Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “And, perhaps,” Helen went on, “it would have been better for me if I had been such a girl as he supposed — trying to help myself because I respected work, and all that. But I wasn’t.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I was merely doing it because I couldn’t bear to be a burden to any one; and I’ve never had any higher motive.”

  “And I’m sure it’s high enough,” said Marian. “And crazy enough to suit any one,” she added.

  “He would like it all the better when he found out what it really was; especially now that his own ideas have changed a little.”

  “He was an aristocrat at heart all the time,” returned Helen. “If I had been born to work for my living, like the poor girls whom I make bonnets for—”

  “It would have been another thing, quite. We ‘re all inconsistent. I don’t deny it. There’s no merit in working for a living, whatever disgrace there is in not doing it. You don’t find your Bridgets and Norahs, or your Sadies and Mamies so very superior to human weaknesses that you wish the rest of us to form ourselves on the pattern of working girls.” O no,” said Helen, with humorous sadness. “They’re poor silly things, most of them, and as full of prejudice and exclusiveness as any one. I’ve never seen distinctions in society so awful as the distinction between shop-girls and parlour-girls. Their differences seem such a burlesque of ours, that sometimes? can hardly help laughing at the whole thing. I supposed once that all work-people were on a level; but really I had no idea of inequality till I came down to them. I daresay,” she added, “Lord Rainford’s experience in coming down to us must have been something like it. But it didn’t make it any pleasanter to have him suggest his surprise. And I don’t know that I need feel particularly flattered at his singling me out for praise because I choose to help myself rather than be wholly dependent — I’ve always been partly so. It isn’t a thing, as you say, that I deserve the least credit for.”

  “I never said that about you,” protested Marian, “and I do think it’s a credit to you — or would be, if there were any necessity for it.”

  “Any necessity for it?”

  “I will speak now,” cried Marian, “hospitable or inhospitable; and I don’t see how it has anything to do with it.” Helen understood perfectly that these enigmatical sentences were the report, so far as they went, of some discussion between Marian and her husband, and that she was now about to break some promise she had made him out of half-conviction. “Do you expect, Helen Harkness, to go back to that horrid shanty, and spend the rest of your life in making servants’ bonnets?”

  “Yes — till I have learnt how to do better work.”

  “Well, then, I think it’s a shame!” Helen drew herself up, but Marian did not quail. “I think that you might have had some little consideration for us — for all your friends, if you had none for yourself. Why should it have been any more disgraceful to accept help from papa — from your father’s old friend, who felt towards you just as he does towards his own children — than to take up such work as that? If it comes to that, why shouldn’t you be dependent upon us, as well as dependent on them?”

  “I’m not dependent on them,” said Helen, “and you have no right to say such a thing, Marian.” But she felt herself physically unable to cope with Marian’s misrepresentation, or the no-reasons with which she supported it.

  “I say it for your good, and to let you see how it appears to others. It will kill you to go back there.

  I can’t bear to think of it.”

  “It won’t kill me,” answered Helen sadly, “but I shouldn’t be frightened by that if it were true. Why do you think I should be so anxious to live?”

  “Helen!”

  “Yes, — seriously. What is there left for me in this world?”

  “There’s everything — if you would see it so.”

  “Everything?”

  “Helen,” said Marian, dropping her hands, with the sewing in them, into her lap, “you force me to break one of the most solemn promises I ever made in my life. But I don’t care; if I can do any good by it, I will break it. And I want you to understand that I speak entirely on my own responsibility, and quite against Ned’s advice and orders. We saw a great deal of Lord Rainford while we were in England, and everything we saw made us like him more and more.”

  Helen feebly put herself on the defensive, but without saying anything, and Marian continued —

  “He’s very greatly improved, in every way. He’s better, and he’s better-looking.”

  “I thought him improved the last time he was here,” said Helen impartially.

  “He’s the kind of man who doesn’t show to advantage out of his own surroundings,” returned Marian, pursuing her apparent advantage. “We visited him at one of his places, in the country: an old house of the fifteenth century, that kings and queens had slept in, and that had been in his family almost as long as it had been built. You never saw such a place, Helen! There wasn’t much of a park, but there were groups and avenues of beautiful old trees all about, and lawns so fine and close, that it seemed as if they had been woven and laid down there just for our visit; ivy all over the front of the house, and such gardens, with peaches and pears and roses trained along their high walls — just like Tennyson’s poems; and an exquisite keeping about everything that I never could make you understand unless you had been there. But everything was so fit that you felt as if that low English sky was part of the place, and the arrangement of the clouds had been studied for it. There wasn’t a jar or a hitch in anything, and Lord Rainford himself came in such a way that you would have thought he was as much a guest as ourselves.”

  “Yes,” assented Helen; “I suppose they’ve brought the art of all that to perfection.”

  “It isn’t an art with them; it’s nature — second nature. This was only one of his places — the smallest of them, — but there wasn’t the least effect of ownership about him; and it wasn’t from him, you may be sure, that we found out the good he was doing!”

  “No; I could imagine that. He must find a great happiness in it. I’m glad—”

  “Oh, he didn’t seem very happy. Not that he made any parade of melancholy. But you can tell whether such a man is happy or not, without his saying so, or looking so, even.”

  Helen was silent, and Marian made a bold push. “You know what I mean, Helen, perfectly well. He didn’t speak to me about it, but he told Ned everything, and Ned told me; and I don’t believe he’s forgotten you, or ever will.”

  “He had better, then,” said Helen, with a momentary firmness. “He must.”

  “Didn’t you tell him that if you were not engaged—”

  “Oh, did he say that? Then don’t talk to me of his delicacy, Marian! It was shameful to repeat it.”

  “What nonsense! Mightn’t he say it, if he were asking Ned whether he thought you really would have cared for him if you hadn’t been?”

  “Did he ask that?”

  “I don’t know. But if he had, would it have been anything so very strange? Not half so strange as your saying it if you didn’t mean it. Why did you say it, Helen?”

  “You know well enough, Marian. Because I felt sorry for him; because I had to say something. Did Ned — did Mr. Ray encourage him to think that I meant—”

  “Of course he didn’t. He never ventured a word about it. He seems to think, like all the rest of us, except me, that you ‘re a very peculiar kind of porcelain, with none of the flaws of common clay, and I can’t persuade him you’re a girl like other girls.

  But if you come to the common sense of the matter, I don’t see why Lord Rainford shouldn’t have supposed you meant what you said, and that when it was all over—”

  “Marian!”

  “ — Why he shouldn’t have begun to have some hopes again. I’m speaking for your good, Helen, and I’m going to speak plainly. I don’t see why you shouldn’t marry him now! If you have no pity for yourself, if you prefer to go on with the wretched life you’ve planned, I don’
t see why you shouldn’t, have a little compassion for him. You’re spoiling his life as well as your own.”

  Helen had to struggle from under the crushing weight of this charge by an effort that resulted in something like levity. “Oh, I don’t know that it’s spoiling his life. He seemed to care for me as an element of social and political reform, and wanted to marry me because I illustrated a theory. Perhaps, if you told him I didn’t really illustrate it, he would be quite willing to accept the situation!” —

  She left Marian where she was sitting, and the subject — for that day. But the next week Ray went off to town by a train earlier than usual one morning, and Marian went restlessly about the house. The moment she found herself alone with Helen, she began abruptly: “Helen, I won’t have you thinking it’s the same thing, my talking to you the other day about Lord Rainford, as it would be if Robert Fenton had lived.”

  “No,” said Helen, recognising the fact that it had seemed so to her.

  “I wish to talk as if he never had lived.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Yes, I can; for now it is the same, so far as Lord Rainford is concerned. If you said anything to make him believe that it would have been different if you had not been engaged, then you owe him another chance. If you ever did or said anything to encourage him—’

  “Encourage him!”

  “Without knowing it — But you can’t deny that he might have thought you encouraged him deliberately that first day—”

  “No,” said Helen, with a guilty sense that did not suffer her to protest against Marian’s cruelty in going back to that.

  “Then I say you must listen to him. Helen, I’m speaking entirely for your good. I didn’t like him at first, either; but now I know how nice he really is. I do want you to reconsider! You would be happy with him; he would make any woman happy, and he would be simply in heaven with you. And you ‘re adapted to the life you would lead in England. You could be fashionable or unfashionable, just as you liked; and if you wanted to be useful, to do good, and that sort of thing, you’d have every chance in the world. You’d be a great success, Helen, in every way. I do want America to be well represented over there! And don’t you see what a great thing his offering himself to you is? It’s almost unprecedented! I hardly know any other American girl who hasn’t been married for her money in Europe; they’re always married for their money, even by cheap little continental counts and barons; and for an English lord to marry a poor American girl, why, it’s like an American man marrying a woman of rank, and that never was heard of! I want you to look at it on all sides, Helen; and that’s the reason I’m almost perjuring myself in talking to you of it at all. I did promise Ned so solemnly; but if I didn’t speak now, I shouldn’t have another chance before—” She suddenly stopped herself, and Helen, who had been borne down by her tide of words, lifted her head again: “Before what, Marian?”

  “Before he comes!” cried Marian hysterically. “He’s coming here to-day!”

  Helen rose. “Then I must go,” she said quietly. “It would be indelicate, it would be indecent, for me to be here. I wonder, Marian, you could set such a trap for me.”

  Marian forgave the offensive charge to Helen’s excitement. “Trap,” she repeated. “Do you call it a trap, when I might have let him come without saying a word to you? I wanted to do it! And I should have had a perfectly good excuse; for we didn’t know ourselves that he was coming, till this morning. He wrote us from New York, and he started for Boston last night: I didn’t even know he was in the country — indeed I didn’t!” she added, beginning to quail, woman as she was, under the awfulness of the reproach in Helen’s eyes. “We couldn’t tell him not to come! How could we tell him not to come? There wasn’t even time!”

  “Yes,” said Helen brokenly, “I know. I don’t blame you. But you see that I can’t stay.”

  “No, I don’t,” retorted Marian, “I don’t see anything of the kind.”

  “It would be shameful — it would be a trap for him.”

  “He’s a man, and he’ll never dream of such a thing; he’s a gentleman, and he won’t think so!”

  “But I shall,” returned Helen definitively. “It will look as if I had been waiting for him here; as if I wished to see him. It leaves me no freedom; it binds me hand and foot. If he spoke to me again, what could I say? Don’t you see, Marian?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Marian. But she denied with her lips only.

  “No matter; it’s quite time I was back with Margaret. I will get ready, and go up to Boston at once.”

  “Helen! And when he’s crossed the ocean to see you?”

  “If he’s done that, it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t see him. He had no right to come. It was very presumptuous; it was unfeeling.”

  “You encouraged him to believe that if you had not been engaged to Robert Fenton you would have accepted him. What was he to think? Perhaps he felt that, as a gentleman, he was bound to come.” Helen panted breathless. “I must go away,” was all she could say at last. —

  “Oh, very well!” cried Marian. “You see how awkward you make it for us.”

  “I know. I’m very sorry. But I can’t help it. How soon do you expect him?”

  “Ned went up to Boston to meet him. I don’t know which train they’ll be down on,” returned Marian coldly.

  “Then there isn’t a moment to be lost,” said Helen, hurrying to the door. “Will you let Jerry take me to the station?” she asked formally.

  “Oh, certainly,” replied Marian, with equal state. A few minutes later Mrs. Butler came to Helen’s room, her gentle eyes full of sympathetic trouble. “Marian is feeling terribly. Must you go, dear?”

  “Why, yes, Mrs. Butler. Don’t you see that I must?” returned Helen, without desisting from her packing, while Mrs. Butler sank upon a chair near the trunk.

  “Yes, of course; Marian sees it too; if you are fully resolved not to — to give him any hope. But she thought — we all thought — that perhaps — . Helen, dear, I don’t wish to pry into your affairs; I have no right—”

  “Oh, Mrs. Butler!” cried Helen, dropping an armful of clothes chaotically into her trunk, in order that she might give the tears, with which she was bedewing them, free course upon Mrs. Butler’s neck, “you have all the right in the world. Say anything you please to me; ask anything! How should I take it wrong?”

  “There’s nothing I wish to ask, dear. If you’re quite firm — if your mind is entirely made up — there’s nothing to say. I wouldn’t urge you to anything. But we all have such a regard for him that if you should — . It seemed such a fortunate way out of all your struggles and sorrows—”

  “And Robert? Do you ask me to forget him, Mrs. Butler, so soon?”

  “Oh, no, my dear! I should be the last to do that! But wives lose their husbands and husbands their wives, and marry again. They don’t forget their dead; but in this world we can’t live for the dead; we must live for the living. Don’t look at it as if it were forgetting him or betraying him in any way. As long as you live — you must understand that — he can be nothing to you!”

  “Oh, I do understand it,” sobbed the girl. “My heart has ached it all out, long ago, and night and A day I know it. And that’s what makes me wish I were dead too.”

  Mrs. Butler ignored this outburst. “And this young man is so good — and he is so true to you—”

  “Oh, is that the reason I should be untrue to myself?”

  “No, dear, it isn’t any question of that. It’s merely a question of examining yourself about it, of making sure of your own mind when you see him again. The children are all romantic about it because it’s a title, and they like to think of a splendid marriage for you; but if it were only that, I should be very sorry. I’ve seen enough of splendid marriages, and I know what risks American girls take when they marry out of their own country, and their own kind of thinking and living. But this isn’t the same thing, Helen — indeed it isn’t. He likes you becau
se you ‘re American, and because you ‘re poor; and the last thing he thinks of is his title. No, dear. If he were some penniless young American, he couldn’t be any better or simpler. Mr. Butler and I both agreed about that.”

  “Captain Butler!” cried Helen, with the tragedy of Et tu, Brute, in her tones, and the effect of pre-

  — paring to fall with dignity. —

  “Yes. He says he never saw any young man whom he liked better. They formed quite a friendship. He was very sweet and filial with Mr. Butler; and was always making him talk about you!”

  A throe of some kind passed through Helen, and the arm round Mrs. Butler’s neck tightened convulsively.

  “I never approved,” continued the elder lady, “of what people call marrying for a home; but I thought — we all thought — that if, when you saw him again, you felt a little differently about everything, it would be such an easy way out of all your difficulties. We approve — all of us — of your spirit, Helen; we quite understand how you shouldn’t wish to be dependent, and we admire your courage and self-respect, and all that; but we don’t like to see you working so hard — wearing your pretty young life away, wasting your best days in toil and sorrow.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Butler! the sorrow was sent, I don’t know why; but the work was sent to save me. If it were not for that I should have gone mad long ago!”

  “But couldn’t anything else save you, Helen? That’s what we want you to ask yourself. Can’t you let the sunlight come back to you—”

  “No, no!” cried Helen, with hysterical self-pity; “I must dwell in the valley of the shadow of death all my life. There is no escape for me. I’m one of those poor things that I used to wonder at — people always in black, always losing friends, always carrying gloom and discouragement to every one. You must let me go. Let me go back to my work and my poverty. I will never leave it again. Don’t ask me. Indeed, indeed, it can’t be; it mustn’t be! For pity’s sake, don’t speak of it any more!”

  Mrs. Butler rose and pressed the girl to her heart in a motherly embrace. “I won’t, dear,” she said, and went out of the room.