Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She had no idea where the Custom-House was, but she wrapped herself against the storm, and took a carriage at the nearest hack-stand. The janitor and messengers, who passed her from one to another in the Custom-House, were of opinion that Mr. Kimball was on duty in East Boston, but the last who asserted this immediately added, “Oh, here he is now!” and called after a figure retreating down a corridor, “Kimball! Here! You’re wanted!” and Helen found herself, box in hand, confronted with her old friend, the policeman.

  “Why, is it you?” she cried, as joyously as if she had met him in some foreign land.

  “Well, I thought it must be you,” he said, with the half-shy, half-jocose respect of that sort of Americans in the presence of a fashionable woman.

  It amuses them to see the women putting on style, as they would say; but they revere them as ladies all the same. Kimball touched his hat, and then pushed it back on his head in token of standing uncovered while they talked.

  Helen could not wait till she had transacted her own business before she said, “But I thought you were a policeman!”

  “Well, so I was the last time I saw you,” returned Kimball. “I left the force about two months ago.

  Got kind of sick of it myself, and my wife was always in a tew about the danger, and bein’ out so much nights, and the new collector was a friend of mine, and he gave me this place,” said Kimball briefly, putting the case into Helen’s hands. “That fellow behave himself after that?”

  “O yes,” answered Helen, knowing that Kimball meant the hackman whom he had rebuked in her behalf; “he was very civil.”

  “I thought I could fetch him,” said Kimball. “I don’t know as anything, while I was on the force, done me so much good as a chance like that now and then.” He dropped his eyes suggestively to the box in Helen’s hands; but he did not otherwise manifest any consciousness of it, and he left Helen to take her own time to say how glad she was to see him again, and how grateful she had always been to him. When she arrived, in due course, at the box, he merely permitted himself a dry smile. “I told him I knew you,” and this time Helen understood Lord Rainford, and not the hackman. “I knew it would be all right.”

  “It was very kind of you, Mr. Kimball, and it’s only a chance that it wasn’t all wrong. Lord Rainford told me all about it, and I forgot to let him have the box to bring back to you till after he had gone, and then I hurried off with it myself, at once. I couldn’t endure that you should think for a moment he hadn’t kept his word.”

  “Of course not,” said Kimball sympathetically. “Full of diamonds?” he asked jokingly, as he received it from her. He opened the lid, and then frowned regretfully at the trinkets. “Gold, do you suppose?”

  “O yes, they must be gold,” said Helen. “It’s a present.”

  “Just so. And of course you don’t know what they cost. Well, now, I’m sorry, Miss Harkness,” said Kimball, with a deep-drawn sigh of reflection.

  “I guess I’ve got to have these things valued.”

  “Of course,” said Helen, with a beating heart, at the bottom of which, perhaps, she accused the punctilious folly of forcing the jewels to official knowledge. She had her feminine limitations of conscience in regard to smuggling, and did not see why it could be wrong to bring in dutiable goods if the Customs’ officers did not know it; she had come out of regard to Lord Rainford, and not at all from tenderness for the public revenue; and she had a sort of vague expectation that the Government would politely decline to levy any impost in recognition of her exemplary integrity. “You just sit here,” said Kimball, finding her a chair which one of the messengers had temporarily vacated, “and I’ll see about it for you. I’ll be back in half a minute.” He was gone much longer, and then he returned with an official paper in his hand, and a fallen countenance. “Well, I done everything I could, Miss Harkness,” he said in strong disgust. He was a man who had enjoyed official consequence largely as a means of doing people unexpected favours, and he was deeply mortified at the turn this affair had taken. “You’ve got to pay fourteen dollars and seventy-five cents on this box. I wouldn’t say it to every one, and I shouldn’t want it reported, but I think it’s a regular swindle.”

  “O no,” said Helen sweetly, but with a deep inward bitterness, and finding her pocket with that difficulty which ladies seem always to have, she found her pocket-book, and in it two dollars and a half. “I shall have to leave the box with you and come again,” she said: after resolving to borrow Mr. Trufitt’s money for the payment of possible but improbable duties, she had come away and left it at home in the letter enclosing it.

  “No, take the box along,” said Kimball, measurably consoled at this unexpected turn. “It’s just the way with my wife. Never knows how much money she takes with her, and comes back with her bank-bills balled up into little balls like gun-wads, and her silver layin’ round all over the bottom of her bag — what there is to lay round. Never gets home ‘th more than sixty-two and a half cents. Don’t you fret, Miss Harkness; I’ll make it all right, and you can make it all right with me, any time.”

  He would not listen to Helen’s protests, but forced the box back into her hands, and walked along the corridor to the vestibule with her, largely waiving each return of her self-reproach and gratitude, and at the door resolutely changing the subject, as he took a card from his waistcoat-pocket. “Lord Rainford! Curious chap Lord Rainford! Don’t know as I ever saw many lords before,” he said with Yankee caution. “Don’t know as I ever saw any,” he added with Yankee conscientiousness. He pondered the card with a sarcastic smile, as if amused that any fellow-creature should seriously call himself a lord, and then broke out in a sort of repentance: “Well, he’s a gentleman, I guess. Had his declaration made out fair and square, and opened up all his traps, first off, like a man. Forced ’em on to your notice, as you may say. No hangin’ back about him. Well!” he added, after a final inspection of the card, “it wa’n’t quite regular, as you may say, to let him take, the box along without openin’ it; but a man has some discretion, I suppose; and — well, the fact is, I took a fancy to the fellow. Seemed kind of human, after all.”

  “Oh, Mr. Kimball,” cried Helen, deeply enjoying the inspector’s condescension, but with a sudden superficial terror at the thought that she had not Lord Rainford’s address, and should not know how to inform him that his word had been kept for him, “let me see his card, please!”

  “Why, certainly, take it along,” said Kimball. “Or I don’t know,” he added sheepishly. “I thought my wife might like to see it — kind of a novelty, you know.”

  “Oh, thank you! I don’t want to keep it,” said Helen, returning it after a swift glance. “I merely wanted to look at it. Thank you, ever so much!” When she reached home she wrote two letters: one to Kimball, enclosing the money he had lent her, and another to Lord Rainford, telling him what she S had done. She felt that finally the whole affair was very funny, and she suffered herself to run into a sprightly little account of her adventure, which she tore up. She wrote it all out fully in the letter to Robert, to which she gave up the whole afternoon; but to Lord Rainford she merely said that she thought he would have been amused at Mr. Kimball’s remarks.

  XIII.

  THE next day Lord Rainford came to acknowledge her note in person, and he excused himself for coming rather early on the ground of an intolerable impatience to know what Mr. Kimball had said.

  “Oh, did I promise to tell you?” asked Helen, not well remembering just what she had written.

  “No, I can’t say that you did,” said he with a candour which she began to see was unfailing. “But I thought, perhaps, you might.”

  “I’m not sure about that. But I was thinking that if you were disappointed when you were here before not to find any of us aggressively American, you might be consoled by studying Mr. Kimball; he’s so absolutely and wholly American, that he takes every other condition of things as a sort of joke.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford, “I und
erstand.

  I think I observed something of the sort in that class of people. But I didn’t meet it in — society.”

  He looked at her inquiringly, as if he spoke under correction.

  Helen laughed. “Oh, society has all been to Europe, and has lost the old American point of view — or thinks it has.” —

  “Thinks it has?” he repeated with interest. “Why, I mean that, with all that acquiescence which you found so monotonous there wasn’t one of those people — except a very few sophisticated instances — who looked at you at all as people in European society would. You were hopelessly improbable to them, no matter how hard they tried to realise you, as a — nobleman. Excuse me!” cried Helen, “I didn’t intend to be personal!”

  “Oh, not at all, not at all. It’s very interesting, I’m sure. It’s quite a new view of the matter. And you—”

  “Now you are personal!”

  “No, no, I don’t mean that. Or, yes, perhaps I did.”

  “Well, then, even I, although I’m able to lecture so clearly and dispassionately about it, I’m not sure that I’m able to take the social state of Europe seriously, either.”

  “Really? I didn’t find you such deeply-dyed democrats.

  “We ‘re not — in our opinions; you found that out; nor in our practice, I suppose. But in our traditions and — I’ve been talking so bookishly already—”

  “Oh, it’s quite what they told me to expect in Boston!

  “Then you won’t mind my saying — in our environment” said Helen, with a laugh, “we are. For instance — and now I’m going to be horribly personal — as long as we supposed that Mr. Ray had introduced you as Mr. Rainford, you were real enough; but as soon as we found that you were Lord Rainford, you vanished back into the stage-plays and the storybooks.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” he said, with an accent of so much earnestness that she laughed again, and now with a mischievous pleasure, which he must have perceived: for he added more lightly, “It’s really very uncomfortable, you know, to be going about as a fictitious character.”

  “You can’t help it, and we can’t,” said Helen. “But I suppose if you were to live here a very long while, and were to be very, very good, we might begin to believe a little in your probability.”

  They talked of other matters, and she let her visitor go, with an uneasy misgiving which haunted her throughout the morning, and still lingered about her when Clara Kingsbury came later in the afternoon to beg her to lunch with her the next day, “I know you’ve not been going out, but this will be an errand of charity. Last night I picked up, of all things in the world, a live lord, and before I knew it, I had asked him to lunch with me, and he had accepted. I suppose that lords are lunched very much like other mortals, — if lords are mortal — but really when he told me that he had met you, I was ready to weep on the first person’s neck for joy. You do know him, don’t you: Lord Rainford, whom you met last fall at the Butlers?”

  “O yes,” said Helen, “he brought me a message from them yesterday.”

  “How very odd!” cried Miss Kingsbury, “I wonder he didn’t mention meeting you yesterday.”

  “He didn’t mention going to lunch with you tomorrow,” said Helen defensively, betraying the fact that she had seen him since.

  Miss Kingsbury ignored it. “Then it must be his English reticence. How droll they are! I should think it would worry them to keep things on their minds the way they do. You must let me send the coupé for you! Lord Rainford, and Miss Harkness for the first time in many months, as the play-bills say: really, for a lunch in Lent—”

  “Oh! I think you must excuse me, Clara,” Helen began. “You know I can’t meet people.”

  “I quite understand, dear,” said Miss Kingsbury. “There are not going to be people, or I shouldn’t have ventured to ask you. There are only to be Professor and Mrs. Fraser: Lord Rainford wanted especially to talk over Aztec antiquities with him, and I promised to get him to come. But I must have some other young lady besides myself; I can’t let it be all Aztecs and antiquities. You must come to keep me in countenance, sitting up there behind the tea-pot like a — a — teocallis.”

  Helen laughed, and Clara immediately kissed her. If it were to be such a mild little affair, she felt that she could certainly go; she could see how Clara would hate to seem to have paired herself off with Lord Rainford, and she said, “Well, Clara, I will go; but I believe that, so far as Lord Rainford is concerned, I shall go as an act of penance. He was here this morning again.”

  “Oh!” popped out of Miss Kingsbury’s mouth. “And I’m afraid I said something inhospitable to him — something, at any rate, that I’d like to do away the impression of.”

  “Oh! do tell me what it was, Helen dear! I’m always saying such hideous things to people!”

  Helen explained, and Miss Kingsbury silently reflected. “I suppose my joking about it annoyed him.”

  “What did he say?” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

  “He said it was very uncomfortable going about as a fictitious character.”

  “But you didn’t make him a fictitious character, Helen!”

  “No; but I can see how he might misunderstand—”

  “They’re very sensitive,” assented Miss Kingsbury, with a sigh. “Really,” she continued more briskly, “for people who have gone tramping about the world ever since they could walk — and they began to walk very early — and crushing other people’s feelings quite into the mire, they’re extraordinarily sensitive. One would think that they had always behaved themselves with the utmost delicacy and consideration, instead of scolding and criticising and advising wherever they went.”

  “Yes,” said Helen. “But all that doesn’t excuse me, if I said too much.”

  “Well, then,” said Miss Kingsbury, “come and take some of it back; or all. Tell him that the British aristocracy is the one only solid and saving fact of the universe! Good-bye, dear! Don’t worry about it. I daresay he was delighted!”

  Helen was afterwards sorry that they had not dressed a little more. She was necessarily in mourning, and Lord Rainford was dipped in the gloom of her crape, and of three black silks: Mrs. Fraser’s best black silk, Miss Kingsbury’s Vermont aunt’s only black silk, and the black silk which Miss Kingsbury herself wore, in some mistaken ideal of simplicity. Helen longed to laugh, but remained unnaturally quiet.

  Perhaps the black silks were too much for the Aztecs. Lord Rainford had the Englishman’s stiffness, and Professor Fraser had the professor’s stiffness; they seemed unable to get upon common ground, or to find each other’s point of view. They became very polite and deferential, and ended by openly making nothing of each other. The Frasers were obliged to go early, and Helen shortly afterwards made a movement towards departure.

  Miss Kingsbury laid imploring hands on her. “Don’t go!” she tragically breathed. Stay, and try to save the pieces!” and Helen magnanimously remained; under the circumstances it would have been inhuman to go. She brightened at Miss Kingsbury’s imploring appeal; and they had a gay afternoon. When she said at last that now she really must go she was scared to find that it was half-past four. She hurried on her sack and bonnet and rubbers, and when she came down-stairs, Lord Rainford, of whom she had deliberately taken leave, was there, hospitably followed out of the drawingroom by Miss Kingsbury.

  “I forgive your not taking the coupé,” she said subtly, seizing Helen’s hand for a grateful pressure at parting.

  “I much prefer to walk, I assure you,” said Helen, “after being mewed up in the house all day yesterday. Good-bye.”

  Miss Kingsbury’s man opened the door, and Lord Rainford stood aside for Helen to pass out. But he hurried after her.

  “If you’re walking, Miss Harkness,” he said, with an obvious effort to continue the light strain in which they had been laughing and talking, “I really wish you’d let me walk with you.”

  “Why, certainly,” said Helen. “I shall be very glad.”

  But
they walked away together rather soberly, as people do after a merry time indoors. There was a constraint on them both which Helen had to make a little effort to break. Whatever caused it on his part, on hers it was remotely vexation that she had allowed the afternoon to slip away without going to see Mr. Hibbard about her money. She must wait again till the morning.

  “I’m afraid,” she said, “that you found Professor Fraser rather an unsatisfactory Aztec.”

  “O no. Not at all! He’s extremely well informed, I daresay. But we approach the subject from very different points. He is interested mainly in the pottery, as the remains of an arrested indigenous civilisation; and I, as an amateur Egyptologist, was rather hoping to — ah — hear something new about the monuments — the architectural evidences. But the ground has been pretty thoroughly traversed in Mexico, and we can only look for fresh results now in Yucatan and Central America.”

  He hurried off the statement without apparent interest in the matter, and with something of present impatience. The effect was to make Helen laugh a little, at which he seemed grateful.

  “I suppose you have come over to look up the ground for yourself,” she began; but he hastily interrupted.

  “No, I can’t say I came for that, exactly. I can’t say I came for that. I should like extremely to see those things for myself; but I didn’t come for that.”

  Helen was amused at his scrupulous insistence on the point, and had a mischievous temptation to ask him just why he had come, then; but she contented herself with saying, “I always wonder that English people care to come to America at all. I’m afraid that if we had Germany and Italy at our doors, we shouldn’t care to cross the Atlantic for a run to Colorado and back.”