Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Cornelia Root disdained to reply. She only said: “You talked very differently when she was lyin’ sick here in the house; you couldn’t pity and praise her enough, then.”

  Evans laughed shamelessly. “Well, I was afraid she was going to die, and we always try to make interest with the other world by being kind to people about to go into it. But we never keep it up after if they turn back.”

  He succeeded no better than he meant in unsettling Cornelia Root’s mind in regard to Helen. He wished his wife, who usually made her own bonnets, to go out to the Port and order them of Helen, and in turn suffered much the same sort of reproach which he was fond of addressing to Cornelia. Mrs. Evans said he had never before wished her to get her bonnets in Cambridgeport, and she understood that Miss Harkness had quite all the work she could do. She had helped to take care of Helen during her sickness, and had been devotedly kind to her, like every one else in the house; but a woman likes to place her own limits to her benevolence, especially towards other women; and the husband will commit an error who attempts to extend them. She asked him why he did not wish her to get her bonnets of some of the common milliners in Hanover Street, and he was unable to say why.

  XVIII.

  THE world of fashion, on whose bonnets Helen had experimented in learning her business, accepted the hearsay of her success in a humbler way with selfsatisfaction, and attributed far greater things to her than she achieved. It understood that she was making money, and several fictions in regard to the sums she had amassed had a ready currency. The world intended to look her up, when it had time; it was neither hard-hearted nor indifferent, but it was preoccupied. There were ladies who meant almost every day to drive out and see Helen; there were others who refrained because they fancied she would rather not have them come; but all were unfeignedly glad that the poor thing had found something at last that she could do. Her experiment in aesthetic millinery had thrown a great deal of light on her former endeavours; people said there was hardly anything she had not tried. In fine, they practically left her acquaintance and her memory in the keeping of Clara Kingsbury, who remained faithful to both, and perhaps did the best thing for them in rather hushing them up. She was herself a little sensitive about Helen’s first experiment, and she was aware that many people held her indirectly responsible for the enthusiasm with which they had encouraged it. She always answered inquiries about Helen in an elusive way; she generalised her, and passed her over as quickly as possible, so that really the world had it to say that, so far from having dropped Helen, she had dropped herself. It was certainly not to blame for having heard nothing of her failing health, which began to break some six months after she had established herself at Margaret’s. She had worked very hard, for she had incurred expenses during her fever at Mrs. Hewitt’s, for which she was still in debt to Clara Kingsbury, and she had cherished the secret determination to reimburse her for all her losses through her. She had not earned enough to do this, but she had worn herself thin and pale by the time the advancing spring made it a year since she had heard of Robert’s death. Her friend wished her to give up and go down to her cottage with her; but Helen refused to do more than spare herself a little, and she was still at Margaret’s when the Butlers and Rays arrived from Europe.

  They had been abroad longer than they had intended, because Captain Butler had continued in feeble health; but now they had come home to stay, as Marian wrote from London before they sailed. They were all going to be in Beverley together till Ray could decide whether to buy or to build in Boston, and Marian said that the first thing must be an indefinite visit from Helen. There was a tone of peremptory hospitality in her letter, which made Helen, in spite of her affection for them, dread the return of her old friends. She was much more comfortable with Clara Kingsbury, who had become the friend of her adversity, who realised it, and took it seriously; and she could see that it was still a freakish piece of wilfulness to the Butlers. Marian somehow treated her as if she were a little girl, and rather an absurd little girl. She knew that she could right herself against Marian’s assumptions of sincerity and wisdom, but she shrank weakly from the effort, and she foresaw that she should not have the physical strength to make it.

  In fact she yielded at once when Marian drove out to Cambridgeport and took possession of her. She was not even to be allowed to wait till they were settled at Beverley, but was to go down with them; and Marian came from the hotel where they were stopping for the day to fetch her.

  Marian had always been large and blonde; she now showed a tendency to stoutness; she was very English in dress, and she had the effect of feeling as if she looked very English. In fact, she had visited so much at great English houses that she was experiencing the difficulty, which sometimes besets American sojourners in England, of distinguishing herself from the aristocracy, or at least the landed gentry. “The illusion shortly yields to American air, but it is very perfect while it lasts.

  Marian had a nurse for her little boy, and she called this nurse by her surname simply; she was quite English in her intonation, and she was at the same time perfectly honest and unaffected in these novel phases, and as thoroughly good and kind-hearted as ever. But her handsome bulk and her airs of a large strange world made Helen feel undersized and provincial; in spite of all she could do, and in spite of her accurate knowledge of just what Marian Ray was and had always been, her friend made her feel provincial. She had been almost two years out of society, and for the last six months her relations had been with inferior people; she asked herself if she might not really have retrograded in mind and manners, and she gladly escaped from Marian to the others; to the exuberant welcome of the younger girls; to the pitying tenderness of Mrs. Butler; to the quiet and cordial simplicity of Ray, — his quiet seemed to have been intensified by absence. But what went most to her heart was Captain Butler’s tremulous fondness, and the painful sense that the others were watching, whether they would or not, for the effect of his broken health upon her. He brightened at meeting Helen; they said afterwards that he had not seemed for a long time so much like himself; and they left him to entertain her while they made a show of busying themselves about other affairs. It was probably an indulgence they had agreed to grant his impatience. He kept her little worn hands in his, and looked at her forefinger, roughed with the needle, and deeply tinted with the stuffs in which she worked, and it seemed to be this sight that suggested his words:

  “I managed very badly for you, my dear! If it hadn’t been for my hesitation when I first doubted that rascal, I could have made terms for you with the creditors. I don’t wonder you would never accept help from me! It’s very good of you to come to us now.”

  “Oh, Captain Butler, you break my heart! Did you think that was the reason? I only wished to help myself. Indeed, indeed, that was all. I wouldn’t have accepted any provision from the creditors.”

  “You need never have known it. That could have been arranged,” said Captain Butler.

  “It’s been a mercy, the work — my only mercy!” cried the girl. “Oh, Captain Butler!” She caught her hands away and hid her face in them, and let the black wave of her sorrow go over her once more. When it was past, she lifted her dim eyes to those of the old man. “Did you read about it — all about it?”

  “Yes, my dear, and many a night I’ve lain awake and thought about it!”

  “Did you ever think that he might still be alive — that perhaps those men came away and left him, and he escaped somehow? Don’t tell me that you did if you never did!”

  The old man remained silent.

  “Then they must have killed him — to get that money—”

  “No; probably they told the truth. It might very well have happened as they said,” pleaded Captain Butler.

  “Ah, you know it couldn’t!”

  Again his hopeless silence assented, and Helen said, with a long, deep sigh, “That is all. You know how I must have felt. There is no use talking of it. I only wanted to see you and speak of it just once, because
I knew you would know. Thank you!” she said, with a wandering pitifulness that forced a groan from her old friend’s lips.

  “For crushing your last hope, Helen?”

  “Ah! it’s better not to have false hopes.”

  She stole her hands back into his, and after a while she began to tell him quietly of her life, and what she had done and expected to do; and he gave her the comfort of his fatherly praise, in which there was no surprise or foolish admiration, such as afflicted her in most people’s knowledge of her efforts.

  “I don’t have to work very hard,” she explained, in answer to a question of his; “not harder than I wish; and I have got to working at last as other people do who earn their living, without thinking at all that it’s I that am doing it. That’s a comfort, — a great comfort. And I know my trade, and I’m sure that I do good work. Do you remember when I told you that I should be a milliner if I were ever left to take care of myself?”

  “I remember, Helen.”

  They were both silent; then she said, with a light sigh, “I’m only feeling a little fagged now.”

  “You must stay with us, Helen,” began Captain Butler.

  “I shall be glad enough to stay a while,” she answered evasively, and in her own mind she had already fixed the term.

  It was inevitable, perhaps, that she should extend the term. The summer was a vacant time, at best, and she could let the luxury of Captain Butler’s house flatter her feeble health into strength again without such a bad conscience as she would have had if she felt that she was spoiling her future, or if she had got back her strength very rapidly. The family did not see many people, and only saw them in a quiet informal way in which Helen could share. The world, with which she had never had any quarrel, took her back kindly enough; it discreetly suppressed its curiosity; it spoke of bonnets and ribbons in her presence with a freedom that was wiser and politer than an avoidance of such topics would have been; it sent her invitations to little luncheons and low teas, and accepted her excuses gracefully, and always renewed the invitations, just as if she had come.

  The old affection enfolded and enfeebled her. It was quite as bad as she had feared. She said to herself sometimes that it would be better to break off at once and go back to Margaret’s; but she did not do so. The thought of the little wooden house baking beside the dust of Limekiln Avenue, and her own low chamber gathering heat and mosquitoes from day to day under the slope of the slated mansard, opposed itself to the actuality of the Butler cottage, with its wide verandahs that looked seaward through cool breaks of foliage on the lawn dropping, smoothly to the boulders on the beach; with its orderly succession of delicate meals; with the pretty chintzed and muslined room in which she seemed to drowse her life away, safe from the harms that had hunted her so long; and she felt how easy it would be to accept indefinitely the fond hospitality that claimed her. She said that she must not; but in the meantime she did. She had the soft, feline preference for sunny exposures and snug corners which is to blame for so much frailty of purpose, or so much purposeless frailty in women; and now she was further weakened by ill-health. She stayed on and on, in spite of the feeling that they all regarded her as a poor, broken thing, who could no longer be the ideal of the young girls, or the equal friend of Marian.

  Mrs. Ray was much preoccupied with her baby, with the house that Ray had decided to build, with the friends abroad from whom she heard and to whom she wrote. She carried with her an impression of wealth, an odour of opulence, which accorded well with her affluent personality; she accepted her lot of rich woman with a robust satisfaction which would have been vulgar except for her incorruptible good-heartedness. She never talked of money, but she was a living expression of large expenditure; and in discussing the plans of her new house with Helen, she had an unconsciousness of cost, as related to questions of convenience or beauty, which went further to plunge Helen into hopeless poverty than any boast of riches could have done. Her manner was none the less effective for her assumption that Helen was equally able to pay for such a house. She was not planning altogether for her own comfort and splendour, though these were duly provided for; but she was looking after the wellbeing of everybody in her household, and she was as willing to lavish upon the servants’ quarters as her own.

  “I think it’s barbaric,” she said, “to make those poor creatures, because they do our work, pass their days in holes in the ground and coops under the roof, and I’m determined that they shall be decently housed with me, at least. I’m making the architect work out this idea — it was something I talked over — with” — she added, with the effect of feeling it absurd to shrink from saying it— “Lord Rainford.”

  They both continued quietly looking at the plan, but the word had been spoken, and they no longer talked of the servants’ quarters in Marian’s house. Helen leaned back in her chair, with her listless hands in her lap, and Marian took up the work she had laid down before unfolding the plan.

  “When did you see him last?” asked Helen.

  “Oh, he came to see us off at Liverpool,” returned Marian.

  “Was he — well?”

  “Yes, as well as he usually is. I believe he’s never very strong, though he’s never in a bad way. He’s much better than he used to be.”

  Helen was silent. Then she began, as if involuntarily: “Marian” — and stopped.

  “Well?”

  She was forced to go on. “Did you know—”

  “He told Ned. Now, Helen,” she added quickly, “I promised Ned not to open this subject with you!”

  “You haven’t,” returned Helen with quiet sadness. “I opened it. I knew that we should have to speak of it some time. I feel that I was not to blame, and I have never felt sorry for anything but his — disappointment.”

  “He never blamed you. He understood just how it happened, and how he had mistaken you. He is the soul of delicate appreciation.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “And his only trouble was, that he should have forced you to say that you were engaged.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I don’t believe that any of us grieved more sincerely for you than he did.”

  “Oh, I believe it.”

  “Well,” said Marian, breaking her needle in expression of her resolution, “I won’t talk with you about Lord Rainford, Helen; for I can only talk with you in one way about him, and I promised Ned not to do that!”

  “What way?” asked Helen.

  “You know!”

  “Now,” cried Helen, “you must tell me all about it! If I didn’t believe that I had suffered as much as he, I couldn’t forgive myself. How did he find out about — about — Robert?” She whispered the last word.

  “We told him!”

  “And he was sorry for me — he —

  “Yes.”

  “How kind he is!”

  “Yes, he is kind,” said Marian. “He’s a good deal changed since he was here.” Helen looked the interest which she did not otherwise express, and Marian continued: “He’s giving up a good many of his wild Utopian ideas about democracy, and all that kind of thing. You know, at one time — before he first came out to America — he thought of dividing up his estates amongst the labourers on them.”

  “What a strange idea!”

  “Yes. But there was some legal obstacle to that — I don’t know what — and now he’s devoting himself to making his people comfortable in the station where he finds them. He conforms a great deal more than he used to, in every way I think his acquaintance with America did him good: he saw what a humbug democracy and equality really Were. He must have seen that nobody practically believed in them; and we must say this for the English, that they ‘re too honest to get any pleasure merely from the names of things. He must have found that people here were just as anxious about position and occupation as they are in England.”

  “He seemed very much puzzled by it,” said Helen. “I couldn’t understand why.”

  “Because he was very sin
cere; the English are all sincerer than Ave are. They accept rank and royalty, and carry it out in good faith; and we accept democracy, and then shirk the consequences. That’s what Ned says. I wonder that the Englishmen who have been here, or seen us running after titles abroad, can keep from laughing in our faces! And I don’t wonder that Lord Rainford was cured of his fancies in America. Why, he actually, at one time, was a sort of republican!”

  “A very curious sort,” said Helen. “He said that Americans were all commoners.”

  Marian paused. “Did he say that? Well,” she added with heroic resolution, “I suppose we are.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Helen. “Or at least it wasn’t delicate of him to say so.”

  “I don’t believe he meant anything by it. He gave us to understand — or Ray at least — that he particularly admired you for your courage in earning your own living, and being no more ashamed of your work than if you were noble.”

  “Yes,” said Helen thoughtfully, “I suppose it might be natural for him, if he had those notions, to idealise us here, just as it would be for one of us to idealise them: it would be his romance.”

  “Certainly,” said Marian, with eager assent, as if this mood ought to be encouraged in Helen, “that is just the way.”