Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Helen had no gratitude to express, and she did not thank him for this service when she took out her purse to pay him. She had kept the carriage two hours and a half, and he said they never counted less than an hour, but he would call it four dollars. As he folded the bills, he said he hoped she did not blame him for not opening the coupé door for her; she got out and in so often, and his horse always started up so when he left the box.

  “O no, no!” cried Helen. “Only go, please.” She closed the door behind him, and she flung herself upon the bed, and hid her face in her pillow, and drenched it with her rushing tears. Her head ached, and her heart was sore in her breast. All that had happened repeated itself with ceaseless iteration in her mind; all the looks, all the tones, all the words; they burnt, and rang, and hummed in her brain; the long ordeal of her disappointment dramatised itself to the inner sense in thousand-fold swift reverberation; the disappointment was as bitter as if starvation were before her, and the shock to her pride was even greater. She had fancied, as she now realised, that she should succeed because she was she; while warning herself that she must not expect anything but failure, she had secretly cherished an ideal of triumph that made the future a matter of fortunate inspirations and delightful toil. This was what she had really hoped; and now, to her defeat was added the stinging sense of having been a fool. She had probably set to work quite in the wrong way; and she had been not only a fool, but such a coward as to be afraid to say that she wished to sell her work to the only people who could take a special interest in it. Yet they might not have cared for it either, and if she had spoken she would have had only one ignominy the more to remember. For, what puzzled and surprised Helen most of all was that when she had taken the humblest mien, and approached those shop-people on their own level, as it were, without pretension and without pride, they should have shown no sense of the sacrifice she had made, but should have trampled upon her all the same.

  The glamour was gone from her experiment. She was in the mood to accept any conditions of dependence; she wondered at the vain courage with which she had refused the idleness and uselessness of the home offered her by the Butlers.

  The dinner bell rang, but she remained with her face in the pillow; after a while some one tapped at her door, and then pushed it softly open and looked in, but she did not stir. Whoever it was must have thought her asleep, and so left her; yet when Helen opened her eyes there was still some one in her room. A shawl had been flung over her, and Miss Root was sitting at the window looking at her, and apparently waiting for her to wake up.

  “Not going to be sick, are you?” she asked. “You’ve been sleeping ever since before dinner, and Mrs. Hewitt asked me to look in and see how you were getting along. I guess you haven’t taken cold; she put the shawl on you.”

  “O no!” said Helen, rising briskly, in the first free moment of waking, when care has not yet dropped back upon the heart. “I came in with a headache, and threw myself on the bed to rest.”

  “That some of your work?” Miss Root indicated with a nod the basket which stood in the middle of the floor where the man had set it. The paper had come off one of the jars, and showed its decoration.

  “Yes,” said Helen. “I did them — I—” A thought flashed into her mind: “They are for a wedding present!”

  “May I look at it?” asked Miss Root.

  “Certainly,” said Helen, feeling bolder, now that she was protected by this little outwork of unreality against the invasion of Miss Root’s sympathy. She unwrapped two or three of the jars and set them on the window seat. —

  Miss Root did not trouble herself to take them up, but stood at a little distance and glanced at them with an eye that Helen saw understood and classed them, and that made her feel like the amateur she was. The girl turned away without comment.

  “I saw some just like them in a window as I came along Washington Street. I pity any poor wretch that expects to live by painting and selling them.” Miss Root could not have meant her equivocal speech in unkindness, for she added, looking back as she went out, “Don’t you come down if you don’t feel just right; I’ll bring up your supper to you.” Helen said she was going down, and arming herself with the courage of her despair, she confronted the question of the tea-table with gaiety even, and made light of her long nap. She said she had been shopping all the morning, and the irony of the phrase in this application flattered her bitter mood. It was a stroke of the finest sarcasm, could they but know it; and in her heart she mocked at their simple acceptance of her statement.

  Mr. Evans said he was surprised she could sleep after shopping. When his wife went shopping it kept the whole family awake for the next twenty-four hours, and careworn for a week. Mrs. Hewitt asked about the fashions, and said that she always found things just as cheap and a good deal better at the large stores, and you spent more time and laid out as much money running round to the little places.

  It seemed to Helen the height of the sardonic to answer, “Yes, it was quite useless to go to the little places.”

  “D’you find your letters all right, Miss Harkness?” asked the landlady, when this talk had taken its course; “I put ’em on the corner of your mantel.”

  “No,” said Helen; “I didn’t look.”

  “Well, you’ll see ’em when you go back. They came after you went to sleep. The most curious stamps on I ever saw!”

  Helen’s heart stood still with fear and hope, and “Oh, papa, get them for my collection,” pleaded the little boy.

  “Here,” she said, rising, and making this opportune prayer her shelter, “come up with me, and you shall have them;” and after due reproach from his mother, he was suffered to go with her.

  It was Robert Fenton’s handwriting on the envelopes. “It’s my answer — it’s my sentence, — and I deserve it,” she said under her breath, as she stood with the letters in her hand, trying to detach one of the stamps with her trembling fingers.

  “There,” cried the boy, “you’re tearing it!”

  “Never mind,” said Helen; “they’re both alike. I’ll cut this other off for you but her hand shook so that she chopped into the letter a little with the scissors.

  “If I couldn’t cut better than that!” roared the boy, anxious for the integrity of his stamp. “What makes you get so white, and then get so red?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing!” answered Helen, incoherently. “Here’s your stamp,” she stooped to give it. The child was pretty, with still grey eyes and full lips. “Will you kiss me, Tom,” she asked in a very soft trembling voice, “for good luck?” It seemed as if her fate hung upon his will, but when he hastily kissed her, and ran out, she still had not courage to open the letters. She flung them on the bed, and locked the door, and then came back and looked at them. She could see a little of the writing in one through the hole where she had cut away the stamp, and she tried to make out the words; they were such words as “from,” and “for,” and “with.”

  If there had been but one letter, she thought, she should not have been afraid of it; but this mystery of there being two! She tried putting one out of sight under the pillow, but that did no good. Her sole comfort was that while they were still unopened she did not know the worst; but in the meantime she was consumed with a terrible curiosity. She studied them hard, and then walked away to the furthest corner.

  “Oh, what is it in them? Indeed, I couldn’t bear anything after to-day, indeed I couldn’t!” she whimpered. “I can’t open them!” and then she pounced upon one of them in a frenzy and tore it open.

  X.

  The character of no man is fixed till it has been tried by that of the woman he loves. Till then he has only the materials of character, and they are all to be shaped and ordered as newly as if he had never had them before. The thousand and one mysteries of Helen’s girlish uncertainty, her fantastic waverings, her aesthetic coquetries with the idea of being in love, were as unintelligible to Fenton as his headlong and outspoken passion was to her. But while she thought his b
luntness charming, in a way, and constantly trembled nearer and nearer to him in her heart, Fenton was far too simple a fellow to feel anything but trouble at the misgivings and delays which she enjoyed. When at last he made what he felt must be his last offer, and she met it with all those freshly alarmed ideals and metaphysical scruples, which a wiser and worse man would have trampled under foot, — tearing her from herself, as she unconsciously meant, and making her his in her own despite, as she reluctantly wished, Fenton lost his head in a delirium of angry and wounded pride.

  When he awoke from it, irretrievably committed to three years’ exile, it was in a self-abhorrence and despair, and a sort of stupefaction that he should have done what he had done. His repentance came before he had forgiven Helen, and long before he had begun to conceive that the letter might have another meaning than that which he had first taken from it.

  Of his own light, perhaps, he never saw more in it than it seemed to say. It was without reading it again, without having the heart to look at it, that he hated himself for what he had done, and loathed himself for his futile desire to make reparation. It was impossible to repair his fault, and if it were possible, it would be despicable to attempt it.

  He went haggardly about his duty, a machine that did its work, but with no more mind upon it than a machine. There came long spaces of time in which he afterwards recognised that he had not known what he was doing; that he had been altogether absent without having been anywhere else; he awoke from these absences as from a profound, dreamless torpor, and with a start of fear and amaze, to find that all had been going well in the meantime, that he had been talking, eating, and drinking, and shrewdly attentive to whatever immediately concerned him. It would have been hard for him to say whether the time when he was on duty, and no one spoke to him, or the leisure in which he was intimately thrown with his brother officers was the more terrible: his solitude was dense with piercing regrets, that stung for ever in the same place; his association with others was tormented by an un forgettable remorse, which, if it seemed to grant him a moment’s oblivion, awoke him presently, from somebody’s joke or story, to the consciousness that it had only been more deeply and inwardly gnawing his soul.

  Some sort of action was indispensable, but action which did not relate to Helen, was none. He began to write letters to her. He had no idea of sending them, but it had grown insufferable to be perpetually ‘ talking to her as he was in those airy dramas within himself; and since his words could not be made audible, he must let them take visible shape. This became his daily habit; and before the ship reached Rio de Janeiro he had accumulated a score of letters, which he bitterly amused himself by reading over, and considering, and putting by without destroying. He kept them, and found a sort of miserable relief in communing with them instead of his intangible thoughts. His industry did not escape the idle vigilance of the ship’s comradery; but at sea every one must be suffered his whim, and after laughing at Fenton’s, they left him to it, in the feigned belief that it was a book he was writing: a marine novel, they decided. Each thought it in the way of his rightful joke to say, “Don’t put me into it, Fenton,” till Fenton, who worked up slowly to his repartees, found presence of mind at last to answer “No; I can’t afford to make it dull, you know,” and then they left him quite alone, with a roar at the expense of the chance victim. Before the laugh was over, Fenton had almost ceased to know what it was about, and had wholly ceased to care. He was quite too miserable to be glad of the immunity he had won.

  He went on with his letter-writing; but on the eve of arrival at Rio de Janeiro he destroyed all his work, and set about writing one letter, which should be his last. It was his purpose to post this without reference to consequences, as an act of final expiation. He was not without some trembling illusion that there might be a letter awaiting him: he did not dare to think from Helen, and he could not think from whom else. But his letter was to go before he knew what was in that, or even whether it existed. He had no reason to suppose it did exist; it was in fact as purely a figment of his distempered fancy as a starving man’s visions of feasting; and when he had faithfully posted his letter before going to the consul to ask if there were anything for him, he could not make out that it was disappointment that sickened him to find there was nothing. But a mail was expected the following day, and he kept his wrecked hopes adrift upon its possibilities during the night.

  The mail brought him no letter, but it brought the consul a copy of The Boston Advertiser, which he politely offered to Lieutenant Fenton unopened, not having the leisure just then for the newspaper. Fenton unfolded it with indifference, and mechanically glanced at the marriages. The paper was of a date four or five days after he had sailed, and the name of Helen Harkness did not appear in the marriage list. He had not expected that it would, nevertheless he had looked at the marriages on her account; and he was about laying the paper aside when the record of a single death caught his eye. It was the death of Helen’s father, with a dozen lines of mortuary praise. He dropped the paper.

  “Nothing in the Advertiser?” asked the consul, who was busy about some letters, without looking up. “Too much!” said Fenton, pulling his cap over his eyes.

  The consul thought this was a joke, and laughed in a companionable, uninterested way. Fenton looked at him and saw his innocence, and then he sat a long time in silence, with his arms folded, and his head down. At last he asked the consul if he could give him a sheet of paper and an envelope, and briefly wrote the second of the two letters which had reached Helen together. In her desperation, she had found no resource but to open them according to the order of the dates in their postmarks, and she had seized first upon that of the 9th. It began simply, Helen, and it ran in this way: —

  “I hope you will have patience to read this letter through, though I have forfeited all right to a hearing from you. I am not going to make an appeal for your forgiveness, because I know I ought not to have it. I have suffered, not all that I ought to suffer, but all that human nature can suffer for that letter I sent you from Portsmouth. But I shall not try to work upon your pity; I believe that I have that already. I only wish you to understand that in again renouncing all pretensions to your regard, I do it with a full approval of your conduct to me. I do not blame you in the least thing. I see that I was altogether to blame. I see what I did not see before: that you never cared for me, and that you tried with all your heart, to be kind to me, and yet not to give me hope. I thank you for your goodness, and I beg you to believe, when you have read this letter, that my eyes are open at last, and that if I keep on loving you, it is because my love of you has become my life, and that I know I am no more worthy to love you than I am to live. I cannot help one or the other, but I can keep either from being troublesome to you, and I will. So I do not ask you to admit any of my former pretensions, but only to let me be your friend, in whatever humble and useful way I can. I consider myself a disgraced man, and I shall expect nothing of you but the kind of forbearance and patience you would show some repentant criminal who was depending upon your countenance for strength to reform himself.

  “I know you have told Mr. Harkness of my Portsmouth letter, and that he must be very much incensed with me. But though I do not ask your forgiveness, Helen, I do beseech you to try to get me his. I owe him all the little good there is in me, and I owe him all that I am and have done in this world. I could not tell you how dearly and truly I honour and love him. The thought that I came away without trying to take leave of him chokes me; but after writing you that fatal letter, everything that was right and decent became impossible.

  “Good-bye, Helen.

  “ROBERT FENTON.”

  When Helen had finished this letter, which, indeed, she seemed instantly to divine rather than to read, she not only kissed it but pressed it to her breast and locked her arms upon it, clasping it close, as if it were some living thing and could feel the wild, happy tumult of her heart. She wept long and sweetly over it. It might not have been the perfection of reason
to another, but to her all the parts were linked together by an impenetrable and infrangible logic. Nay, it was not that, it was not eloquence; it was the sum of everything, it was love, and however hapless love to the writer, it was heaven-prospered passion to Helen, who seemed in that fond embrace to implore, to forgive, to console Robert, as if he were there present and she had fallen upon his neck. They were happy, and they were happy together; it was so much to know that she need never wish to know more.

  For some time, in the rush of her emotion, she did not realise that it was not an answer to her own letter. But it was infinitely more. It forestalled and anticipated her letter, as that, when it came to his hand, would in its turn be both appeal and response to him. Best of all, his letter made the first advance towards reconciliation, and assumed for Robert the blame for what she had suffered. She knew that he was not wholly to blame, but as a woman she liked to have him say that he was, and she liked him to be generously first in owning himself wrong — that always seems a man’s part. She had almost forgotten the letter of later date, the letter of the 10th, which still lay unopened before her. That, too, would be precious, but never so dear as this of the 9th, which should always be first in the history of their love; the other, no matter how sweet it proved, must always remain second. It was, in fact, not a fortunate inspiration. In his grief at the news which he had just read, Fenton’s mind had reverted to the old relation in which he had first known Helen, and in the presence of the bereavement that they had both suffered in the loss of one who had been no less a father to him than to her, he addressed her as a sister, and signed himself as her brother Robert. These words, coming upon the different tenderness his other letter had evoked, seemed to push her coldly from him, to disown their love and to ignore it, to take her at a certain disadvantage with respect to the sorrow in which they humbly asked a brother’s share; they made her jealous in a wild sort of her sorrow, they indescribably wounded her so that she threw the letter from her and wept bitter tears for the happy ones she had shed. It was such a letter as no woman would have written if she had been a man! She should not know which letter to answer now, nor how to answer either; for if she answered the first as she would have done, might not Robert think her bold and unfilial? and if she answered the second as she ought, would she not appear reserved and cold with him upon whom her heart had just thrown itself with such tender abandon? The letters made two Roberts of him, and left her to despair between them. She passed a hapless night, and in the morning she took the first train after breakfast for Beverley, where she appeared at the Butlers’ before ten o’clock, asking in such a high hysteric key for Mrs. Butler, who was not yet down, that they led her at once to her room. There she threw up her veil, revealing eyes tragic with tears and want of sleep, and gave the two letters into Mrs. Butler’s hand while she hid her face in Mrs. Butler’s pillow.