Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  He returned her absent gaze, winking his little, red-lidded eyes. He presently said, “I have had to lay out a great deal of money on the house, and I thought this might as well go into the general account. The structure was very good, but there were many things that needed going over, the plumbing especially. I have had the plumbing put into perfect order. Mrs. Everton was very particular about it — the ladies are, I believe. I think you would be pleased to see the improvement.”

  “Yes,” said Helen.

  “I have had brass pipes put in nearly everywhere; Mrs. Everton had heard that they were very much superior, and I was willing to do anything to gratify her: she was very low at the time.”

  He coughed behind his hand, and Helen awoke from her daze to say gently, “Oh, I hope she’s better.”

  “Thank you,” returned the old man. “But she is dead.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, she was so far gone that she could not be moved from our old house. I never expected she could, but I made the changes to please her, and she went over them all in the architect’s plans. I spared no expense. I don’t suppose,” said Mr. Everton, with a sort of brisk appeal to Helen, “that you would know the place now: the old cornices all down, and fresh paint and paper everywhere.”

  Helen did not reply; but she looked at the man with a pathetic wonder, which he apparently did not feel.

  “I think,” he continued, with a certain insinuation, “it would interest you to see the changes.”

  “O no!” Helen broke out.

  Mr. Everton looked at her and passed his tongue over his red lips, fringed with dry cuticle at their edges, in apparent perplexity. “I don’t mean to say,” he resumed, “that the general plan of the house is changed; that couldn’t be done; Mrs. Everton saw that herself. In many respects she was a woman you could reason with. It was a great blow to lose her.”

  “It must have been,” said Helen, relenting again; but wondering a little why Mr. Everton should speak to her of these matters.

  He explained for himself. “Your burying your father such a short time before I buried Mrs. Everton — it seems a sort of coincidence, a kind of bond, as one may say, and makes me feel as if — as if — you could appreciate my feelings.”

  “I am sorry for you with all my heart,” said Helen. “I didn’t know,” she added vaguely, “that you had met with any bereavement.”

  “Yes; she’s dead,” sighed the old man. “It isn’t as if I were broken, or hadn’t kept my health. I’m as well as ever I was. And as strong. I’m as good for business as any two young men I know of. But it’s when I come home from business that I feel it; that’s where the rub comes in; it’s lonely. Yes, it’s lonely.”

  —

  “O yes,” said Helen, surprised into sympathetic confidence by the simple words. “I often felt it in my father’s case, especially towards the end, when he seemed to live so much in the recollection of the past, and I knew that I was scarcely any companionship for him.”

  “Your father,” said Mr. Everton dryly, “was a much older man than I am, and he was all broken up before he died; I used to notice it. I don’t believe,” he went on, “but what you’d like the house as well as ever, if you saw it. I should be very sorry to think I’d done anything to it that you didn’t like.”

  “It’s very, very kind of you to say so, Mr. Everton.” returned Helen cordially. “And you mustn’t think at all about it. When I made up my mind to part with it, I made up my mind never to care what became of it.” —

  “Well, that was the right spirit,” said Mr. Everton. —

  “And if the changes you have made in it gratified your wife in her last days, I can only be glad of them. I shall always think of my old home as it used to be; if it were burned to the ground, it would remain there, just as I left it, as long as I live.”

  “Well, I’m pleased to hear you say so,” said the old man. “I like to see a young lady sensible—”

  “Oh, I’m not sensible,” protested Helen; “but I like what you’ve done because you did it to gratify your wife in her last days; that makes it sacred.”

  “I was always on good terms with her,” said the widower; “and I always determined to wait a proper time, if I should want to marry again. But if you believe you’ve found the right one, there’s no sense in waiting too long.”

  He looked inquiringly at Helen, who was somewhat mystified at the turn the conversation had taken. But she said politely, “O no.”

  “I should want you should like the house on your own account,” he continued, still more irrelevantly.

  “On my own account?” faltered Helen.

  “Because I want it to be yours,” cried the old man, with a sort of violence. “I appreciate the course you have taken in regard to the fraud that was practised upon me at the sale, and I say that you have acted nobly. Yes, nobly? And I should wish to give the house to you as a mark of — of — my esteem; that, and everything else I have. I’m alone in the world, and nobody has any real claim on me, no matter what her relations may expect, and I will deed the house to you to-day, if you say so!”

  It all seemed like a dream of romance to Helen; it was fabulous, it was incredible, it must be impossible. She began to think that the old man was insane, and involuntarily left her chair. But there was nothing abnormal about him, unless it was the repressed excitement in which he sat blinking at her, as he went on: “The house can be your home to-morrow — today, if you like. You have only to say the word.” He seemed to form some sort of hope or expectation from her continued silence, and now he rose. “If you ‘re willing, there’s nobody to interfere, and I should soon teach them to attend to their own business if they attempted it. My mind is as clear and my health is as good as ever it was, and I would do everything I could for you. I admire you, and I respect you. I think you have right principles, and that’s a very important thing. I should be proud of you. To be sure, we haven’t been much acquainted; and I suppose it’s only reasonable you should want time to think it over. I’m in no hurry; though, as I said, my own mind is made up.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” gasped Helen. “What do you mean? Why should you give me your property and why—”

  Her eyes dwelt hopelessly upon his face, in which a smirk of cunning insinuation struggled with an anxious perplexity. He again passed his tongue over his dry, red lips, and then cleared his throat, and breathed hard: “I mean — all I have; not that house, but half-a-dozen houses, and everything I’m worth. I’m not afraid of what people would say. If we ‘re both of one mind, the difference in age is nothing.” At a sign of renewed impatience from Helen, he added desperately: “I want you to be my wife!” She recoiled, with a shudder, and her teeth closed in a nervous paroxysm. “Oh!” she uttered, in abhorrence far beyond rejection; and, creeping softly by the wall to the door, with her eyes fixed warily upon him, as if he were some nightmare spider that might spring upon her, she vanished out of it, and fled up-stairs to her own room, where she bolted herself in.

  The half-hour of self-loathing that she passed, with her burning face in her pillow, could not have been more cruel if what had happened were some shameful deed of her own. She searched her soul for cause of blame, but she could find nothing worse there than the consciousness of having suffered herself for one inappreciable instant to dream of her home coming back to her by the wild poetic chance which the old man’s words had intimated. This point of time, fine and tenuous as it was, had been vast enough for her to paint a picture on, where she and Robert, dim figures of grateful reverence, had seemed piously to care for the declining years of their benefactor, and to comfort his childless solitude at their fireside. But the silly vision, for which she grieved and blushed, was innocent, as she felt even in the depths of her self-abasement, and the thought of it ended in the reaction through which she rose from the bed, and dashed off a letter commanding Mr. Hibbard to pay the interest on the money due Mr. Everton, to the last cent, and not to accept any sort of concession
from him. But the horror of his offer survived, an incredible fact, which she could not reject. His age, in asking to mate itself with her youth, had seemed to dishonour both, and had become unspeakably ugly and revolting to her. She wondered what kind of young girl it could be that would marry an old man, and what he had seen in her that made him think she could be such a girl. Nothing, she was sure; and therefore this humiliation, when she was so blameless, must be her punishment for sins from the consequence of which she had seemed to escape; for the way in which she had tortured Robert; for her flirting, as she did that first day, with Lord Rainford; for liking to be admired, and for, perhaps, trying to make people admire her. Yes, that must be it; and as soon as she had fitted the burden to her spirit, she rose up with strength to bear it. Whatever men have contrived to persuade themselves, in these latter days, as to the relations of cause and effect in the moral world, there are yet few women who do not like to find a reason for their sufferings in their sins, and they often seem still to experience the heroic satisfaction in their penalties, which nothing but the old-fashioned Christian’s privity to the designs of Providence can give.

  When Cornelia Root came home to tea she knocked at Helen’s door, and passed in round the jamb a hand with which she produced the effect of rejecting all responsibility for the letter it conveyed. “I guess it’s from Mr. Evans,” she said, refusing to look in. “I don’t know what’s in it.”

  Helen was ready, in her penitence, almost to welcome the worst; but the envelope only conveyed a printed slip from the publishers of the Saturday Afternoon, in which they thanked her for her contribution, and begged to enclose their cheque in payment. She rapped in her turn at Miss Root’s door. “Just to tell you the good news,” she explained to Cornelia’s inquiring face, while a laugh fluttered out of her throat, which just failed of being a sob. “They’ve accepted them!” She escaped again into her own room, before Cornelia could formulate that strictly truthful expression of her feelings without which she would not speak at all. She joined Helen a little later, and underwent the pangs of remorse in arranging with her to call on A Mr. Evans that evening and confess the authorship of the reviews preparatory to asking his candid criticism and his advice about future work. Cornelia’s heart smote her in the presence of Helen’s unsuspicious rejoicings; she languished for the moment when she could own that Mr. Evans had wickedly divined their secret from the first, and she found no relief, but rather an added anguish in the skilful duplicity with which he received Helen’s avowal.

  He was alone when they knocked at his door, for Mrs. Evans was putting their boy to bed after the usual conflict with his entreaties and stratagems.

  “Is it possible?” he demanded with a radiant deceit.

  “Why, this is delightful, Miss Harkness. We are quite an aesthetic colony here, under Mrs. Hewitt’s hospitable roof — with Miss Root’s art-work and your literature and my journalism. Really!” He deepened Cornelia’s sense of nefarious complicity by the smile aside which she could not reject. “Have you written much for publication?”

  “I’m afraid you must see that I haven’t,” said Helen, with a straightforward honesty that Cornelia felt ought to have made Mr. Evans ashamed of himself; “and I wished you to tell me just where I have failed in my work, and, if you will be so good, how I can improve it.”

  This seemed to Helen a perfectly simple and natural request, and she was not, perhaps, altogether without the feeling that Mr. Evans ought to be gratified at her approaching him for instruction.

  “Well, there you set me rather a difficult task, Miss Harkness,” he said evasively. “We usually expect the fact that we are willing to print a contribution to suffice as criticism in its favour.”

  “Yes,” pursued Helen, “but you want beginners to do better and better, don’t you? I’m not saying it to fish up a compliment from you; but I wish really and truly that you would tell me what my faults are. Please specify something,” she said with an ingenuous sweetness which smote Cornelia to the soul, but which apparently glanced effectlessly from the editor’s toughened spirit. He laughed, as if other ladies had said the like to him before. “Indeed, I shall not be hurt at anything you say!” cried Helen.

  “It’s a little academic,” said the editor. “But that’s a good fault. It had better be that than be smart.”

  “O yes! I detest smartness in everything.” She wondered just what Mr. Evans meant by academic, but she did not like to ask, and she consoled herself by reflecting that he had’ said it was a good fault to be academic.

  “I don’t know,” he continued, “that it is the best plan to tell the plots and explain the characters so fully as you’ve done; but that can be easily remedied.”

  “I see,” said Helen. “It destroys the reader’s interest in the story.”

  “Yes,” assented the editor, “and in the review a little. And I don’t think it’s best to sum up very deliberately at the end, and to balance considerations so formally.”

  “No?” said Helen. She had thought it was well; and she began to wonder why it was not.

  “But that part can be easily omitted. And I shouldn’t quote from the book unless I could give something very significant or characteristic. Your sentences are a little long. And it is rather late in the day to open with an essay, however brief, on the general effect and tendency of fiction. I think I should always begin directly with the book in hand, and let those ideas come in incidentally.”

  “Yes, to be sure,” said Helen eagerly.

  Mr. Evans put down her manuscript, which he had taken up from the table, and added lightly, “I shall have to work it over a little before it goes to the printers, and then when you have it in the proof you will see what I’ve done, and get a better notion of what I mean than I could give you in words.”

  “Oh, thank you very much. That will be so kind of you!” exclaimed Helen. She added: “I was careful to write only on one side of the paper. I heard that the printers preferred it.”

  “Quite right,” said Evans with a smile at this innocence. Cornelia Root felt the irony of it, but it was simply amiable to Helen. “They do, very much. It’s beautiful copy. By the way, here is the Afternoon for this week, if you want to look it over. You’re one of us now, you know.”

  “Thank you, I shall be very glad of it,” said Helen, taking the paper he offered her.

  Mr. Evans seemed to have all his work about him, and she thought that she ought not to keep him any longer. She said good-night, but Cornelia lingered a little; she could not help it; she could not rest till she knew from the editor, taken alone and defenceless, whether he thought Helen would ever be able to help herself by writing, and she told him so in as many words.

  “I saw you attempting to pierce my inmost soul all the time, Miss Root,” said the editor. “And I tell you frankly, you won’t get the truth out of me. Miss Harkness is a very cultivated young lady.” He bent over her MS., which he had again drawn towards him. “She possesses a neat and polished style. I could imagine that in letter-writing she would have all the charm that tradition attributes to your sex in that art In addressing the object of her affections” — Cornelia gave a start of indignant protest and disclaimer, which had no effect upon Mr. Evans, who went smoothly on— “she must be fascinating, and I have no doubt the fashionable friends to whom she describes our humble boardinghouse ménage think she writes delightfully. But in appealing to the general reader through the medium of the public prints, Miss Harkness seems to think it advisable to present her ideas and impressions in the desiccated form. Her review has all the fixed and immovable grace, all the cold and dignified slipperiness, of a literary exercise.” He looked up, and laughed out his enjoyment of the righteous despair in Cornelia’s face.

  She dropped upon the corner of a chair. “She’s got to do something,” she said.

  “O no, she hasn’t,” returned Mr. Evans cheerily. “She hasn’t kept her secret so well as you have, Miss Root; and yesterday a fashionable friend of hers stopped her coup
é at the pavement, and called me up to the window to say that she was so glad I was giving Miss Harkness a chance to write for Saturday Afternoon, and was sure that I would find her very clever. She was always such a brilliant girl, and said such delightful things! Miss Kingsbury asked me if I didn’t think it was dreadful, her having lost everything, and being thrown upon her own resources in this way, and I said I did; but I don’t. And then Miss Kingsbury explained that of course she, and numerous other persons of wealth and respectability, would be only too glad to have Helen Harkness come and spend her days with them, but she could not bear the idea of dependence; and wasn’t her trying to do something for herself splendid? And I said that I thought it was; but I don’t. And Miss Kingsbury said she knew it would appeal to me, and I said that it did; but it doesn’t.

  Why should it appeal to me, — why should I think it splendid that a healthy young woman refuses to be a loafer and a pauper? Why, under heaven, shouldn’t she do something for herself? The town is full of young women who are obliged to do something for themselves. That’s the kind of splendour that appeals to me — the involuntary kind, — like my own. Is it any worse for Miss Harkness to work for a living than for the tens of thousands of other girls who are doing it? You have worked for a living yourself, Miss Root. Do you want me to regard you as splendid?”

  Cornelia examined her just spirit in silence for a moment. “It’s different with us,” she answered, “because we were brought up to work. We never expected anything else, and it isn’t so much of a hardship for us, as it is for a girl like her who is used to being taken care of, and never had to do or think for herself.”

  “Ah, my dear Miss Root, it is the princess in exile who appeals to us both! But is she more to be praised for refusing to eat the buttered roll of others’ prosperity than the peasant-maids who have never had the chance of refusing?”