Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “The Continent is rather an old story with us, you know. Of course the towns are a good deal alike here, after you leave Boston, and there is nothing to see in the usual sight-seeing way; but the conditions are all new, and they ‘re interesting; yes, they ‘re interesting. But I can’t say exactly—” Helen felt a nervous inability to let him define, as he clearly intended, that it was not exactly the new conditions either that had brought him to America, and she turned a smiling face from the anguish of sincerity that was urging him on, and looked about her with the hope that something in their surroundings would suggest escape for them both.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that you know Boston very well by this time?”

  “No, I don’t know it very well,” replied Lord Rainford. “But I believe I know something about this quarter of it. This is where your principal people live — professional people, and large merchants?”

  “All sorts of people live everywhere, now,” said Helen, with a little touch of her superiority; “and I can’t say that Beacon Street is any better than Commonwealth Avenue. Papa was in the India trade,” she continued, “and we lived just here in Beacon Steps.” She remembered what Captain Butler had said of the India trade and its splendour, and she had a tender filial pride in speaking of it.

  Lord Rainford had not caught the word. “In trade?” he repeated.

  “His business was with Indian products of all sorts,” Helen explained.

  “Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford. He walked on a silence which Helen did not heed particularly.

  He must have been pondering the complications of American society, through which he was walking about the most exclusive quarter of Boston with the daughter of a person who had bartered beads and whisky to the aborigines for peltries; for, “Really,” he said at last, “I didn’t suppose there were enough of them left in this region to make it worth any one’s while. But perhaps he carried on the business at a distance — in the West?”

  They came to an involuntary pause together, in which they stared at each other. “What — do you mean?” cried Helen.

  “Upon my word I don’t know whether I ought to say,” returned Lord Rainford.

  “You didn’t — you didn’t suppose,” Helen continued, “that papa traded with our Indians?” Lord Rainford’s silence confessed his guilt, and she added with a severity which she could not mitigate, “Papa’s business was with India; he sent out ships to Calcutta!”

  “Oh — oh!” said her companion. “I beg your pardon.”

  Helen made a polite response, and began to talk of other things; but in her heart she was aware of not pardoning him in the least; and she had an unworthy satisfaction in leaving him in evident distress when they parted.

  The next morning, at the earliest permissible hour, Mrs. Hewitt brought her his card, with a confidential impressiveness that vexed Helen almost to the point of asking Mrs. Hewitt to say that Miss Harkness was not well, and begged to be excused; but she repented of the intention before it was formed, and went down to receive her guest.

  She received him coldly, and his manner confessed the chill by an awkward constraint in the commonplaces that passed before he broke out abruptly with, “I’m afraid I must have annoyed you, Miss Harkness. I’m not ready — I don’t suppose I’ve any tact at all — but it would grieve me to think that I had misunderstood you yesterday in a way to vex you.”

  “Oh, don’t speak of it!” cried Helen, with the generosity which his frankness evoked. “There was never anything of it, and now it’s all gone.” She began to laugh at the droll side of his blunder, and she said, “I was afraid that I must have seemed very rude the other day, in openly reducing you to a fairy prince.” —

  “No, I rather liked that,” said Lord Rainford.

  “It interested me, and it explained some things.

  I’m sure people get on better in the end by being frank.”

  “Oh,” said Helen, “there’s nothing like frankness,” and at the same moment she felt herself an intricate and inextricable coil of reservations.

  “I think the Americans particularly like it,” he suggested.

  “We expect it,” said Helen, with a subtlety which he missed.

  He went on to say, with open joy in the restoration of their good understanding: “The distinctions you make in regard to different kinds of trade rather puzzle me. I don’t see why cotton-spinning should be any better than shoe-manufacturing; but I’m told it is.”

  “Why, certainly,” said Helen.

  “But I don’t see the ‘ certainly’!” he protested, with a laugh.

  “Oh, but it is!” she explained.

  “Ah,” he returned, with the air of desisting, “it’s my defective education, I suppose. But if people go into trade at all, I don’t see why they shouldn’t go into one thing as well as another. It appears all the same to — us.”

  The little word slipped out; and neither of them thought of it at the time. He went away, happy in having made his peace; she parted from him with sufficient cordiality and as soon as he was gone, this word by which he had unconsciously distinguished between them and classed her, began to rankle and to sting. When it came to herself, she had the national inability to accept classification, which seems such a right and wise arrangement to Europeans, and which some Americans uphold — till it comes to themselves.

  She could not get rid of her resentment by asking herself what Lord Rainford’s opinions and prejudices were to her, and resolving not to see him if he came again; and she was so hot with it, when she went out in the afternoon to Mr. Hibbard’s office at last, that she must have seemed to the clerk, who told her he was not in, to have some matter of personal question with the delinquent lawyer.

  She stopped a moment on her way home at the window of a picture-store, attracted by some jars of imitation faïence, and she went in to ask about them; the sight of them suddenly revived her belief that she could still do something of the kind, and spare herself the shame of encroaching upon her capital.

  A gentleman turned round from looking at them on the inside of the window, and she confronted Lord Rainford. “Ah, Miss Harkness!” he said. “Was it you who were spell-bound outside there by these disagreeable shams?”

  His words struck her new hopes dead. “They are ghastly,” she said, with society hardness. Then Miss Root’s words came involuntarily to her lips,” I pity the poor wretch that expects to live by painting and selling them.” That door, she felt, was for ever closed against her, even if she starved on the outside. The shock brought the tears into her eyes behind her veil, and she remained staring at the fictitious faience without seeing it.

  “Frankly, now,” said Lord Rainford, “don’t you think that all effort in that direction is misdirected, and that the world was better before people set about prettifying it so much?”

  “Frankly,” said Helen hysterically, “I don’t believe I like frankness as much as you do.”

  He laughed. “If you have ever decorated pottery, Miss Harkness, I take it all back.”

  “Oh, it isn’t a question of that,” said Helen breathlessly. “It’s a question of what else the poor girl, who probably did the things, shall turn to if she stops doing them.” She had a kind of dire satisfaction in dramatising her own desperation; and the satisfaction was not diminished by the fact that these ideas had come into her head since she had denounced frankness, to which they had no relation whatever. She had meant — if she meant anything by that denunciation — to punish him for the tone of his talk in the morning. She had not forgotten his patrician us. But the talk was now far from that, and he had not been punished.

  “Ah,” he said, with feeling that she respected in spite of her resentment, “I should be sorry if I seemed indifferent to that side of the question. It was only that I hadn’t thought of it.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she returned, with an aimlessness from which she thought to escape by asking, “ Is there anything up-stairs?”

  “Yes,” he said; “a ve
ry beautiful picture — I fancy a very American picture.”

  “The two things ought to tempt me,” said Helen, passing on as if to terminate their casual interview. — She mounted the thickly-carpeted stairs, which silenced the steps behind her; but she was not surprised to find the portière held back for her to enter the pretty little gallery, or to find Lord Rainford beside her, when she stood within. There was a gentleman there with his hat off, after our fashion in picture-galleries at home, and two suburban ladies with a multiplicity of small paper parcels, in awe-stricken whisper; but they all presently went out, and left her alone with Lord Rainford before the painting.

  A yellow light fell rich into an open space in the primeval New England forest, and revealed the tragedy of an arrest for witchcraft, — an old woman haled away in the distance by the officers, with her withered arms flung upward in prayer or imprecation; and in the foreground a young girl cowering at the door of the cabin, from which her mother has just been torn. The picture was an intense expression of the pathos of the fact, which seemed as wholly unrelated to canvas or pigment, in the painter’s poetic treatment, as if it were his perfect dream of what he had meant to do.

  “Yes!” said Helen, with a deep sigh of the impassioned admiration with which she always devoted her being for the moment to the book or picture she liked.

  “One of your Boston painters?” asked the Englishman.

  “The one,” answered Helen, and she launched out in a fury of praise, while he continued attentive to her rather than to her words.

  “I suppose you can’t understand how it afflicts me,” he said finally, “to find any of the errors and sufferings of Europe repeated here.”

  Helen laughed as people do at mysterious grievances. “Why, no; as far as such things are historical, I believe we’re rather proud of them. They do something to satisfy the taste for the picturesque, though after all they’re such a mere morsel that we land in Europe perfectly ravenous.”

  “If they were all historical, I shouldn’t mind,” said the young man. “It was finding our current superstitions accepted here that surprised and disappointed me.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me that you find any imperfections — domestic or foreign — in us now?”

  “Ah, you get beyond my joking depth very soon,” he protested. “I told you once that I was a serious person.”

  “I didn’t believe you could be serious about it!”

  “I was, I assure you. I suppose it was my habit of taking things very seriously that put me at odds with matters at home, and that puts me at odds with matters here, where I fancied that I might be rather more of the regular order.

  “I don’t understand,” said Helen; and being curious, and being fatigued, she dropped into one of the chairs that the suburban ladies had vacated.

  “I mean that this morning I was trying to express the feeling which has made me a sort of white crow among my own people, and which doesn’t seem even credible here. I was very far indeed from wishing to imply disrespect for any sort of usefulness — which is the only thing I really respect in the world. Did you understand me to do so?” —

  “Not exactly that,” said Helen, with a reserve which he must have seen was as yet inexpugnable.

  “I daresay it was one of the misfortunes of my being a sickly boy, bred at home, apart from other boys, and indulging himself in all sorts of fancies; but I used to imagine that in America our distinctions — criterions — didn’t exist. When I began to know Americans, at home as well as here, it seemed to me that they were often rather more subservient — more eager to get on with people of rank, than Englishmen even. I confess it baffled me, and you ‘re the only American — if you’ll excuse my being so personal, as you say — who has at all explained it to me. I can see now how they may have a romantic -an historical — interest in knowing such people, and that they are not merely tuft-hunters in the ordinary sense.”

  Helen could not tell whether he was speaking in irony or in earnest; she dropped the glance she was lifting to his face, in a little fear of him.

  “I daresay I’ve been mistaken about other matters — appearances; and I’m vexed that I should have said something this morning that I saw put me further than ever in the wrong with you. I assure you that I don’t think better of myself for belonging to an order of things that I believe to be founded and perpetuated in ignorance and injustice. I would really rather have been one of the pilgrims who came over in the May-Blossom—”

  “Flower,” said Helen, helplessly correcting him.

  “Flower — I beg your pardon — than one of the robbers who came over with the Conqueror!”

  He seemed to think this a prodigious tribute; but Helen could not even make a murmur of grateful acceptance. Those radical ideas, in which he expected her to sympathise, were ridiculous to her; she had always heard them laughed at, and she could not imagine how an Englishman of rank could entertain them, though she had heard that such Englishmen sometimes did, for a while. To hear him talking in that way made him seem not so much unnatural as impossible; it was so unexpected from him that she felt a little uneasy, as if he were not quite in his right mind; but she had so far a compassion for his mania that she could not find it in her heart to tell him that he had totally misconceived her, and he went on to explain further.

  “And I was merely trying to say that I thought it odd in a society where you are all commoners together-”

  “Commoners!” cried Helen, in astonished recognition of the fact.

  He did not heed this effect in her, but went on— “That there should be any such distinctions as ours. I’ll go further, and say that I thought it preposterous; and the other day, when I fell into that unaccountable blunder in regard to the India trade, I had no such-feeling as you — as you — might have supposed. If I venture to speak of something that Mr. Ray let drop in one of his letters about your determination to trust to yourself and your own efforts, rather than accept any sort of dependence, it’s because I wish to tell you how much I revere and — and — honour it? It only endeared you to me the more! Miss Harkness!” he cried, while she began to look about her with a wild hope of escape, “it was for your sake that I came back!”

  They were quite alone, and if it were to come to this, it might as well have come to it here as anywhere else: Helen realised the fact with a superficial satisfaction, following her superficial terror of the publicity of the place. “Ever since I first saw you—”

  “Oh, don’t say any more! Indeed, you mustn’t! Didn’t the Rays — didn’t they tell you—”

  “I haven’t seen them. Before I went home I knew that your father’s circumstances — But I beg you to do me at least the kindness to believe that it made no difference at all. God knows I never considered the circumstances or made them an instant’s question.”

  “You are very kind, Lord Rainford; generous — but—”

  “No. It pleased me to think you had nothing.

  I would rather have found you as I have than in the best house in your town; I don’t like people of fashion at home; and when it comes to what is called position, or loss of it, here —

  Helen tried to interpose again, but he would not let her speak.

  “What Ray told me only made me the more impatient to see you again, and to assure you — to tell you how wholly I sympathised with your — ideas; and to prove my sincerity in any way you choose. If you dislike going to England — and I could very well imagine you might, for some reasons — I will come here. It’s indifferent to me where I live, so that I honestly live out my opinions. I love you for what you are, — for your courage, your sincerity, your truth to yourself; and if you think that your having — your being—”

  “Oh, it isn’t at all!” cried Helen piteously, compassionately. To a girl who had never dreamt of being loved for anything but herself, and in her quality of well-born and well-bred American, could not imagine herself less than the equal of princes, Lord Rainford’s impassioned misconceptions contained as ma
ny offences as could have been put into as many words; but she forgave them all to the pain that she saw that she must inflict. He had misunderstood everything: all her assumptions of equality, on his own plane, had been thrown away upon him; she had only been his equal as he ordained it, and condescended to her level. But she could not be angry with him, since she was to crush him with the word she must speak. She had never forgiven herself for her reckless behaviour the first time they met; and now he must have taken all her kind sufferance, all her hospitable goodwill of the past week — which she had shown in atonement — as invitation for him to hope, even to expect. She hung her head, but she must stop him at once, and, “Oh! Lord Rainford,” she murmured, “I’m engaged!”

  He turned very white. “I beg your pardon,” he said, simply and quietly.

  “I’ve been very greatly to blame from the beginning; I see it now, and I ought to have seen it before. But that first day, when I met you, I was very unhappy — I hardly knew what I did; I’m afraid I didn’t care.

  I had driven away the dearest friend I had by my foolishness; and he had left me, hating me; it made me desperate! But it all came right very soon again; and it’s he — It’s cruel of me to be telling you this; but I want you to believe that I do prize your regard, and that since you’ve been here this time, I’ve only tried to do what I could to remove that first impression, and to — to — to — You must forgive me!”

  “O yes,” said the young man with a bewildered look.

  “I do see how good you are, and I respect — Any girl might be proud and glad, if she were not bound—”

  “Good-bye,” said Lord Rainford abruptly. She took his hand in a clinging, pitying pressure; she would have liked to detain him, and say something more, to add those futilities with which women vainly seek to soften the blow they deal a man whom they value, but do not love. But the useless words would not come to her lips, and she must let him go without them.