“Well, why in the world—” Cornelia began. But she checked herself.
“Why what?” asked Helen.
“Oh, nothing,” returned Cornelia, with the outward hauteur which was apt to mark a spiritual struggle with her. “I’ll see Zenas Pearson to-morrow about those photographs.”
“That will be very kind of you,” said Helen.
The next day Cornelia brought her three of the unsparing likenesses in which the art of photography sometimes unmasks its objects. One was a gentleman in what he would have called chin-whiskers, with his hair gathered in a puff over his forehead, and a gold watch-chain wandering across his bulging shirt-front. The other was a lady in middle life, with her small features losing themselves in the obese contour out of which her eyes looked over little cushions of fat. The gentleman was to be painted of a fair complexion, and the lady as a brunette. The third picture was the likeness of this lady’s child, which was to be coloured in accordance with her present appearance in the spirit-life as reported by a writing-medium.
“I don’t envy you the job, any,” said Cornelia Root. “Zenas apologised for not havin’ any place for you to work in his gallery, but I told him I guessed you’d rather work a while at home first.”
“O yes,” murmured Helen, lost in a heart-sick contemplation of her subjects.
“He can allow you two dollars apiece for ‘em. It’s better than nothin’, and it ain’t much better, and so I told him,” said Cornelia.
“Oh, it’s quite enough; quite,” returned Helen. After her first despair, she resolved to be very faithful and conscientious in her work, and try to make the poor things look as well as she could. She had finished them all by the end of the week, but when Cornelia carried her work to Mr. Pearson, he was critical of it. “Of course,” he said, “she’s done her best, and so far forth she’s earned her money; but anybody can see with half an eye that she ain’t a natural artist. There ain’t any touch about it.”
“Good gracious, Zenas Pearson!” cried Cornelia.
“Do you expect to get an artist to paint up those scarecrows of yours?”
She put Zenas down, but he offered her no more work, and she was too proud, in Helen’s behalf, to ask for it. She was more deeply hurt and discouraged than Helen herself appeared. The latter, in fact, professed a sense of relief when Cornelia, with a blunt reluctance, owned the truth.
“I couldn’t do any more, if he had given them to you for me. I know that I don’t do them well, and they ‘re so hideous, that if I were the greatest artist in the world I couldn’t help making them wooden and staring. I must try something else; and I’ve been thinking — I’ve been wondering — if I couldn’t write something and sell it. Do you know any people — women — who write for the magazines, or the newspapers, rather?”
“Well, I know one girl: she’s an art-student, and she helps herself out by correspondin’; writes for two or three papers up-country, and out West; but I never saw any of her stuff, and I don’t want to; for of all the perfect simpletons — !” Cornelia was expressively silent; she added thoughtfully: “Yes,? guess it must be pretty easy to do, if that girl can do it. I wonder I didn’t think of it before. Why don’t you ask that ridic’lous Mr. Evans? He’s the literary editor of Saturday Afternoon, and I guess he could tell you all about it.”
“I don’t like to trouble him,” said Helen.
“Well, I do, then,” retorted Cornelia. “What’s he here for?”
“I can’t let you,” said Helen, thoughtfully folding the dollar-bills that Cornelia had brought her. “This money will last a little while, and perhaps — perhaps,” she concluded rather faintly, “I can think of something to do by the time it’s gone. I know I’m very weak and silly,” she said, lifting her suffused eyes to Cornelia’s.
“Not at all!” cried Cornelia; and that evening she cornered Mr. Evans, as she said, and attacked him about some sort of newspaper work for a friend of hers.
He was sitting before his fire in a deep chair, with his feet on the hearth of the open soap-stone stove; Cornelia assailed him from a higher chair at a little distance. “Some young man you ‘re trying to help along?” he asked, smiling up into Cornelia’s eyes.
“You know it ain’t any young man!” cried the girl.
“Oh! You didn’t sky” returned Mr. Evans coolly. He asked presently, “Why does Miss Harkness want to write for the papers?”
“Mr. Evans! I think you ‘re too bad! I never said it was Miss Harkness.”
“But you won’t say it isn’t.” —
“I won’t say anything about it. There! And if you can’t give me any advice without askin’ who it is—”
“Oh, that isn’t necessary now. But what I do wish to ask, Miss Root — and I think you owe it to yourself to answer frankly — is simply this: are you sure that you are trying to befriend Miss Harkness from the highest motive?” —
“Highest motive?” demanded Cornelia whom such an appeal must always arrest. “What does the man mean?” She was on such terms of offence and defence with Mr. Evans, that she often cast aside all formalities of speech in dealing with him and came down to sincerities that seemed to afford him the purest delight.
“What do I mean? Why, I mean this — and a person who pretends to keep such a conscience as you do always dusted off and ready for use in any emergency, ought to be able to answer without prevarication. Are you sure that you are not doing more to help this Miss Harkness because she is a lady of fallen fortunes, than you would do for some poor girl who was struggling up, and trying to support inebriate parents, and pay a younger brother’s way through college?” Cornelia opened her mouth to protest, but he hastened to prevent her. “Wait! Don’t commit yourself! Are you sure that her being visited by a lord has nothing to do with your beneficent zeal? Are you sure that you are not indulging a native disposition to curry favour with worldlings and vanities, generally? Are you certain that at the best you are seeking anything better than the self-flattery that comes through the ability to patronise a social superior? I merely ask you to reflect.”
These were precisely the doubts which Cornelia had already exorcised; but they all sprang into new life at the touch of the laughing malice that divined them.
“I declare,” she said, “you are enough to provoke a saint!”
“I’m glad to see it,” said Mr. Evans. “Now, I’m not a saint, and I can be frank and open about a great many things that I observe saints like to fight shy of. A saint — especially a female one — is about as difficult a party to bring to book as any I know. Now I don’t mind acknowledging all these shameful motives which you feel that you must blink. I don’t mind saying that the notion of throwing something in the way of a young lady who has moved in the first circles, and still associates with lords and ladies on equal terms, is quite intoxicating to me, and that I will help you in this work with far more pleasure than if she were a mechanic’s or farmer’s daughter.” He smiled at the rueful misgiving painted in Cornelia’s countenance. “Come, Miss Root, what kind of newspaper work does your patrician protégée think she can do?”
“I don’t know as I want to talk with you about it,” said Cornelia. “You had no business to find out who it was.”
“I know — I know. It was my fatal gift of divination. A random guess, and your own guilty soul did the rest. Well, go on, Miss Root. You know that you ‘re not going to let a selfish pique interfere with an opportunity to do good — to one above us,” he added.
“I should suppose,” said Cornelia grimly, “that you would know a great deal better than I do what she’d best try. I presume she could do most any kind of writin’.”
“That is the presumption in regard to all refined and cultivated people till they prove the contrary, — which they usually do at the first opportunity.”
“I should think,” pursued Cornelia, whose courage always rose in view of any but moral obstacles, “that she could write notices of books. Seems as if almost anybody could write them.”
“If I could ever tell,” she said, taking them from him, “how much you believed of what you said, it would be one satisfaction.”
“No, no, that isn’t it, Miss Root: what you would like to know is how much you believe of what I say. Very little, I imagine. The philanthropist’s ability to reject any truth that tells against him — or her-is unbounded.”
“Well,” said Cornelia, “I don’t know as I care, so long as you give her this chance.”
“Oh, it’s perfectly safe: she’ll be sure to fail,” said the editor. “Tell her I want the notices next week, sometime. In the meantime, I don’t know who’s writing them.”
He did not betray himself in any way during the ensuing week, and he left Cornelia unmolested with a secret which she did not know whether she ought or ought not to keep. Helen worked Very hard at the criticisms; she had it on her conscience to do them very fairly and justly, because when she had read the books carefully through she perceived for the first time how much thought and labour must go to the construction of even indifferent stories; and she felt that it would be a sin not to do justice to all this in the case of novels which were certainly not first-rate. She thought that she ought to be careful about her style, and not say anything in a slipshod or slovenly way. She wrote out her reviews in her neatest hand, and then she copied them all, so that there was not one blot or erasure. She determined that if Mr. Evans accepted them, Miss Root should tell him who had done them, for there were some points which she was doubtful about, and on which she would like his instruction. She was very simple and humble in the matter, and in her own mind looked up to the journalist in his professional quality with an awe that she had not hitherto felt for anything connected with Saturday Afternoon. Her father used sometimes to buy that paper, and send it to her when she was away from home, and she had read its social gossip with a high-minded disapproval of the entertainment it gave her. She never thought of looking at the notices of books in it, and when she first heard that Mr. Evans was connected with it she had resolved to be very careful what she said before him, and she had partly withdrawn from anything like intimacy with Mrs. Evans for that reason. It was very well for Clara Kingsbury; Clara Kingsbury was a kind of public character herself, with her charities and enterprises, her Homes and her Fairs, which were always needing newspaper mention; but for Helen it was another affair. Even now, while the question of the acceptance of her work was pending, Helen asked herself whether she would like to have the Butlers know that she wrote for the Saturday Afternoon, and was quite sure that she would not. “If he should take them, and you tell him who did them, please ask Mr. Evans not to mention it to any one,” she said in giving her manuscript to Cornelia Root, who had suffered everything in the guilty consciousness that he knew already who had done them.
“I ain’t afraid,” she said to Mr. Evans, in discharging herself of the business, “that you’ll mention it; but if you should have to refuse them, and then if you should show out any way that you knew, it would about kill me.”
“Rely upon me, Miss Root,” returned the editor. “I have rejected such loads of young-lady literature, that I have become perfectly hardened, and never show out in any way that I know there are young ladies or literature in the world. Ah!” he added, carelessly opening the manuscript, “the bold, free hand of fashion; pages neatly pierced at the upper right-hand corner, and strung upon a narrow red ribbon with notched edges; faint odour of the young person’s favourite perfume. Yes, this is the real thing!” He laughed in the way that Cornelia Root had more than once said she could not stand when talking with him about serious things.
She went out after leaving the manuscript with him in the morning, and shortly afterwards Helen received the card of Mr. Hibbard, who was waiting for her in the reception-room. It was rather a shock at first, and then she found a sort of relief in the second anxiety, as people do in playing one care off against the other. She said to herself, in putting her ear-rings in before the glass, that he must have heard from Captain Butler, and that if Captain Butler sided with Mr. Hibbard, she should not know what to do; she would have to yield, or at least let the whole matter rest till she had heard from Robert, to whom she had written all about it.
“Good-morning, Miss Harkness,” said the lawyer, absently dropping her proffered hand, “I have a cablegram here from Captain Butler.”
“Oh, I thought you must have,” said Helen, in the pause which he suffered to take place before he went on, with a frown at the paper in his hand.
“He telegraphs me from Naples, in answer to my letter, and directs me to obey your wishes as to paying Mr. Everton’s claim.”
The lawyer lifted his eyes and looked into Helen’s face, as if to wait her orders; and her heart sank. This was what she had been eager and urgent to do when they last met: it had seemed to her then that she could not rest till Mr. Everton’s claim, just or unjust, was paid, since its existence involved a doubt of fraud. But, in fact, she had, not being able to help herself, rested very well, and she had begun to hope that the doubt could be somehow cleared away without the cost of everything to her.
“Is that all he says?” she asked feebly.
“No; he says he will write.” He handed her the despatch, which she mechanically read, and then twisted round her finger.
“What do you think, Mr, Hibbard?” she asked at last pitifully.
The lawyer must have seen so many people halt between their interest and their sense of abstract right, and gladly take advantage of any doubt in their own favour, that he could not have wondered at her hesitation. But he was obliged to say, “I can do nothing now but receive your instructions. I will contest the claim to the last, or I will pay it.” He again explained the matter, and put the points clearly before her.
“And there must always be this doubt about it, even if we gained the case?” she asked.
“Always. Even if that scamp himself were to declare in our favour, and acknowledge that he had played upon Everton’s suspicion, the doubt would remain.”
“Then, I can’t bear it! You must pay Mr. Everton!” cried Helen. “Anything, anything is better than living upon stolen money!” At the same time that she pronounced this heroic truth, which indeed came from her inmost heart, she burst into human tears for the loss of all that she could call her own.
“Miss Harkness,” said the old lawyer, “I would not let you do this — I would take the responsibility of disobeying you and Captain Butler both; but — but I must tell you that my inquiries into the matter have not been satisfactory. I have talked confidentially with several of the gentlemen who were present at the sale, and I find that they all carried away the impression that there was something queer about the bidding towards the last. Now, as I said before, I don’t believe that Everton’s understanding with Mortimer will ever allow him to press the question to an issue, and that you could rest legally secure in the possession of this money; but this, as I conceive, isn’t the point with you.”
“O no, no, no! And thank you, thank you, Mr. Hibbard, for letting me decide the matter — and thank God for helping me to decide it rightly — before you told me this. Whatever happens now, I shall have the consolation of knowing that I wasn’t influenced by the fear of what people would think or
say. I know that I should have been, but I know that I wasn’t.” She dried her eyes, and controlled her quivering lips. “Don’t lose an instant, please, about paying him, and pay him every cent. And oughtn’t I — oughtn’t I — to say something, do something to show that I was sorry that he was kept out of the money so long?”
“I don’t think Mr. Everton will care for that,” said Mr. Hibbard. “The money is what he wants. I will pay it; and then what will you do, Miss Harkness? You were coming to me for money, you said; you mustn’t allow any mistaken feeling—”
“O no, I won’t.”
“I am sure that Captain Butler will wish me to be your banker till he comes home.”
“Yes, certainly; but I have a little money yet,” said Helen, following Mr. Hibbard to the door.
XVI.
THE lawyer was mistaken in supposing that Mr. Everton cared for nothing in the affair except the money. He came that afternoon to make his acknowledgments to Helen, who felt it her duty to receive him when he called, and he showed himself capable of responding generously to her own action.
“I am well aware,” he said, “that I owe this reparation to you, Miss Harkness, and I wished you to understand that I could appreciate your conduct. The original claim is now fully satisfied, but the interest on the money that I have been kept out of would have amounted during the past seven months to something like two hundred dollars — a little short of two hundred dollars. I have written to your attorney that we will say nothing about this sum, that we will consider it paid.”
“Thank you,” said Helen blankly. It was not, perhaps, that she was insensible to Mr. Everton’s magnanimity, but just then she was studying his personal appearance with a strange fascination. She found something horrible in the neatness of this little old man’s dress, in the smug freshness of his newly-shaven face, which had the puckered bloom of an apple that hangs upon the tree far into the winter’s cold, and even in the smoothness and cleanness of his conspicuous linen.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 211
