Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The Captain paused restively, and seemed at a loss how to frame what he had next to say. “Helen,” he broke out abruptly, “did you know anything about your father’s affairs?”

  “Papa’s affairs?” asked Helen, with a start.

  “Oh, don’t be troubled — don’t be troubled,” the Captain hastened to say. “It’s all right; perfectly right; but I want to speak to you about yourself, and — it’s all right. Don’t you think we’d better, have one of these windows open?”

  “Are they shut?” asked Helen. “Yes, you can open them, please.”

  “We shall be cheerfuller with a little light,” said the Captain, flinging back the shutters; but they hardly looked so. Helen had dark rings round her eyes, which were swollen with her long weeping; she was very pale, and looked old in that black which, in a house of mourning, seems to grow upon women in a single night. She thought the Captain tremulous and broken; these muscles at the sides of his chin hung down, as if ten years had been added to his age in the last fortnight. They made a feint of finding nothing strange in each other, and the Captain resumed as he sat down again: “I mentioned your father’s affairs because there has to be some settlement of the estate, you know; and there are circumstances that make it desirable to have an early settlement. The business was left in a little confusion; it’s apt to be the case,” Captain Butler added quickly.

  “Yes,” Helen said, “papa sometimes spoke of the perplexity he felt about his accounts.”

  “Did he?” asked the Captain with some relief. “Then I suppose he gave you some idea of how he stood.”

  “No; he merely said they worried him.”

  “Well, well. I don’t know that there was any occasion to tell you, any occasion for alarm. There seems to have been no will; but that makes no difference. The law makes a will, and you get what there is — that is, all there is.” The Captain had a certain forlorn air of disoccupation, which now struck Helen more than what he was saying.

  “Would you like to smoke, Captain Butler?” she asked.

  “Why, yes, if you will let me, my dear,” he said, with an eager, humble gratitude, putting his hand quickly into his breast-pocket. “I didn’t know—”

  Helen rose, and placed the little table at his elbow, and set the ash-holder on it, as she had done that last night when he had sat there with her father. They looked at each other without speaking.

  The Captain struck his match, and said apologetically between the long whiffs with which he lit his cigar, “I talk better with, it, and I have some things to explain.”

  He paused, and sinking back into his chair with a sigh of comfort which brought a dim smile into Helen’s face, presently resumed: “As there is no will, and no executor, there will have to be an administrator. Whom should you like appointed? I believe the Court appoints any one you wish.”

  “Oh, you, Captain Butler!” replied Helen instantly.

  “I expected this,’’ said the Captain, “and I suppose I am as fit as any one. I’m sure that no one could care more for your father’s interests and honour, and I know rather more of his affairs than anybody else. You will have to make your wishes known in form; but that’s easily managed. In the meantime, you had better be away, don’t you think, while we are looking into things? I don’t know what there is to do, exactly; but I suppose there’s to be some sort of survey, or appraisal, and — yes, you had better be away, when we are looking into things.”

  “Do you mean — away from the house?” asked Helen.

  “Why, yes,” the Captain reluctantly assented. “It’s a — form; a necessary form.”

  “It’s quite right,” said Helen positively. “And — yes, — I had better be out of the way.”

  “I’m glad you see it in that light, my dear,” returned Captain Butler. “You’re a good girl, Helen, and you make it much easier for me. Pack up everything that belongs to you, and go as if you were going to stay.” The Captain made a ghastly show of heartiness, and smoked without looking at Helen. “Run over the house, and put together all the things that you would like to retain, and I’ll see that they come down.” Helen was trying to catch his eye, and he was keeping his gaze fixed upon the ceiling.

  “I don’t think I need do that,” said Helen; “I should merely have to bring them back with me,” Captain Butler took his cigar from his mouth in compassion, as he now looked at her puzzled face. “We don’t mean you should come back, my dear child. We want you to stay with us.”

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” said Helen quickly.

  “You can’t go on living here alone,” retorted the Captain.

  “No,” Helen ruefully assented, and faced Captain Butler in touching dismay.

  “You see,” he said, “that you must submit. And, Helen,” he said with a show of brisk, businesslike cheerfulness “I think you had better sell this house. If I were you, I should sell it at once. You’ll never get more for it.’’

  “Why, what would become of Margaret?” gasped Helen.

  “Well, Mrs. Butler has been talking of that. We want a cook, and we will take Margaret.”

  Helen simply looked bewildered. The Captain apparently found it better to go on while she was in this daze than await her emergence from it. “And if I were you, I would sell the furniture and pictures and all the things that you have not some particular association with; everything of that sort I should keep.” Helen still made no comment, and the Captain went on. “I know all this is very painful, Helen—”

  “It isn’t painful,” said Helen quietly. “It was papa’s wish to sell the house. We were talking of it that night — the night before — He thought of building in the country.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Captain Butler. “Then we can push right ahead and do it.”

  “It’s very sudden, though,” faltered Helen. “Poor Margaret! What will she say?”

  “We will hear what she will say,” cried the Captain, ringing the bell before Helen could stop him. Margaret answered it, drying her hands on her apron, as she came in, and then with a prescience of the coming interview, resting them folded upon that prop with which nature in process of time provides the persons of most cooks. “Margaret,” said the Captain, “Miss Helen is going to break up housekeeping. She is coming to us. Mrs, Butler wished me to ask you to come too.”

  Margaret pursed her mouth, and bent forward so far over the natural provision as to catch sight of the toe of her neatly shod small foot. “Should you like to come?” asked the Captain.

  “I’m afraid I should feel the change,” said Margaret.

  “Of course,” retorted the Captain shortly. “There is going to he a change, and you would feel it. We understand that. But you know me, and you know Mrs. Butler, and you know whether you would have a good place.”

  “It would be a good place,” said Margaret, still surveying her slipper. “But I think I should feel the change more and more.”

  “Well,” said the Captain impatiently, “do you mean yes, or no?”

  “I think I should feel the change,” replied Margaret.

  The Captain was nonplussed by this dry response to his cordial advance, and he waited a moment before he asked: “Have you any other place in view?”

  “I had arranged,” said Margaret calmly, “to go to a cousin’s of mine that lives in the Portland then advertise for some small family in Old Cambridge where they only keep one girl.”

  Helen had felt hurt by Margaret’s cold foresight in having already so far counted the chances as to have looked out for herself; but at this expression of Margaret’s ruling passion, she could not help smiling.

  The Captain gave an angry snort. “Very well, then,” he said, “there is nothing to do but to pay you up, and let you go,” and he took out his pocket-book. “How much is it?”

  “There isn’t anything coming to me,” Margaret returned with the same tranquillity; “Mr. Harkness paid me up.”

  “But he didn’t pay you up to the present time,” said the Captain.r />
  “I should wish to consider Miss Helen my guest for the past two weeks,” said Margaret, in the neatness of an evidently thought-out speech.

  The Captain gave a laugh; but Helen, who knew all Margaret’s springs of action, and her insuperable pride, interposed: “You may, Margaret,” she said gently.

  “Thank you, Miss Helen,” said Margaret, lifting her eyes now for the first to glance at Helen. She turned with a little nod of self-dismissal, and went back to the kitchen, leaving the Captain hot and baffled.

  It was some moments before he spoke again. “Well, then,” he said; “about selling the house: do you know, Helen, I think it had better be sold at auction? It might be tedious waiting for a private sale, and real estate is such a drug, with the market falling, that you might have to lose more on it after waiting than if you forced it to a sale now. How do you feel about it?”

  The finesse that the Captain was using in all the business, wreathing the hard legal exigencies of the case in flowers of suggestion and counsel, and putting on all a smiling air of volition, could never be fully known, except to the goodness that inspired it; but he was rewarded by the promptness with which Helen assented to everything.

  “I shall be glad to have-you do whatever you think is best, Captain Butler,” she answered. “I have no feeling about the house — it’s strange that I shouldn’t have — and I don’t care how soon it is sold, nor how it is sold.”

  The Captain instantly advanced a step further. “Perhaps you wouldn’t care to come back to it at all, any more? Perhaps you could put your hand on what you’d like to keep, and I could look after it for you, and—” He stopped at seeing Helen change countenance. “Well?”

  “Did you think of selling the furniture too?” she asked.

  “Why, yes,” assented the Captain. “I said so just now. I’m afraid you’d find it a burden after the house was gone. You’d have to store it, you know. Still, if you don’t wish it—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Helen, drawing a long breath, “it had better go!” She spoke with a gentle submissiveness that smote the Captain to the heart “You can keep everything you want, my dear — you can keep it all!” he returned vehemently.

  “That would be silly,” said Helen. “Besides, there are very few things I should want to keep. I couldn’t keep papa’s things: they ‘re terrible. I should like you to take everything that belonged to him, Captain Butler — except his watch and his Bible — and give them to some poor people that could use them. Then I only want my own things; and perhaps his chair, and—” Helen stopped, and the Captain, not to look at her, cast a roving eye about the room.

  “Those Copleys, of course, you would reserve,” he remarked presently.

  “No,” said Helen, “I never saw the people. You can sell them. But I shall keep my mother’s picture, because I think papa would like me to.”

  The sense of her father’s presence expressed in these words touched the Captain again. He cleared his throat, but he was still hoarse in saying, “I think the Museum would buy the Copleys.” Helen seemed too indifferent about their fate to make any reply.

  The worst was now over. Captain Butler had accomplished all that he wished without being obliged to explain anything to Helen, or to alarm her fears in any way, and he was unreasonably heartened by the fact. He might, perhaps, have stated the whole truth to her ignorance of affairs without being much more intelligible than he had been with all these skilful evasions. If he had said, “Your father died with his business in the utmost confusion, and probably insolvent,” she would scarcely have realised that life was not to go on just as before; and if he had said, “You are left a beggar,” how could Helen Harkness have conceived of herself in the figure of one of the women who had dropped their tears into their tea-cups in the kitchen, as they cried over the old clothes she had given them? It had wrung the Captain’s heart to hear her talk of poor people, and of giving; and yet, he rose from his chair, when he saw Helen still safe in her ignorance, with something like cheerfulness.

  “You just make a memorandum of what you’d like reserved, Helen,” he said, “and I’ll attend to it for you. Put your own little traps together, and I’ll send a carriage to take you down to the four o’clock train. Anything you think of afterwards of course will he kept for you.”

  He left her to this task. It was at least something to do, and Helen went about it with an energy which she was surprised to find in herself. At first the reproach with which the silent house seemed to use her indifference smote upon her, but it did not last long. Home had died out of it, as life had gone out of her father’s dust; and neither house nor grave was anything to her. She passed from room to room, and opened closets and drawers, and looked at a hundred things. She ended in despair by choosing a very few. If she could not keep all, why should she want any? Whatever it seemed desecration to sell she put on her memorandum to be given away. She selected a large number of things for Margaret, and when she sat down at the old Bostonian half-past two o’clock dinner (to which her father had always kept), she told Margaret what she had done. Margaret took one or two little trinkets which Helen offered her in her hand, and declined the other gifts.

  “Why, what do you mean, Margaret’!” asked Helen. “Why don’t you take them?”

  “I shouldn’t wish to, Miss Helen,” said Margaret, pursing her mouth.

  “Well, have your own way,” returned Helen. “I suppose this is another of your mysteries.’’

  “I should wish to do everything properly, Miss Helen.”

  “What do you mean by properly? Why do you Miss Helen me, all the time? What made you so stiff with Captain Butler? and he so kind!”

  “Captain Butler is a very pleasant gentleman,” said Margaret, in her neatest manner, “but I shouldn’t wish him to think it was quite the same as going on here.”

  “You ‘re very foolish. It would have been a nice place.”

  “I wished him to understand that I felt it a change.’’

  “Well, well!” cried Helen impatiently. “You must do as you please, but you needn’t have been so cross.”

  Helen’s nerves were beginning to give way, and she went on childishly. “You act just as if we were going to be together always. Do you know that I’m going away now, and not coming back any more?”

  “Yes, Miss Helen.”

  “And do you think this is the way to treat me at the last moment? Why don’t you take the things?”

  “I shouldn’t wish to be under a compliment, Miss Helen.”

  “What do you mean by being under a compliment?”

  “I shouldn’t wish to be beholden.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t wish, you shouldn’t wish! This is too bad!” whimpered Helen. “What am I but under a compliment to you, as you call it? I didn’t think you’d behave so at the last moment. But I see. Yon ‘re too proud for anything, and you never did care for me.”

  “Oh, Miss Helen!”

  “Yes! And go to your cousin’s, — the quicker the better — and have your own cross way. I’m sure I don’t care, if you’ll be the happier for it. I can tell you what you are, Margaret: you ‘re a silly goose, and you make every one hate you. The charm’s broken between us, — quite; and I’m glad of it.”

  Margaret went out without saying anything, and Helen tried to go on with her dinner, but failed, and began her inventory again, and at last went to her room and dressed for her journey. She came down into the library just before starting, and rang for Margaret. When the cook appeared, the young girl suddenly threw her arms round her neck. “Goodbye,” she sobbed out, “you good, old, wicked, foolish, stuck-up Margaret. I’m glad you didn’t come to the Butlers’, it would have killed me to see you there! Good-bye, good-bye! Remember your poor little Helen, Margaret, and come to see me! I can’t bear to look into the kitchen! Say good-bye to it for me! Oh my poor old slighted happy home! Oh my home, my home, my home! Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!” She ran wildly through the well-known rooms, and bade them adieu with heart-
breaking farewells; she stooped down and kissed the lounge, on which her father used to lie, and spread out her empty arms upon it, and laid her homeless head where his had rested. At the sound of the bell she sprang up, and opened the door herself, and fled down the steps, and into the carriage, shrinking into the furthest corner, and thickly hiding her face under her black veil.

  She seemed to herself part of a vast train of events, without control, without volition, save the will to obey. She did what she was bid, and the great movement went on. Somewhere must be arrest, somewhere repose, but as yet she could not foresee it, and she could only yield herself to the forces carrying her forward. She was going to the Butlers’ because Captain Butler had told her to come; she had assented to everything he proposed because he had seemed to wish it; but she felt that he was as powerless as she in the matter. If he had proposed everything of contrary effect, she must still have yielded the same.

  Captain Butler joined her at the station half-an-hour after she had left home, and just in time to step aboard the train with her. He was hot and looked vexed. When he got his breath a little, “Do you know,” said he, “that old fool hasn’t made any bills?”

  “What old fool?” asked Helen passively.

  “Margaret!” replied the Captain, with a burst. “Didn’t you understand that she meant merely to refuse her wages for the last two weeks, when she said she wished to consider you her guest?”

  “Why, yes,” said Helen.

  “Well, she meant a great deal more,” cried the Captain. “I’ve been round to the butcher and baker and all the rest, to settle their accounts, and I find that she’s paid for everything since we left you. But I shall have it out with her. It won’t do. It’s ridiculous!”

  “Poor Margaret!” said Helen softly. She understood now the secret of Margaret’s intolerable stateliness, and of her reluctance to mar her ideal of hospitality by accepting a reciprocal benefit. It was all very droll and queer, but so like Margaret that Helen did not want so much to laugh as to weep at it. She saw that Captain Butler was annoyed at the way she took the matter, and she thought he would have scolded her at any other time. She said very gently: “We must let her have her way about it, Captain Butler. You couldn’t get her to take the money back, and you would only hurt her feelings if you tried. Perhaps I can do something for her some time.”