Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The proprietor of the store came forward with a smile of recognition, and of something more. “This is really a coincidence,” he said. “We have just sold your vases, and I was beginning to wonder where I should send you the money; I find there is no address on the card you gave me.”

  He filliped her card with one hand against the other, and looked at her with friendly pleasure, while she stayed herself against a show-case with a faintness which he could not see.

  “Sold them!” she whispered.

  “Yes, all three. Mr. Trufitt was looking at them yesterday, and asked me who did them. This morning he called and took them.”

  “How dared he?” cried Helen in a tumult of indignation, none the less appalling because wholly unintelligible to the person of whom she made the demand. At the mere name of Trufitt a series of odious facts had flashed without sequence into her thought: his obtuse persistence in love; his baldness; his stinginess; the fit of his pantaloons; his spiritual aridity, and his physical knobbiness. She hardly knew for which of his qualities she disliked him the most, but she recognised with perhaps superior disdain that after learning that the vases were her work, he had turned over for a whole day in his frugal mind the question of buying them. After presuming to think of owning her vases, he had also presumed to hesitate! It was intolerable.

  “What right—” she began on the innocent means of the offence, but corrected herself so far as to ask instead, “Why did you tell him who did them?”

  “Really,” said her victim, with just pique, “I saw no reason why I shouldn’t. You gave me no charges on that point, and I gave the matter no reflection.

  I seized the first chance that offered to sell them for you.” He looked hurt and vexed; perhaps he had made his little romance about serving this very pretty young lady in her trouble and need.

  Helen would not consider his kindness; in her own vexation she continued to treat him de haut en bas. “I can’t allow him to keep my vases,” she said. “You must send for them.”

  “The vases were on sale,” returned the proprietor, “and I sold them in good faith. I can’t ask them back.”

  “I will ask them back,” said Helen grandly.

  “Good-morning.” When she put her hand on the bell-pull at Mrs. Hewitt’s, she remembered that the shopman had not given her the money for her vases, and that she had again left him without her address. This was some satisfaction, but it was not enough: she would not rest till she had her vases back again, and had broken them into a thousand pieces.

  But she found that the first thing she must do was to write to the people who had sold them, and apologise for the strange return she had made for the interest they had taken in her, recognising the justice of their position and the absurdity of her own. It was not an easy note to write, but she contrived it at last, and that gave her courage to think how she should get her vases back from Mr. Trufitt, who had bought them, and had certainly a right to keep them. She knew why he had bought them, and this enraged her, but it did not help her; she felt that it would be putting herself in an asking attitude, however imperiously she demanded them again. If he yielded, it would be in grace to her; and he might refuse — very likely he would refuse. She had not decided in her own mind what she should do in this event, when she received a reply from Messrs. Pout & Lumley, enclosing Mr. Trufitt’s money for her vases, less their commission. Messrs. Pout & Lumley regretted that their Mr. Lumley had not clearly understood Miss Harkness’s wishes in regard to the vases she had left with them; but finding themselves unable to ask their return from the gentleman who purchased them, they had no course open to them but to send her the money for them.

  Helen saw that she must have written her address at the top of her letter of apology, and that she must have seemed to them to have repented of her magnificent behaviour on another ground, and to have tacitly asked for the money.

  She broke into a laugh at the hopeless complication.

  “Really,” she mused, “I don’t know whether I’d better be put into the Home for Little Wanderers or into the Insane Hospital,” and for the present there seemed no safety but in entire inaction. She was so much abashed at the result of her yesterday’s work, that she remained with Messrs. Pout & Lumley’s letter in her hand, wondering when she should have courage to go out again and renew her attempt to see Mr. Hibbard. At first she thought she would write to him, but there seemed something fatal about her writing to people on business, and she hesitated. It was impossible to use this money of Mr. Trufitt’s; she was quite clear as to that, and, with various little expenses, her money had dwindled to less than three dollars since her interview with Mrs. Sullivan. She let the morning slip away in her irresolution, and then she decided to put the whole affair off till the next day. She felt a comfort in the decision, merely as a decision, and she began to enjoy something like the peace of mind which moral strength brings. Perhaps the weather had something to do with her willingness to postpone any duty that must take her out of doors; it was a day that would scarcely have invited her to an errand of pleasure. For almost a week the weather had been relenting, and the warmth of yesterday had brought a tinge of life to the bare slopes of the Common, where for three months past the monumental dumpings of the icy streets had dismally accumulated; and along the base of these heaps, a thin adventurous verdure showed itself, like that hardy vegetation which skirts the snowline on the’ Alps. As Helen walked across the planking on her way to Mr. Hibbard’s office, she had heard a blue-bird in the blue soft air high through the naked boughs of the elms, making querulous inquiry for the spring; and there had seemed a vernal respite even in the exasperation of the English sparrows. The frozen year, in fact, was awaking to consciousness, with secret pangs of resuscitation that now declared themselves in an easterly storm of peculiar spitefulness, driving against the umbrellas, which she saw ascending the narrow hillside street, in gusts that were filled from moment to moment with sleet and rain and snow.

  In the little grate in her room the anthracite had thrown off its first gaseous malice, and now lay a core of brownish-red under a soft, lurid blur of flame; and she stood before it thinking to herself that, rather than go out in that weather, she would spend some of Mr. Trufitt’s money, as she called it, and smiling faintly at the demoralisation which had succeeded her heroics, when some one rapped at her door. She turned away from the fire, where she had stood smoothing the front of her dress in the warmth, with a dreamy eye on the storm outside, and opened the door rather resentfully. Mrs. Hewitt was there with a card in her hand, which she had apparently preferred to bring in person, rather than send up by the general housework girl. Before she gave Helen the card, she said, with a studied indifference of manner that might well have invited confidence —

  “I heard him askin’ for you, and I showed him into the parlour on the second floor, till I could find out whether you wanted to see company.”

  Mrs. Hewitt made her own inferences from the flush and then the pallor with which Helen received the card; and while Helen stood staring at it, she added suggestively, “Seemed to have some kind of a passel, or something, ‘t he brought with him in the carriage.”

  “Oh!” said Helen, as if this idle detail had clinched the matter, “then will you tell him, please, that I’ll be down in a minute.”

  She hastily made a woman’s imperceptible changes of hair and ribbon, and descended to the parlour, with her line of behaviour distinctly drawn in her mind. After a first impulse to refuse to see her visitor, and then a full recognition of the stupidity of such a thing, she saw that she must be frankly cordial. Mrs. Hewitt had hospitably put a match to the soft-coal fire laid in the grate, and it was now lustily snapping in the chilly air of the parlour; but Lord Rainford was not standing before it. He stood with his back to the door, with his hat in his hand, and his overcoat on, looking out into the storm, whose national peculiarities might well have interested him; he turned when Helen came in, and she greeted him with a welcome which she felt must have the same e
ffect of being newly-kindled as the fire in the grate. He did not seem to notice this, but began a huddled and confused explanation of his presence, as if it ought to be accounted for and justified upon special grounds. Helen pulled the wrap she had flung on tightly round her, and concealing the little shiver that the cold air struck through her, asked him to sit down.

  “The fact is,” he said, “that I was anxious to put this little parcel into your own hands, Miss Harkness, and to make sure that it had reached you in safety.” He gave her the package he had been holding, and then offered to relieve her of it.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Helen, ignoring it as well as she could, while refusing to give it up. She had gathered from the fact that Lord Rainford would not have felt authorised to present himself to her at that moment, if he had not this commission from the Rays, that the Rays had sent her the parcel by him, and she began to unravel the maze, in which he was involving them both, by that clew. There had been something in what he said about London, and Nice, and Rome, and Alexandria; but whether he had been with her friends at any or all of these points, she had not made out.

  “Where did you see the Rays last?” she asked. “Were the Butlers with them, or—”

  Lord Rainford laughed. “Why, the fact is,” he exclaimed, “I haven’t seen them at all! They made no stop in England, through some change of plans.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Helen.

  “And later, I gave up my winter in Egypt. I found that I couldn’t go up the Nile, and get back in time, — in time for the visit I had intended to make to America; and — and I had decided to come to America, and — so I came!”

  “Yes,” said Helen, a little dazed still. She added, to gain time for reflection rather than to seek information, “And you are fond of the Atlantic in the middle of March?”

  “It wasn’t so bad. We’d a very good passage. I found myself so well here, last year, that I’ve been impatient ever since to come back.”

  “I’m glad America agrees with you,” returned Helen vaguely.

  “Why, I’m not here for my health, exactly,” said Lord Rainford. “I’d some other objects, and Mr. Ray asked me to bring the little box from his wife for you.”

  “O yes, I understand! They sent it to you from Egypt.”

  “Precisely. I assure you it wasn’t an easy matter to get it through your Custom House unopened.”

  “How did you manage? By bribery and corruption?”

  “No. I won’t say I wasn’t tempted to try it. But I don’t altogether like that sort of thing even in countries where they naturally expect it; and I couldn’t feel that the inspector whose hands I fell into did quite expect it. I told him that it contained a present from one lady to another, and that I would rather deliver it unopened, if he could trust me to come back and pay the duty in case it proved to be anything subject to duty. I gave him my card and address, and I did go so far as to offer to deposit a sum of money with him as surety.”

  “How very, very kind of you!” cried Helen, beginning to be charmed.

  “Oh, not at all,” said Lord Rainford, colouring a little. “I merely mentioned it because it led up to something that interested me. He looked at my card, and then he looked at me, and said, ‘That it wasn’t necessary between gentlemen!”’

  Helen laughed at the man’s diverting assumption of a community of feeling with Lord Rainford. “You must have been edified,” she said, “with such an early example of American equality.”

  Lord Rainford looked rather mystified and a little troubled. “I don’t know. I rather liked it, I believe,” he said tentatively; as one does who has not been taken in quite the way he expected.

  “You are easily pleased,” cried Helen; and he seemed still more perplexed.

  But as if he set these speeches down finally to some ironical intention in her, he went on: “He said I could ‘take the box along,’ and then he looked at the address on it, and said, ‘Oh, ‘t’s all right! I know Miss Harkness!”

  “Who in the world could it have been?” wondered Helen. “I never dreamt that I had a friend at court — or the Custom-House.”

  Lord Rainford took out his pocket-book, and, to do this, he had to unbutton his overcoat. “Won’t you lay off your coat?” asked Helen. “I believe we shall not freeze to death here, now. The fire is really making an impression.”

  “Thank you,” he said, obeying. “He gave me his card. I have it here somewhere. Ah, here it is!” Helen received it and gazed at the name. “No!” she said, returning it with a shake of the head, “it doesn’t throw any light on my acquaintance, and I don’t exactly understand it.”

  “Perhaps it was some other lady of the same name.”

  “Perhaps. But I haven’t asked you yet when you arrived; and that ought to have been the first question.”

  He seemed willing to evade it; but he said gravely that he had arrived that morning. “The fact is,” he added, “I had them send the luggage to the hotel, and I — took the liberty of driving directly here.”

  “Why, this is zeal in stewardship!” cried Helen. She felt a girl’s thrill of pleasure in it. To see Lord Rainford was like meeting an old friend; she had parted from the Rays and Butlers long since he had; but his coming on an errand from them seemed like news from them, and she found herself at home with him, and truly touched by his kindness. She had been too little abroad to consider whether she was behaving like an English girl under the circumstances, and she ended by behaving like an American girl. “Now, Lord Rainford,” she said, “I’m going to do all I can to reward you, and if you were a woman you would feel very lavishly rewarded; I’m going to open this box at once in your presence.”

  “I’m sure you ‘re very good,” said Lord Rainford. She put the box on a little table near them, and “I hope it isn’t the kind that opens with a screw-driver,” she continued, breaking the line of barbaric seals which held the edge of the paper covering, and then coming to a second wrapper tied with an oriental cord of silk, for which she required the aid of Lord Rainford’s penknife. “What a pity to break and cut such things!” she sighed.

  “Why, I don’t know,” said the young man, not feeling the occidental strangeness to which the paper and the cord were poetry. “It’s the way they put things up, there. I dare say their dragoman had it done at a bazaar.”

  “Their dragoman! At a bazaar!” cried Helen, and now he dimly sympathised with her mood, and said, “O yes! yes!” while she tore away wrapper after wrapper, vaguely fragrant of musk or sandal, and came at last to a box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the Persian fancy. She opened this, and found, under a note from Marian Ray, a set of gold jewelry, — ear-rings, bracelets and necklace rich in the colour of the unalloyed metal, and fascinating in their fantastic naïveté of design; as old as man, as young as childhood.

  “Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford, smiling back her rapture in the trinkets. “Those goldsmith’s things. They’re very pretty. And it’s amusing to see those fellows work. They set up their little forge in the street before their doors, and make the things you’ve ordered while you’re waiting.”

  “And the high, white house-walls, and the yellow sun, and the purple shadows all round them?” cried Helen, dangling the necklace from her fingers.

  “Well — ah — yes; you’re quite right,” said Lord Rainford. But he added conscientiously, “There isn’t much sun, you know. The street is very narrow; and I don’t know about the walls being white; they’re apt to be coloured.”

  “Oh!” deeply sighed the girl, as she dropped the pretty things back into their box. “Marian has certainly outdone herself,” she said, shutting the lid. She re-opened it, and took out the necklace again, and one by one the bracelets and the ear-rings, and stood absently regarding them, held a little way off, with her head on one side. She was thinking of the night before her father died, when she put on that silver filigree of Robert’s, and she had forgotten the young man before her. He made a little movement that recalled her to herself. “Oh, I beg your
pardon,” she said softly. He had his hat in his hand, and she saw that he had taken up his overcoat. “Must you go? I can never thank you enough for all the trouble you have taken.” She stopped, for she had a sudden difficulty. It seemed savagely inhospitable, after what Lord Rainford had done, in the way he had done it, not to attempt some sort of return. But she felt sure he must see at a glance that she was not in her own house: the bare spectacularity of the keeping; the meagre decoration of the mantelpiece and whatnot; the second-hand brown plush furniture; the fire, burning on the hearth, as in a scene set for some home of virtuous poverty on the stage, must all be eloquent of a boarding-house, even to unpractised eyes; and Helen was in doubt what she ought to do under all the circumstances. She decided upon a bold, indefinite course, and asserted that they would see each other again before he left Boston.

  “Thank you,” he said. But he did not go. He looked vaguely round the room.

  “Your umbrella?” she suggested, joining actively in the search.

  “Ah, I don’t think I brought one,” he said speciously.

  When he was gone, Helen put on the trinkets, and found them very becoming, though, as she frankly owned to her reflection in the glass, a dark girl would have carried them off better. “That comes,” she mused, “from Marian’s want of feeling for colour. I’m sure she chose them.” She smiled a little superiority at the mirrored face, and then she started away from it in dismay. Of course Lord Rainford had hesitated in that way, because he promised the Customs’ officer to come back and pay duty on the box; and she had not offered to let him take it, and he could not ask for it. There seemed no end to this day’s contretemps. He had not given her his address, and there was no telling, after that sort of parting, when she should see him again, if she ever saw him again. She had placed him in a cruelly embarrassing position, for he had given his card to that Mr. Kimball. The name was inspiration; she could at least go to the Custom-House, and pay the duty herself, and trust to some future chance of telling Lord Rainford that she had saved his honour with Mr. Kimball. Kimball! She only wondered that she should have remembered the name.