and death, from which either world was equally remote. She was quite alien here, without the will or the fitness to be anywhere else; and she shrank, with a vague resentment, from the world that had taken him from her.

  This terrible touchstone of death, while it revealed the unimagined tenderness of many hearts, revealed also to her the fact that no friendliness could supply the love in which there was perfect unity of interest and desire, and perfect rest. Every day, when the Butlers came to her they brought her word from some one, from people who had known her father in business, from others who had casually met him, and who all now spoke their regret for his death. A rare quality of character had given him standing in the world that vastly greater prosperity could not have won him; and men who were of quite another stuff had a regard for him, which perhaps now and then expressed itself in affectionate patronage, but which was yet full of reverence. They found something heroic in the quiet constancy with which he fought his long, losing battle, and now that he was down at last, they had their honest regrets and spoke their honest praises. It made Helen very proud of her father to hear them; she read with a swelling heart the paragraphs about him in the newspapers, and even the formal preambles and resolutions which expressed the loss the commerce of the city had suffered in the death of a merchant of his standing and integrity. These things set Helen’s father in a new light to her; but while they made her prouder and fonder of his memory, they brought her a pang that she should have known so little of what formed his life, and should never have cared to know anything of it apart from herself.

  This was not the only phase in which she seemed to have been ignorant of him. She had always believed him good and kind, without thinking of him in that way. But now there came poor people to the door, who sometimes asked to see her, or who sometimes only sent by Margaret, to tell how sorry they felt for her, and to say that her father had at this time or that been a good friend to each of them. They all seemed to be better acquainted with him than she, and their simple stories set him in a light in which she had never seen him before. It touched Helen that they should frankly lament her father’s death as another of their deprivations, more than if they had pretended merely to condole with her, and she did not take it ill of them, that they generally concluded their blessings on his memory with some hint that further benefactions would be gratefully received. The men accepted her half-dollars in sign that their audience was ended, and went away directly; the women shed tears over the old clothes she gave them, and stayed to drink tea in the kitchen.

  One day after she had already seen three or four of these visitors, the bell rang, and Captain Butler’s boots came chirping al
ong the hall, not with their old cheerful hint of a burly roll in the wearer’s gait, but subdued and slow as if he approached with unnaturally measured tread. Helen sprang into his arms, and broke out crying on his breast. “Oh Captain Butler! I felt just now that papa must he here. Ever since he died he has been with me somehow. It seems wild to say it; but no words can ever tell how I have felt it; and just before you came in, I know that he was going to speak to me.”

  The Captain held her away at arm’s-length, and looked into her face. “Poor child! They’ve sent me to bring you home with me, and I see that I haven’t come a moment too soon. You have been alone in this house quite long enough. My God, if he only could speak to us!” The Captain controlled himself as he walked up and down the library, with his face twitching, and his hand knotting itself into a fist at his side, and presently he came and sat down in his accustomed chair near Helen. He waited till she lifted her head and wiped her eyes before he began to speak.

  “Helen,” said Captain Butler, “I told you that they had sent me for you, and I hope that you will come.”

  “Yes,’’ answered Helen, “I shall be very glad to go with you; but I think it’s hard for Marian, bringing my trouble there, to be a blot on her happiness.”

  “We won’t speak of that, my dear,” said the Captain. “If Marian can’t find her happiness in something besides gaiety, she’d better not think of getting married.”

  “I wouldn’t come if I thought I could endure it here any longer; I wouldn’t come, if I had anywhere else to go,” cried Helen.

  “We wouldn’t let you go anywhere else,” returned the Captain. “But we can talk of all that another time. What I have to say to you now is something for you to decide. Do you think you are equal to talking a little business with me?”

  “O yes. I should like to.”

  “Yes, it will take up your mind.”