Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “She’s more to be pitied!”

  “Right again, Miss Root! You are always right. By the way, why didn’t you urge Miss Harkness to attempt something in art? Miss Kingsbury asked me if I couldn’t get her some book to illustrate! She said that Miss Harkness’s sketches were exquisite, and she asked me if I had ever seen any of them. Have you?”

  “Yes,” Cornelia reluctantly admitted.

  “Well?”

  “They’re hopeless!” cried Cornelia, with an involuntary vehemence that delighted Evans.

  “And you thought that if she couldn’t draw she could write! That was quite natural.”

  “It was her own idea,” urged Cornelia.

  “And it was your idea that she should write for me! Very good, very right, very like a philanthropist!”

  “Now, you know well enough, Mr. Evans,” began Cornelia, “that you were perfectly free to refuse Miss Harkness’s writin’; and I ain’t goin’ to praise you up for takin’ it, if that’s what you ‘re after.”

  “That’s what I’m after; but I knew I shouldn’t get it before you told me. Who praises an editor for anything? You and Miss Kingsbury will only think I’ve done my duty when I’ve sat up till midnight putting this pretty rubbish into shape.”

  “Is it so bad as that?” asked Cornelia, aghast.

  “Why didn’t you give it back to her, and tell her it was rubbish? It would have been the best for her in the end!”

  “Because I have a timid and truckling spirit, Miss Root, and you know it. Because I have scarcely the heart to refuse the rubbish of ladies who tell me they have produced it in the interest of some worthy charity, or for the purpose of eking out their pin-money; and I’m naturally helpless in the presence of a lady who has written it for bread — as I am given to understand.” Cornelia was silent, and the editor continued gleefully: “A woman can sometimes do something without damaging others. But when a lady undertakes to help herself, some man has to suffer for it; and why shouldn’t I be the victim? I usually devote Saturday night to working on a little play I’m trying to write, but I daresay the time will be much better employed in rewriting Miss Harkness’s reviews.”

  He watched the travail of Miss Root’s soul in her honest eyes with a smile of unrelenting enjoyment. “Besides, I like to befriend gentility in adversity as well as you do, Miss Root. The thought that I am actually earning money, without her knowing it, for a young lady of Miss Harkness’s condescension, does my mean and servile little soul more good than I can well describe.”

  Cornelia burst forth with a sort of groan, “Oh, it’s all wrong, I know it is! But what is a girl fit for that’s been brought up just as a lady? If there’s anything under the sun that she can honestly do, without imposing upon other people, and putting them to twice the trouble she takes for herself, for goodness’ sake, let her do it!”

  “Very just sentiments; but what is it?”

  “Well, one thing it isn’t; and that’s writing for the papers, and I shall tell her so!”

  “You have no right to abuse my confidence, Miss Root,” said the editor with superficial gravity, through which his laughter broke when she turned desperately upon him. “Miss Harkness’s failure is my secret. If it is a failure. I supposed it was a shining success! There are very few young ladies who can get editors to write their articles for them, and then let them pocket the proceeds.”

  “I should think,” said Cornelia, “that you would be ashamed to make fun of everything the way you do. It seems as if you didn’t have a morsel of compassion for the poor thing.”

  “Ah, there it is again! Accept her inefficiency and applaud her failure because you pity her! Do you think the ladies are ever going to do anything for themselves as long as the world is asked and expected to take that attitude? Did you tell her that she was an artist, and then work up her sketches for her? Have a morsel of compassion yourself, Miss Root! I’m going to have large masses of it. I’m going rewrite Miss Harkness’s whole review!”

  His laugh followed Cornelia as she climbed the stairs in slow and heavy perplexity to her room.

  Helen in her room was light-heartedly writing to Robert, and telling him that though she had now absolutely nothing in the world, she had never felt so happy since her father died, for now she had found at last that she could do something and be of some use. She could not grieve, even for his sake, for the loss of the money paid back to Mr. Everton; the thought of it now was such a perfect horror. She said that some time she should tell him why, but not now; and she turned from the odious subject to describe her interview with Mr. Evans, who had been so frankly kind and encouraging. She had not said anything to Robert about Lord Rainford yet, and she wondered whether she ought. Some time, of course, she must do so; but she was afraid it might be difficult to make the whole affair clear to Robert at that distance. It was something that could be much better spoken than written; she resolved at least to leave her letter open till morning, and decide then what she should do.

  She was not sleepy, but she felt a pleasant languor, such as comes after the fortunate close of a period of strong excitements, and she sat down before the fire, which was giving out its last delicious glow, to indulge her fatigue a little more luxuriously. She looked back over what had happened during the week with satisfaction, now that it was past; she was glad not only that she had paid that horrible old man his money, but that she had been right, and not, as she had sometimes feared, morbid and conceited about wishing him to be paid. She felt that she had behaved in a sensible and business-like manner; that Captain Butler’s action proved this; and that all the events sustained her in her first instinctive impulse. At this safe removal in time and space, Mr. Everton’s proposal did not seem so simply horrible; it began to reveal some amusing aspects; she broke into a little murmur of laughter when she thought of certain moments of perplexity for him.

  As for the money, it was a little matter: it was five thousand dollars in the abstract, but in reality it was only six dollars a week; and with the prospect of literary work from Mr. Evans, and perhaps other editors, she could easily make that up: she had earned ten dollars by her pen already.

  She unfolded the paper that Mr. Evans had given her, and the crepitation of its leaves sent a light shiver through her. What would the Butlers say when she sent them the next number with her reviews marked in it? She knew from her own fine reluctance that it would surprise them disagreeably; and she fancied Jessie Butler supporting, and Mrs. Butler forgiving, while Marian Ray denounced her new attempt. But, she reflected, she would often have to disagree with Marian Ray; and whatever people said of the society gossip in the Saturday Afternoon, it was a good literary paper; everybody acknowledged that. She heard herself defending it to Marian, and, in the rapid process of reverie, it had come to her saying plainly to Marian that she saw no disgrace in writing for the newspapers, and that the only disgrace could be in writing dishonestly and vulgarly for them. She had said she had Clara Kingsbury’s approval, and Marian had laughed and answered, “Oh, if she had Clara Kingsbury’s approval!” and had retreated again to Naples; for Helen now had the newspaper quite open, and was looking for the book-reviews occupying the place which hers would have the next Saturday. They were rather appallingly well written; she could see that they were indefinitely better done than hers; she wondered if they were Mr. Evans’s, and she gave a little sigh of dismay; while her eye wandered idly to the next column, where a name arrested it.

  The name was Fenton’s; and the paragraph in which it occurred seemed to become alive and sentient under her eyes. It was a despatch from Washington, rehearsing, with telegraphic brevity, the facts of the wreck of the Meteor, as furnished to the State Department by the Consul at Tahiti, from the statements of the survivors.

  Five days after the disaster the French ship Belle Paysanne, which brought them to that port, had fallen in with an open boat containing Captain Rollins and a number of the Meteor’s crew and passengers, who reported that Lieutenant Fenton and three others h
ad volunteered to remain on the reef where the Meteor struck till the overladen boat could find land and return to them. The Belle Paysanne altered her course, and visited the scene of the catastrophe; but the wreck had then disappeared, and there were no traces of the men left behind. A week later, however, the ship picked up another of the Meteor’s boats, with the two sailors who had remained with Lieutenant Fenton. From the narrative of these men it seemed that the wreck had broken up the day after Captain Rollins abandoned her, and that Lieutenant Fenton, who had lingered on board after helping to launch the boat, was caught in the wreck and carried down with her. His companion, a passenger named Giffen, was rescued by the seamen; but he had been so badly bruised by the floating timbers that he died the following day.

  They confirmed the statements of Captain Rollins and all the other survivors, concerning the heroic behaviour of Lieutenant Fenton, who had chosen to remain on the rock rather than imperil the lives of the passengers in Captain Rollins’s boat, and who had been most efficient throughout the events that followed the striking of the ship. The boat in which the men were found was in a ruinous condition, and was set adrift after their rescue. A large sum of money, belonging to Captain Rollins, which they had recovered from the wreck before it broke up, was restored to him.

  XVII.

  HELEN did not come down to her breakfast, and Cornelia Root, who was finishing hers about the time there began to be question at Miss Harkness’s absence, said she would step in and see what the matter was after she got on her things. She found Helen sitting before the empty grate; the gas was burning, and the bed untouched; and a thrill of terror went through her lest Helen should be sitting there dead. When, after bidding her good-morning in vain, she ventured to touch her on the shoulder, Helen looked round, with a stare that, for the moment, made Cornelia repent being so bold. “For the good Lord’s sake!” cried the girl, “what is it, Miss Harkness?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Helen. She began to laugh, and tried to hide under her hands the newspaper she had in her lap, and then, as if at her failure in this, she began to weep piteously. “Look!” she exclaimed, opening the paper, and pointing to the story of the shipwreck, “he’s dead! And those men killed him. Oh, I’ve thought it all out!”

  Cornelia took the paper, and, after a swift glance at the paragraph, put it aside without questioning her. “I guess you better lie down, Miss Harkness, and try to get some rest. I’m going to have your fire made up.”

  She got her to bed, and then she conferred with the landlady outside the door; she ended by sacrificing her own preference for a female physician, and calling in the doctor who, Mrs. Hewitt recollected hearing Miss Harkness once say, had taken care of her father.

  She sent a note to Miss Kingsbury telling her that she was afraid Miss Harkness was going to be sick, and asking her to come to see her; but word was returned that Miss Kingsbury was in New York, and would not be home till the latter part of the week. It was then too late to move the sick girl to her friend’s house.

  It did not need the light which Miss Kingsbury threw on her relation to Lieutenant Fenton to enable Helen’s fellow-boarders to understand what had happened. Cornelia Root had understood it at once, with austere resolution not to recognise her own privity to the fact even to herself; Mrs. Evans had divined it, and talked it over with her husband, who halted between remorse for having laughed at Helen’s contributions and secret question whether he would not be justifiable in using a parallel incident in his play; Mrs. Hewitt guessed it out, in a hungry inability to talk it over with anybody, and got her first real comfort out of the expansive desolation in which Miss Kingsbury confided to them all her grief for what had happened, and stated the facts as fully as she knew them.

  “Well, it didn’t stand to reason,” said Mrs. Hewitt, “that she would care so much for a brother, and an adopted one, at that.”

  “O no!” cried Clara. “It was much more than that!”

  She got a professional nurse to relieve the devotion of all Helen’s volunteer nurses; and from this young woman Mrs. Hewitt at first hoped everything, but only to be the more keenly disappointed; for, so far from reporting the tenor of Helen’s delirium, the nurse wholly refused to talk of her patient. She would sit at Mrs. Hewitt’s own table, and blink at Mrs. Hewitt through her glasses, and never say a word, morning, noon, or night, until Mrs. Hewitt did not know what would become of her. Mrs. Hewitt’s disgust with the nurse authorised the first full laugh which Evans had permitted himself since Helen’s sickness began. It was after a favourable turn had taken place; nevertheless Cornelia Root bent upon him a look of keen reproof.

  “Oh, come now, Miss Root |” he protested, “I’m not going to stand that. I’ve just succeeded, after infinite pains and argument, in convincing Mrs. Evans that I didn’t cause Miss Harkness’s fever by laughing at her literature whilst I was putting it into shape that night; and I still believe that if she had died my wife would have required me to deliver myself up to justice. But I am an innocent man, and I won’t have you going round and looking as though this never would have happened if it hadn’t been for me.”

  Cornelia opened her mouth to deny the accusation, but Evans hastily interposed. “Do you mean to say that you haven’t thought — that you haven’t felt — that I was somehow to blame for the whole thing?” She refused to answer, with a dignity that did not avail her. “Don’t fall back upon the fact that I lent her the newspaper! I didn’t invent the facts, at any rate; but I’ve suffered under the ban of public opinion quite as if I had, and now I’m going to stop it.”

  “What nonsense!” said Cornelia. “But if your conscience pricks you for anything, I’m not going to comfort you.”

  “Oh, it isn’t my conscience that pricks me! It’s your conscience, and Mrs. Evans’s conscience, that have goaded me to desperation. I can get on very well with my own conscience.”

  As soon as Helen could be safely taken away, Clara had her carried to her house, where she completed her convalescence amidst every superfluity of luxury. For many weeks she remained gathering strength, and listlessly accepting service and favour that she never could repay; but at last the day came when the tide of life rose high enough in her veins to beat in feeble revolt.

  “You know,” she said, “this must end some time, Clara. I’m not your mother or sister. You can’t keep on taking care of me, as if I belonged to you.” —

  “You do belong to me, Helen dear,” cried her friend, with a rush of generous tenderness. “Don’t talk of anything ending, but just stay on and on. Why shouldn’t you? What would you do?”

  “Ah, that’s the old question!”

  “I didn’t mean that! I meant, why should you try to do anything?”

  “I suppose, because I’m not a lily of the field, for one thing.” Clara laughed gratefully for the gleam of gaiety from Helen, whose sadness had been heavy on her heart. “I should be glad enough never to do anything, or even be anything again. You understand, Clara, what I’ve been through?” she asked.

  “You hinted something once, and I could guess the rest.”

  “Then we won’t speak of it. It’s such a mercy we needn’t! But you can see that all the past is swept away from me. There’s nothing left; I have to begin everything new, with new ideas and new objects. I used to be ambitious about helping myself, but I’m not now; even my pride in that is broken.” The tears of self-pity started to her eyes. “Yes, I would be humbly grateful if I needn’t do anything. But I must. And the old question comes back: what?”

  “Oh, Helen,” said her friend devoutly, “if you would only stay and be a companion to me — anything!”

  Helen smiled. “To cheer you up — read to you — keep you interested — go pleasure journeys with you? Yes, I should be a gay companion.”

  “Well, then, my housekeeper, if you will insist upon usefulness — and I don’t blame you for it; I should myself. Why shouldn’t you be my housekeeper? I have heard of girls trying that!”

  “I should be
glad to learn housekeeping of you, Clara. You know I don’t know anything about it, and that you know everything. I used to pretend to keep house for papa; but Margaret really did it all. I must be fit for something; but I can’t tell what it is, yet.”

  “I can’t bear to hear you talk so, Helen. Why don’t you try writing again? I’m sure Mr. Evans would be glad to have you.”

  “Don’t!” cried Helen. “I couldn’t think of anything I tried before — that.” She touched her calamity with the word, and then struggled to get away from it with a curious effort of her broken spirit, which Clara said afterwards made her think of a crippled bird trying to fly. “I’m a fearful problem, Clara. But don’t worry over me any longer, now. There must be some very simple answer to me if we take time to think it out; and I’m afraid I’m willing to take all the time you’ll let me. I’ll accept any sort of disguised charity at present; and if you want to start a subscription for me, Clara, you may. Only, don’t let me know about it.”

  A thought seemed to strike Miss Kingsbury, which kept her silent for a moment. “There was a Hungarian lady here last year, who had a plan of gardening for girls — vegetable and flower gardening.

  I wonder if you met her.”

  “No,” said Helen.

  “She was at the Kelloggs’. She was Mrs. Kellogg’s religion for the time being.” Helen did not catch hopefully at the gospel of the Magyar prophetess, but looked with a rueful surprise at her friend, who went on: “Then there has been a good deal of talk about farming for women, — small fruits, and poultry.” She threw out the suggestion diffidently, but gathered courage when once it was projected from her. “I suppose one becomes interested in it, and gets very fond of the poor little things.”

  “Which, Clara — the berries or the chickens?” asked Helen, with a lifeless laugh. “I should want to eat the berries; but I can’t imagine eating poultry of one’s personal acquaintance.”