Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Helen heard her encounter some one who had just come up the stairs, at the head of which a briefly-murmured colloquy took place, and she heard in Jessie Butler’s penetrating whisper: “Will she stay? Will she accept him? Is she going to be Lady Rainford? Oh, I hope—”

  “Hush, Jessie!” came in Mrs. Butler’s whisper, and then there was a scurry of feet along the matting, and a confusion of suppressed gaiety, as if the girls were running off to talk it over among themselves.

  Helen would not make allowance for the innocent romance it was to them. She saw it only as a family conspiracy that the Butlers ought all to have been ashamed of, and she began again to pack her trunk with a degree of hauteur which, perhaps, never before attended such a task. Her head was in a whirl, but she worked furiously for a half-hour, when she found herself faint, and was forced to lie down. She would have liked to ring and ask for a biscuit and a glass of wine; but she would not, she could not consent to add the slightest thing to that burden of obligation towards the Butlers which she now found so odious, and on which they had so obviously counted, to control her action and force her will.

  She lay on the bed, growing more and more bitter against them, and quite helpless to rise. She heard a carriage grate up to the door on the gravel outside, and she flung a shawl over her head to shut out the voices of Ray and Lord Rainford; she felt that if she heard them she must shriek; and she cried to herself that she was trapped, trapped, trapped!

  Some one knocked lightly at her door, and Marian entered in answer to a reckless invitation from the pillow. It seemed an intolerable piece of effrontery, and Helen wondered that Marian was able to put on that air of cold indifference in proposing to ask her to come down and meet Lord Rainford before he had been in the house ten minutes.

  “Helen,” said Marian, in a stiff tone of offence, “Mrs. Wilson is here, and wants you to come over and take lunch with her. I couldn’t do less than promise to give you her message. Shall I say that you ‘re lying down with a headache?”

  “Oh, not at all, Marian,” said Helen; “there’s nothing the matter with me. I’m perfectly well Please tell Mrs. Wilson that I shall be very glad to come, and that I’ll be down directly.”

  She was already twisting up her hair before the glass with a vigour of which she could not have believed herself capable. But the idea of flight, of escape, inspired her; in that moment she could have fought her way through overwhelming odds of Butlers; her lax nerves were turned to steel.

  “Marian,” she said, “I will ask Mrs. Wilson to drive me to the station this afternoon, and I’ll be very glad if you can send my trunk there.”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Marian.

  “I know I’m making it horrid for you,” added Helen, beginning to relent a little, now that she felt herself safe, “but I can’t help it. I must go, and I must go at once. But Mrs. Wilson is such a kind old thing, and she’s asked me so often, and I can easily make her understand that I must come now or not at all, and if she knows that you ‘re expecting other people your letting me go to her for lunch the last day won’t seem strange.”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Marian, with a slight laugh, whose hollowness was lost upon Helen.

  Mrs. Butler said she was to come and visit them as soon as they got back to town; she kissed her as lovingly as ever, and the Captain was affectionately acquiescent; but the young girls were mystified, and Marian was cold. Helen tried to make it up to her by redoubled warmth in parting; but this was not to be done, and as soon as she was out of the house she began to feel how ungracious she had been to Marian, who had certainly done everything she could, and had behaved very honourably and candidly. In the undercurrent of reverie which ran along evenly with Mrs. Wilson’s chat, she atoned to Marian with fond excuses and explanations, and presently she found herself looking at the affair from the Butlers’ point of view. It did not then appear so monstrous; she relented so far as to imagine herself, for their sake and for Lord Rainford’s, consenting to what seemed so right and fit to them. She saw herself, in pensively luxurious y fancy, the lady of all that splendid circumstance at which Marian had hinted, moving vaguely on through years of gentle beneficence and usefulness, chivalrously attended in her inalienable sadness by her husband’s patient and forbearing devotion; giving him, as she could from a heart never his, and now broken, respect and honour that might warm before her early death to something like tenderness. It was a picture that had often been painted in romance, and satisfied her present mood as well as if its false drawing and impossible colour were true to any human life that had ever been or could be.

  By the time she reached Mrs. Wilson’s cottage Ray drove up to the Butlers’, and met the surmise of his wife and sisters-in-law with monosyllabic evasion till he could be alone with Marian. “I didn’t bring him,” he explained then, “because the more I thought of it the less I liked our seeming to trap Helen into meeting him.”

  “Oh, indeed!” said Marian. “That was her own word!”

  “Then you told her? I might have expected that. Well, it was quite right. What did she say?”

  “Everything unpleasant that she very well could. You would have thought that really we had taken the most unfair advantage of her, and had placed her where she couldn’t say no, if she wished.”

  “I could see how it might look that way to her,” said Ray, “and that’s what I was afraid of. It was extremely awkward, every way. We couldn’t very well tell him not to come, and we couldn’t very well tell her to go; the only thing I was clear of was that we must tell her he was coming, and let her decide upon her own course.”

  “That’s what I did, and she decided very quickly — she’s gone.”

  Ray looked worried. “It’s tantamount to turning her out of doors, I suppose, and yet I don’t know what else we could have done. Well! I might as well have brought him straight here, and saved myself all the diplomacy of getting old Wilson to take him home for the night.”

  Marian did not for the present ask what was the diplomacy which Ray had used. “Mr. Wilson!” she shrieked. “You got Mr. Wilson to take him home for the night?”

  “Yes,” returned her husband quietly. “What is so very remarkable about my getting Wilson to do it?”

  She did not answer, but burst from her door with a cry for Mrs. Butler that brought all her sisters also. “Mother, Lord Rainford has gone home with Mr. Wilson?”

  Mrs. Butler was dumb with sensation that silenced all her daughters but Jessie. This young lady, not hitherto noted in the family for her piety, recognised a divine intention in the accident: “I call it a special Providence!” she exclaimed ecstatically.

  “What is it all about?” inquired Ray.

  “Oh, nothing,” replied his wife. “Nothing at all! Merely that Helen was in such haste to get away that she accepted an invitation to lunch with Mrs. Wilson, and has just driven over there with her. I suppose she’ll accuse us of having plotted with the Wilsons to ‘ trap’ her, as she calls it.”

  “Marian!” said Mrs. Butler, with grave reproach. “I don’t care, mother!” retorted Marian, with tears of vexation in her eyes. “Can’t you see that she’ll accept him over there, and that I shall be cheated out of having brought them together, when I had set my heart on it so much? I didn’t suppose Helen Harkness could be such a goose, after all she’s been through!”

  “My dear,” said her mother, “I don’t wish you to speak so of Helen; and as for her accepting him — Children,” she broke off to the younger girls, “run away!” and they obeyed as if they had really been children. “Edward,” she resumed, “how in the world did you contrive with Lord Rainford?”

  “Well, Mrs. Butler,” said Ray, “with men, there was only one way. He had told me so much, you know, that I could take certain things for granted, and I made a clean breast of it at last, on the way home. I told him she was here, and that I thought it wasn’t quite fair bringing him into the house without giving her some chance to protest — or escape.”

  “It
was terrible,” said Mrs. Butler, “but I see that you had to do it. Go on.”

  “And he quite agreed with me, that it wouldn’t be fair to either of them. I don’t know that I should have spoken if I had not seen old Wilson in the car. I asked him if he wouldn’t give Rainford a bed for the night; and he was only too glad. That’s all. I told him he could walk over here this evening, and meet her on equal terms.”

  “That won’t be necessary now,” said Marian bitterly. “I congratulate you on the success of your diplomacy, Ned!”

  “Perhaps it is providential, as Jessie says,” murmured Mrs. Butler.

  “Oh, very providential!” cried Marian. “It’s as if it had all been arranged by the providence of the theatre. I hate it! Instead of taking place romantically and prettily, among her old friends, she’s obliged it to take place fancically, by a vulgar accident, where there can be nothing pleasant about it.”

  “Why, Marian,” said her mother. “Do you think she will accept him?”

  “Accept him? Of course she will! She is dying to do it — I could see that all the time — and I could hardly have patience with her for not seeing it herself. She’s old enough.”

  “Well, never mind about that,” said Ray, authoritatively. “We have done what we all saw to be right, and we must let the consequences take care of themselves.”

  “Oh, it’s very easy to say that,” cried Marian. “But, for my part, I’m sorry I did right.”

  “Well, your doing wrong in this case wouldn’t have helped. My doing right alone was enough to put everything at sixes and sevens.”

  XIX.

  A SERIES of trivial chances brought Helen and Lord Rainford together alone, before she could get away from the Wilsons’ after lunch. The first train for town did not start till three, and it was impossible that she should shut herself up in her room and avoid him until that time. In fact she found that there was nothing in his mere presence that forced her to any such defensive measure, while there was much in the fatal character of the situation, as there is in every inevitable contingency, to calm if not to console her; and the sense of security that came from meeting him by accident, where she was perfectly free to say no, and could not seem by the remotest possible implication to have invited an advance from him, disposed her in his favour. They met certainly with open surprise, but their surprise was not apparently greater than that of the Wilsons in bringing their guests together; and when Mr. Wilson explained that he owed the pleasure of Lord Rainford’s company for the night to a domestic exigency at the Butlers’, Helen divined that Ray’s thoughtfulness had given her this chance of escape, and wondered if Lord Rainford was privy to it. But he was listening with his head down to Mrs.

  Wilsons explanation of the chance that had given them the pleasure of Miss Harkness’s company; she wondered if he were wondering whether she knew that he was coming and had fled on that account; but it was impossible to guess from anything he said or looked, and she began to believe that Ray had not told him she was with them. With impartial curiosity she took note of the fact that his full-grown beard had unquestionably improved his chin; it appeared almost as if something had been done for his shoulders; certainly his neck was not so long; or else she had become used to these traits, and they did not affect her so much as formerly. More than once during the lunch she thought him handsome; it was when his face lighted up in saying something pleasant about seeing America again. He pretended that even twenty-four hours of American air had made another man of him. Mr. Wilson said that he did not know that there had been any American air for a week, and Lord Rainford said that he did not mind the heat; he believed he rather liked it.

  “But you certainly haven’t got it to complain of here,” he added. —

  “Oh, no, it’s always cool on the North Shore,” Mrs. Wilson explained. “We shall not let you go home this afternoon, Miss Harkness,” she turned to say to Helen; “you would certainly perish in Cambridge.”

  “Port,” added Helen, with inflexible conscience; she never permitted herself or any one else the flattering pretence that she lived in Old Cambridge. “You must,” she continued quietly. “I’ve made all my preparations.” This fact was final with a woman, and Mrs. Wilson could only make a murmur of distress, and beg her at least to go by a later train, but Helen was firm also about the train; she said her trunk would be at the station, and she must go then. If she had her formless intention that this should be discouraging to Lord Rainford, she could see no such effect in him; he remained unmoved, and she began to question whether at sight of her he might not have lost whatever illusion he had cherished concerning her. She said to herself that she knew she had changed, that she had grown older and thinner, and plainer every way. If this were so, it was best; she hoped — with a pang — that it was so. She ought to have thought of it before; it might have saved her from giving Marian pain. Of course he had entirely ceased to care for her.

  After lunch Mr. Wilson betrayed signs of heaviness, which obliged his wife to the confession that nothing could keep Mr. Wilson awake after lunch. She sent him away for his nap, and she was going to lead her guests down over the lawn for a look at the sea from the rocks by the shore, when a servant came with some inexorable demand upon her.

  “You know the way, Miss Harkness,” she said.

  “Take Lord Rainford down there, and I will be with you in a moment.”

  She hurried away with the maid, and Helen descended the piazza steps and sauntered past the beds of foliage-plants across the grass with her charge. He did not leave her in a moment’s doubt of his mind or purpose after they were beyond hearing.

  “Do you know why I have come back?” he asked abruptly, and striving to catch the eyes she averted.

  “How should I—” she began, but he spared her the sin of even an insinuated ignorance.

  “I came back for you,” he said with a straightforward sincerity that shamed her out of all evasion.

  “Then I am sorry for that,” she replied frankly, “for you had better have forgotten me.”

  “That wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have forgotten you when I knew you were not free; how could I forget you now? For the last year my life has been a count of days, hours, minutes. If I have come too soon, tell me, and I will go away till you let me come again. I can wait!”

  He spoke with the strength but not the vehemence of his passion, and she stayed her fluttered nerves against his quiet. If it were to be reasonably talked over, and dismissed like any other impossibility, it would be very simple; she liked him for making it so easy; she felt humbly grateful to him; she imagined that she could reconcile him to his fate.

  “You must forgive me,” he added, “if what I say is painful. I will spend my life in atoning for it.”

  “There is nothing to forgive on my part. If you can have patience with me.”

  “Patience?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean what you think!”

  “I hope I haven’t seemed impatient. I couldn’t excuse myself if I had. No one could have respected, revered your bereavement more than I; and if I thought that I had sinned against it in coming now—”

  “No — no—”

  “It seemed to me that I had a kind of warrant — permission — in something you said — something, nothing — that took away all hope and then became my hope—” —

  “Oh,” she trembled, “what did I say?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “if you remember nothing.

  I abide by what you say now.”

  She was thrilled with an aesthetic delight in his forbearance, and with a generous longing to recognise it. “I know what you mean, and I blame myself more than any words can say for letting you suppose — It was my culpable weakness — I only meant to save you — to spare you all I could!” A dismay came into his face that she could not endure to see. “Oh, don’t look so! Did you — did you really come back on account of that?”

  “I misunderstood you — I see. Not perhaps at first; but afterwards. I came back beca
use I thought you told me that if you had been free you might have answered me differently then.”

  “Yes, that’s what the words said; but not what they meant!” She silently grieved for him, walking a little apart, and not daring to lift her eyes to his face. He would not speak, and she had perforce to go on. “Why did you ever care for me?” she implored at last, rushing desperately at the question, as if there might be escape on that side.

  “Why?” he echoed.

  “Surely, the first time we met — what was there to make you even endure me?”

  “Endure?” He seemed to reflect. “I don’t think you were to blame. But it never was a question of that. You — you were my fancy. I can’t tell you better than that. And you have always been so. It isn’t for what you did; it isn’t for what you said.”

  It seemed hopeless. They walked on, and they only ceased from walking because they had reached the brink of the rocks beyond which lay the sea.

  She stood there looking on its glassy levels, which shivered against the rocks at her feet in impulses that were like her own feeble and broken purposes. In a certain way life was past with her; there could be no more of what had been, no longer the romantic tenderness, the heroic vision of love; but there could be honour, faith, affection. The sense of this passed vaguely through her heart, and exhaled at her lips in a long, hopeless sigh.

  At the light sound he spoke again. “But I didn’t come back to make good any claim upon you. I came to see you again because I must, and because it seemed as if I had the privilege of speaking once more to you. But perhaps I haven’t.”

  “Oh, certainly, you have that!” she weakly assented.

  “I don’t urge you to anything. I only tell you again that I love you, and that I believe I always shall. But I don’t ask your answer now or at any given time. I can wait your will, and I can abide by it then, whatever your answer is.”

  A heavy weight was on her tongue, which hindered her from making her answer “No.” A ship lagging by in the offing as if it panted with full sails for every breath of the light breeze, the whole spectacle of the sea, intimated a reproach, poignant as fleeting and intangible. She felt herself drifting beyond her own control, and any keeping would be better than none; she longed for rest, for shelter; she no longer cared for escape. There was no reason why she should refuse the love offered her. She could not doubt its truth; its constancy even charmed her a little; she was a little in love, — pensively, reluctantly, — with a love for herself so steadfast, so patient, so magnanimous. The sense of her own insufficiency to herself, the conviction that after all, and at the very most, she was a half success only even in the sordid and humiliating endeavour which was the alternative, unnerved her.