Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Do you mean that you ‘re actually going to stand it, Helen?”

  “Yes, why not? It isn’t as if anybody else did it for me — any equal, you know. I can’t feel that it’s a disgrace, from Margaret; and it will do her so much good — you’ve no idea how much. She’s been with us ever since I was born, and surely I may accept such a kindness from an old servant, rather than wound her queer pride.”

  The Captain listened to these swelling words with dismay. This poor girl, at whose feet he saw destitution yawning, was taking life as she had always done, en princesse. He wondered what possible conception she had formed of her situation. Sooner or later he must’ tell her what it was.

  V.

  Captain Butler believed that his old friend had died a bankrupt; he represented the estate as insolvent, and the sale of the property took place at the earliest possible day. A red flannel flag, on which the auctioneer’s name was lettered, was hung out from the transome above the front door, and at ten o’clock on a dull morning when the sea-turn was beginning to break in a thin, chilly rain, a long procession of umbrellas began to ascend the front steps, where Helen had paused to cast that look of haughty wonder after the retreating policeman. The umbrellas were of all qualities, from the silk that shuts into the slimness of a walking-stick, to the whity-brown, whale-bone ribbed family umbrella, under which the habitual auction-goer of a certain size and age repairs to her favourite amusement. Many of the people had a suburban look, and some even the appearance of having arrived by the Fitchburg railroad; but there was a large proportion of citizens, and a surprising number of fashionably dressed ladies, who, nevertheless, did not seem to be of that neighbourhood; they stared curiously about them, as if they had now for the first time G entered a house there. They sat down in the sad old parlour, and looked up at the pictures and the general equipment of the room with the satisfied air of not finding it after all any better than their own. One large and handsome woman, whose person trembled and twinkled all over with black bugles, stood in the middle of the floor, and had the effect of stamping upon the supposed pride of the place. People were prowling all over the house, from cellar to garret, peering into closets and feeling of walls and doors; several elderly women in feeble health were to be met at the turns of the stairways, pressing their hands against their chests, and catching their breath with difficulty. Few, apparently, of the concourse had come to buy; but when the sale began they densely thronged the rooms in which the bidding successively went on, and made it hard for one another to get out of the packed doorways. The whole morning long the auctioneer intoned his chant of “A half, and a half and half, do-I-hear-the-three-quarters?” varied with a quick “Sold!” as from time to time he knocked off this lot or that. The cheaper carpets, chairs, beds, and tables were bought for the most part by certain fading women who bid with a kind of reluctant greed, and got together each her store of those mismated moveables which characterise furnished lodgings. They wore cheap camel’s hair Wraps and thread gloves; others, who seemed poor mothers of families, showed their black stubbed finger-tips, pressed anxiously together outside the edges of imitation India shawls, and bid upon the kitchen crockery. The Copleys were bought, as Captain Butler had expected, by the Museum of Fine Arts; the other paintings were bought by men who got them low to sell again, and in whose ruinous bazaars they were destined to consort with secondhand refrigerators and strips of dusty carpeting.

  Captain Butler would gladly have stayed away from the auction, but his duty in the matter was not to be avoided. Helen had given him a list of things to be reserved from the sale, which she had made out under two heads. The first was marked “For self,” and this was very short, and easily managed by setting the things aside before the sale began. But the list of articles “To be given away,” was on a scale which troubled the Captain’s conscience, while it forlornly amused him, by its lavish generosity; the girl had done charity to an extent that wronged the creditors of the estate, and that put it quite beyond Captain Butler’s power to humour her unwitting munificence by purchasing the things to give away. He used a discretion with which he invested himself, to put all the valuable articles up at the sale, and bestowed in charity only the cheaper matters on Helen’s list. Even then, the auction was an expensive affair to him. He was unable to let certain things, with which he intimately associated his old friend, pass’ into the hands of strangers, especially things connected with the India trade. He bought the Chinese vases and bronze monsters, the terra cotta statues and ivory carvings, the outlandish weapons, and Oriental bric-a-brac, which in the age of Eastlake mantel-shelves, then setting in with great severity, he discovered to be in great request.

  His dismay increased as these costly and worthless treasures accumulated upon his hands, for his house was already full of them, to the utmost capacity of its closets and out-of-the-way corners. Besides, he laid himself open to the suspicion of bidding in, and remained under that doubt with many. He had a haughty way of outbidding that stood him in no good stead, and went far to convince the crowd that all the sales to him were sham.

  The auction, which began in the basement, ascended through the several stories, wandering from room to room till it reached the remotest attic chamber. Then, all the personal property had been sold, and it descended again to the first floor, where the crowd was already much thinner than at first, and was composed mainly of respectable-looking citizens who had come to bid on the house, or to see how much it would bring. The fashionably-dressed women were gone; it was not long before the last auction-goer’s whity-brown umbrella, expanded after the usual struggle, went down the front steps, and round the next corner. The auctioneer took his stand in the parlour before the pier-glass, — into which Helen looked that day to see whether her trouble with Robert had changed her, — with the long windows of the swell-front on either side of him. He was a young man, eager to win his reputation. He had been praised to Captain Butler as a frightfully vulgar wretch, who could get him more for the property than any other auctioneer in the city, and the Captain had taken him with certain misgivings. As he now confronted his respectable audience, he kept his hat a little aslant; he had an unlighted cigar in his left hand, which he put into his mouth from time to time, and chewed upon nervously; his eyes shone with a gross, humorous twinkle, and his whole face expressed a reckless audacity, and a willingness to take other people into the joke of life’s being a swindle, any way.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I feel honoured in being the instrument, however humble, of offering this property to your consideration; this old family mansion, rich in tradition and association, in the very heart of the most select quarter of Boston. You have already examined the house, gentlemen, from attic to cellar, you have seen that it is in perfect repair, and that it has no concealments to make—’ nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,’ as our coloured brother says in the play. I will not insult your intelligence, gentlemen, by dwelling upon its entire soundness. Built forty years ago, it is this day a better house than the day its foundations were laid — better than nine-tenths of the gaudy and meretricious conceptions of modem architecture. Plain, substantial, soberly elegant, — these, gentlemen, are its virtues, which, like

  ‘A bold peasantry, their country’s pride,

  When once destroyed, can never be supplied.’

  Gentlemen, I will not ask your attention to the eligible position of the house. I see none but Boston faces here, and I am proud to take it for granted that you need no instructions from me upon this point. When I say that this is one of the best sites on Beacon Hill, I say everything. You know the value of the location, you know the character of the social surroundings, — you know what I mean, and all that I mean. I do not appeal to strangers here. I appeal to the old Boston blood, animated by a generous affection for our city and its history, and unwilling to see dishonour cast upon her by the sale, even in these ruinous times, of a property in her midst at less than its full value. Gentlemen, I feel that you will stand by me in this
matter; and I have the pleasure of opening the sale with a bid of $10,000. Is this so, Mr. Wetherall?”

  The gentleman addressed, in the midst of the laughing crowd, nodded slightly.

  The auctioneer looked keenly at the faces in an irregular semicircle before him. “With a bid of $10,000 from Mr. Wetherall,” he resumed. “Mr. Wetherall, gentlemen, does not want the property, and he does not dream of getting it at a sixth or seventh — in any other times I should say a tenth — of its value. But he does not choose that it shall be disgraced by the offer of any ignobler sum; and, gentlemen, if Mr. Wetherall had not made this bid I should have made it myself in good faith. I am offered ten thousand, ten thousand, ten thous — eleven, from Mr. Wheeler. You don’t want the property either, Mr. Wheeler, but I thank you nevertheless. Eleven, eleven, eleven — do I hear the twelve? Twelve from Mr. White. The W.’s are doing well, but we must mount higher yet in the alphabet. Twelve, do I hear the thirteen? Five hundred! Thanks: twelve five, twelve five — thirteen. Going at thirteen, at thirteen — fourteen! This is something like, gentlemen; this is very good as a genteel relaxation; fourteen has its merits as part of the joke; but, gentlemen, we must not give too much time to it We must come to business, before long; we must indeed. I am willing to accept these ironical bids for the present, but — fifteen, did you say, Mr. Newell? Thank — you for fifteen. I am offered fifteen, fifteen, fifteen, by an eminent American humorist; fifteen, fifteen, going at fifteen? Oh come, gentlemen! Some one say twenty, and let the sale begin seriously.” Nobody had bidden twenty, but at that moment a greedy-eyed, nervous little man, with a hot air of having hurried to arrive, wedged his way through the people who filled the doorway, and entered the opener space inside with a bid of five hundred. A roar of laughter rewarded his ardour, and the auctioneer instantly went on: “Twenty thousand, five; twenty thousand, five. Now we are really warming to the work. We have reached the point at which blood begins to tell. Twenty thousand, five from Mr. Everton — do I hear the twenty-one? Yes, right again; I do hear the twenty-one, and from Mr. Newell, who redeems his reputation from the charge of elegant trifling, and twenty-two from Mr. White, who also perceives that the time for jesting is past. Going at twenty-two, at twenty-two, twenty-two! Do I hear twenty-three? No, only twenty-two, three; I regret to say it is only twenty-two, three.”

  A quick succession of small bids now ran the sum up to twenty-four thousand, at which point it hung in spite of all the devices of the auctioneer to urge it beyond. “Going, going, going,” — he swung his right hand threatingly above the open palm of his left—” going to Mr. White at twenty-four thousand dollars! Are you all done?” He scanned the crowd, and pierced it to the outer circle with his audacious glance. “Going at twenty-four thousand dollars to Mr. White. Are you all done, twice? Are you all done, three times? Going once, going twice, going — Gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, putting his cigar in his mouth and his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, and addressing them in a low, impassioned tone, “Gentlemen, it’s no money for it! I should feel ashamed, personally disgraced, if this property went for such a sum. I should know that it was owing to some fault of mine, some failure on my part to impress its value upon you. But I have trusted to your own sagacity, to your own intelligence, to the fact that you are all Boston men, and thoroughly acquainted with the prices of adjacent property, and the worth of this. I may have deceived myself; but I appeal to you now, gentlemen, not to let me suffer by the confidence I have reposed in you. My professional repute is in your hands. If this estate goes at $24,000 I am a ruined man.” A general laugh, in which the auctioneer himself joined so far as to smile, met this appeal. He ran his eye over the assembly. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Thank you, Mr. Everton! Was it twenty-six!” He leaned forward over his desk, and beamed with a flattering gratitude upon the new-comer.

  “No, twenty-four, fifty,” replied Mr. Everton in a weak, dry voice.

  “Thank you all the same, Mr. Everton. You are none the less my preserver. Thank you for twenty-four, fifty. We breathe again. Twenty-four, fifty, — do I hear the five? Twenty-four, fifty, — will you give me the five? Twenty-five, very good, twenty-five thousand, twenty-five, twenty-five — just one-fourth of the worth of the estate in prosperous times. Now let me hear the twenty-six! Gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, again breaking from his chant, and lowering his voice to the colloquial tone, “you all know the old story of the sibyl and her books: how, when she came with nine copies in the first instance, she asked a sum which struck the officials as a fancy price; how she went away and burnt three of the edition and then asked twice the original price for the six; and how, when she had burnt three more, they were glad to take the rest off her hands at her own terms. We have here a parallel case.”

  “Don’t see the parallel,” said one of the crowd.

  “Don’t you, Mr. Rogers? Well, you will, presently, when you’ve failed to buy this property for half the money that you’d be glad to offer the purchaser for his bargain. Do I hear twenty-six from you, Mr. Rogers?” Mr. Rogers laughed and nodded. “Twenty-six it is from Mr. Rogers. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six, will you give me the seven?” He went on crying this sum in varying tones of exultation, reproach, and persuasion for several minutes. Again and again he brought himself to the point of knocking off the house at that price, and then retired from it upon some fresh pretence of having heard a higher bid. But none came, or could be made to seem to have come; every one to whom he turned with a questioning look shook his head in prompt denial. The auctioneer’s mobile countenance took on an air of deep discouragement He threw aside his mallet, and pulled down his waistcoat. “I won’t sell this property at that price. I suppose there are men in this city who would do it, but I won’t. Captain Butler, I should like a word with you.” He came down from his perch, and retiring to a corner with the Captain talked with him in a dumb show of bitter and passionate appeal. When he again mounted to his place, he wore a look of grim despair. “Well, gentlemen, I have done my best to persuade Captain Butler to withdraw the property, and stop this bloody sacrifice.” The crowd laughed and the auctioneer’s eye twinkled. “But he feels bound by the terms of his notice to you to let the sale proceed. The property will be sold without reserve. Now let us see whether you will meet him in the same magnanimous spirit” Captain Butler looked on in blank amaze while this statement was making; but an intenser surprise was painted upon the face of Mr. Wetherall as the auctioneer proceeded: “Twenty-seven, twenty-seven.”

  “Twenty-six was the last bid,” said a bystander.

  “Excuse me, sir,” retorted the auctioneer severely, “I don’t think I deceived myself in a nod from my friend Mr. Wetherall. Twenty-seven!”

  Mr. Wetherall seemed struggling to open his petrified mouth in protest, when Mr. Everton quickly bid twenty-seven five hundred. Mr. Wetherall turned sharply upon him and bid twenty-eight. The keen auctioneer scented their rivalry, and played upon it so artfully that in five minutes the property was going at thirty thousand, to Mr. Everton. He came to the third going, in his thrice-repeated warning, when he once more paused, and leaning forward, bent a look of pitying incredulity upon the faces before him. “Gentlemen,” he asked in an accent of soft reproach, “is this Boston?”

  His audience again roared their pleasure, and the auctioneer, leaving his place, stepped forward and personally approached several gentlemen of the group in a conversational tone. “Mr. Wetherall, am I going to have nothing more from you? Mr. White, what do you say? You know this house is worth more than thirty thousand, and whoever buys it will have a dozen people after him to morrow offering to take his bargain off his hands at an advance. Mr. Merritt, we haven’t heard from you at all yet, I believe. You’ve been enjoying the show for nothing: it isn’t your custom to dead-head yourself on these occasions. And you, sir, — I can’t call your name, but I know your face; I’ve seen it in State Street often — can’t I get a bid out of you?” The gentleman addressed coloured, and shrank further back in the crowd. The auctio
neer smiled in perfect good-humour, and turned away for another word with Captain Butler in private.

  “Captain,” he whispered, “Mr. Everton is going to buy this property. Do you think he will stand another five thousand?”

  Captain Butler, who seemed in a sort of daze, said, “I don’t believe he will. But if you—”

  “I’ll get it,” said the auctioneer briskly, and returned to his work, into which he struck with a sudden and startling energy. “Going at thirty thousand, go — . Thirty-one, thirty-one, thirty-one; at thirty-two; thirty two, five; thirty-three, thirty-three — and five; thirty-four!” He clashed off the bids with a rapid confidence that would have inspired belief in the most sceptical. Mr. Wetherall bid thirty-four thousand five hundred, and was instantly topped by Mr. Everton at thirty-five. “Thirty-five, thirty-five, thirty-five,” cried the auctioneer, “going at thirty-five thousand, going, going, going, and sold — given away — to Mr. Everton!”

  Mr. Everton came forward, with a half-frightened look, and laid down the money necessary to secure his purchase, and received a provisional deed of the property.

  “Look here!” said Captain Butler, as soon as he could get the auctioneer aside, “I didn’t hear any of these bids till Wetherall’s last.” The Captain looked troubled and unhappy.

  The auctioneer laid a re-assuring hand upon his shoulder. “Yon haven’t got a practised ear, Captain Butler. I have. Mr. Everton has got a great bargain. But it was hard, working up to that final point.”

  VI.

  “WHAT perplexed me the most about it,” said the Captain to Mrs. Butler, when he came home the day after the sale, “was that the auctioneer had so misrepresented his first talk with me. He never asked me to withdraw the property at all; he knew I couldn’t; he merely offered to bet me that he would get thirty thousand for it. Well! I don’t see what I could do about it. I couldn’t have proved that the bids were fictitious, and the attempt to try would have made a great scandal. That’s the way Hibbard looks at it; I went to him for advice; I put the case to him, and he says that there’s no way of going back of the fact, for the auctioneer would swear, to save himself, that he heard the bids, or thought he did. Most probably he did; it was all confusion; and my not having heard them proves nothing at all. Besides, Everton was not obliged to bid thirty-five thousand, and he did get a great bargain. The property is worth fifty, in any decent times. And that extra five thousand is a perfect godsend for Helen, poor girl! It’s all she’ll have in the world. I tell you, my dear, I haven’t had many things in life that gave me more satisfaction no than meeting the principal creditors to-day. You see, when I looked into his affairs with Joshua the day he died I was very badly discouraged. They were all in confusion; he seemed to have lost his grip of them; I suppose it was his failing health, but he couldn’t make head or tail of anything; and when I was appointed administrator I reported the estate insolvent. It was precipitate—”