Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Oh, what shall I say?” she asked herself; and then looked up in terror lest she had uttered the words. But she had not. He met her inquiring glance only with a look of sympathy, in which perhaps the hope suggested by her hesitation was beginning to dawn. She appealed to him against himself.

  “I wish you had not come back. You have made a great mistake.”

  His countenance fell again.

  “A mistake?”

  “Yes, you are mistaken in me. I’m not at all what you think me. If I were that, ‘ I shouldn’t be here, now, begging you for mercy. If I were not so foolish, so fickle-minded, that no words can describe me, he would never have left me; he would have been alive and with me. Oh!” she cried, “I can’t let any one else trust me or believe in me for an instant. It isn’t as if I were bereft in any common way; it’s as if I had killed him!”

  Lord Rainford remained so little moved by this assumption of guilt that she added, “Ah, I see you won’t believe me!”

  “No,” he said. “I understood something of that from Ray; and if I hoped only to be your friend — if I knew I was never to see you again — I should still say that you were wrong in blaming yourself now; that you were right then in wishing to make sure of yourself before you married him. It would have been unjust to him to have done less.”

  “Oh, does it seem so to you?” she implored. “That was the way it seemed to me then.”

  “And it ought always to seem so. If you’ve made it my privilege to speak to you of this matter—”

  “Oh, yes, yes!”

  “Then I say that I think what you did in that matter ought to be your greatest consolation now. It may be one of those eccentricities which people have found in my way of thinking, but? can’t feel less reverently towards marriage than that.”

  He had never seemed so noble, so lovable even, as at that moment. Her heart turned toward him in a fervent acceptance of the comfort, the support he offered her; it thanked him and rejoiced in him; but it was heavy again with its former dismay when he said, “I don’t urge you to any decision. Remember I am always yours, whether you refuse me or not.” —

  She perceived then that it was not really a question of her and Robert, but of her and Lord Rainford, and that the decision to which he did not urge her must rest finally with her. If she could have been taken from herself without her own consent, passively, negatively, it would have been another affair.

  She gathered herself together as best she could. “I am acting very weakly, very wrongly. I’ve no excuse but that this is all a surprise to me. I didn’t know you were in this country. I didn’t dream of ever meeting you again till three hours ago, when Mrs. Ray told me you were coming. Then I ran away from her to avoid meeting you. Yes, I had better be frank! It seemed horrible to me that I should meet you in her house; you could never have believed that I hadn’t wished to meet you.”

  “That’s what I should be glad to believe, if I could. But I saw — I agreed with Ray — that it might not be leaving you quite free in every way; and so I was glad to accept his suggestion that I should come here first till something could be arranged — till you could be told.”

  “That was like Mr. Ray,” interrupted Helen.

  “I see how it has all happened; and oh, I’m so sorry it’s happened!”

  The young man turned pale. But he answered courageously, “I’m not. I had to know whether there was any hope for me; I had to know it from you.”

  “Yes,” she assented, moved by his courage.

  “And I should not have gone away without at least making sure that there is none, and that is all I ask you now.”

  “But if I can’t tell you? I must wait — I must think. You must give me time.”

  “Did I seem to be impatient?” he asked with exquisite deference and protest.

  “No. It must have been my own impatience — I don’t know what — and you mustn’t try to see me again — unless—” A deep blush dyed her face.

  She had put some paces between them, with a sort of nervous dread that he might off his hand in parting. She now said abruptly, “Good-bye,” and turned and ran up toward the house, leaving him on the rocks by the sea.

  Mrs. Wilson met her half-way across the lawn. “I was coming to join you,” she began.

  “Lord Rainford is there,” said Helen. “Mrs. Wilson, I find that I must see Mrs Ray again before I go to town. Could you let them drive me across, and then to the station?”

  “Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Wilson in the national terms of acquiescence.

  XX.

  AT first Fenton’s arrival on the island had seemed, like the breaking of the steamer’s shaft, the storm, the shipwreck, the escape to the reef, and the voyage in the open boat, one step in a series in which there was no arrest, and in which there was at least the consolation of movement from point to point But this consolation ceased with his last glimpse of the sail, in which all hope of escape fainted and died; and it did not revisit him when he gathered courage to explore the fairy solitude of the atoll. It was so small as to have been abandoned even by the savages of those seas, who forsake their overpeopled islands, and wander from reef to reef in search of other homes, and it would never be visited from the world to which he had belonged. The whalers that sometimes stop for water at the coral islands would not touch at this little point of land, lifted, like a flower among its thorns, above those perilous rocks. It had probably never been laid down on any chart; in a century which had explored every part of the globe, it must be a spot unknown to civilised men. The soil showed like snow through the vegetation that thinly covered it, and the perpetual green on white repeated itself in the trailing vines that overran the coral blocks, with narrow spaces of sea between, which Fenton leaped, in his round of the island, to find himself again and again on the white soil of the groves, through which the palm struck its roots, and anchored itself fast to the reef. At the highest point the land rose fifteen feet above the sea; at the widest place it measured a hundred yards; and if he had fetched a compass of the whole, he would have walked less than two miles. They should not starve; the palms would yield them abundant fruit through the unvarying year; the sea, he knew, was full of fish. As he emerged from the grove at the point at which he had started, Giffen called out to him, “What’s that on the tree right by your shoulder?” Fenton looked round, and the bright blossom near him turned into a bird. He put out his hand; it did not move; and when he lifted it from its perch, it rested fearlessly on his palm. He flung it from him with a sickening sensation, and Giffen came running towards him.

  “Hallo! what’s the matter?” demanded Fenton. “I thought mebbe it was poison!”

  “There’s nothing to kill us here,” Fenton replied. “Come, we must begin to live.”

  The sailors had left behind the remnant of the bag of flour, and the peas and beans. Giffen had carried them up to the hut, and one day Fenton found that he had made a garden and planted it with them. They came up quickly, and then, as if the soil lacked vitality, they withered away, all but a vine sprung from a seed that Giffen found among the peas.

  He tenderly cherished this vine, which he hoped would prove a musk-melon, or at least a cucumber; in due time it turned out a gourd. “My luck,” he said, and gathered his gourds, for drinking-cups.

  In the maze which had deepened upon Fenton, the whole situation had an unreality, as of something read long ago, and half-forgotten, and now slowly recalled, point by point; and there were moments of the illusion in which it was not he who was imprisoned there on that unknown island, but the hero of adventures whom he had envied and admired in boyhood, or known in some romance of later life. The gun and the cartridges which they treasured so carefully after they found traces of a former savage habitation; the tools which they had brought from the wreck, and which they used in shaping the timbers for their hut; the palm-leaves they plucked for its thatch; the nuts they gathered for their food and drink; the fishing-lines they twisted from the fibre of the cocoa-bark; the hooks
they carved from the bones of the birds they ate, and the traps they set for game when the wild things once so tame began to grow wary; their miserable economies of clothing; the rude arts by which they fashioned plates from shells, and cooking utensils from the clay they found in sinking their well; the vats they made to evaporate the sea-water for its salt: all these things seemed the well-worn properties and stock experiences of the castaways of fiction; he himself the figment of some romancer’s brain, with which the author was toying for the purposes of his plot, to be duly rescued and restored to the world when it should serve the exigency of the tale. Once when this notion was whimsically repeating itself to Fenton in the silence and solitude, it brought a smile to his haggard face, and when Giffen asked him what the matter was, he told him.

  “No,” said Giffen, “it ain’t much like us.”

  That two modern men should be lost out of a world so knit together with telegraphs and railroads and steamships, that it seemed as if a whisper at any point must be audible at all others, was too grotesque a fact, too improbable for acceptance. It was not like them, and it was not like any one he could think of, and when he tried to imagine some contemporary and acquaintance in his case, it became even more impossible than when he supposed it of himself.

  There were ironical moods in which he amused himself with the carefully ascertained science of the story-tellers as he recalled it, and in which he had a fantastic interest in noting how near and yet how far from the truth their study came. But there were other times when the dreary sense of the hackneyed character of the situation overpowered him, and he dropped his work and lay with his face in the sand, helpless and hopeless for hours, sick of the repetition of such stale inventions. There was no greater reality in it all, when he recalled the narratives of men actually cast away on desert islands, though there were moments when the sum of what they had suffered seemed to accumulate itself upon his soul, and his heart and hand were heavy with their sorrows.

  Yet in spite of all, the simple and wholesome conditions of his life were restoring him to physical health, which reacted upon his mind at last; and one morning he woke with a formless, joyful expectation that was like a hope. It was merely the habit of hope, reviving from a worn-out despair, but he sprang to his feet with a buoyancy of soul that he had not known since the storm first began to close round the Meteor.

  Hitherto, the thought of Helen had been fruitless torment, which he banished when he could, but now, all at once, he found it an inspiration and an incentive; he thought of her gladly; she seemed to call him.

  He left Giffen to kindle the fire for their breakfast, and ran down to the lagoon for a morning bath. The sun shone on a long black object that stretched across the main channel from the sea, and swimming out to it, he found it the trunk of a tree which had drifted to their island. With Giffen’s help he got it inside of the reef, and floated it to their beach, and he could not rest till they had dragged it up out of the water. It was a message from the world they had lost, and the promise of rescue and return to it. At the bottom of his heart he knew that it might have drifted a thousand miles before it reached them, but it was as easy to believe that it came from land within a day’s sail; it was of a timber unknown to the atolls; the pebbles that it held in the network of its roots were from shores where there were hills and rivers, from peopled shores that they might reach if they had any craft in which they could venture to sea.

  Giffen walked up and down beside the log, and examined it critically, stooping aside, and glancing at it as if to make sure of its soundness in every part.

  “Well?” demanded Fenton.

  “Chop it along the top, and shape it up at the ends, and dig it out; and maybe we can fix some sort of outrigger to it, like they use on their canoes around here. I’ve seen pictures of ‘em.”

  He made the suggestion with melancholy diffidence; but Fenton caught at it eagerly. The wood was very hard, and it cost them weeks of labour, with the tools they had, before they were ready to launch their canoe upon the lagoon. But even in those placid waters, it proved hopelessly unseaworthy. Some fatal defect of construction, which their skill could not remedy, disabled it, and it capsized with Giffen, who was caught in the outrigger, and with difficulty saved from drowning by Fenton.

  “Well, sir,” he said, as he walked dripping to their hut, “we’ve got a lot of good firewood in that thing. I believe if you hadn’t had me around, you could have made it go.”

  But the idea of escape had taken full possession of Fenton’s mind, and the failure of the canoe turned it all upon another scheme which had begun to haunt it. They had kept a fire burning night and day ever since they had landed on the island, to attract the notice of any ship that came in sight; but now Fenton determined to build a tower on the highest point, and light a beacon on it, so that no lookout on those seas could fail of the smoke by day or the flame by night.

  “All right,” assented Giffen, “it will kind of occupy our minds any way.”

  “Don’t say that!” cried Fenton, with a pang. “Well, I won’t,” returned Giffen penitently.

  The tower was to be not only a beacon for friendly sail, but a refuge from wandering savages who caught sight of it. They must make it the centre of defences to which they could resort if they were attacked, and which they could hold against any such force as would probably land on their atoll.

  Fenton drew a plan, and by nightfall they had dug the foundations of their fortress. They burnt some of the coral blocks, which they brought from the reef, for lime, and laid their walls strongly in mortar.

  The days passed, and as they toiled together, Fenton had at last the heart to talk to his fellow-castaway of the world to which they were preparing to return.

  He found that to speak of his affairs in that world made it not only credible again, but brought it very near.

  He told Giffen that he was going to be married as soon as he got back to Boston, and that he was going to leave the navy, and try to get into some sort of business ashore. He described Helen to his comrade, and what she wore when he saw her last; and then he added, that she must be in black now, for she had lost her father, who died very suddenly a few days after he sailed.

  “I behaved badly,” he added, with the feeling that always struggled for utterance when he thought of this, and which it was a relief to speak out now. “We had a misunderstanding, and I came off without saying good-bye to him.”

  “That was pretty rough,” said Giffen. “But you can make it all right when you get back.”

  “Oh, it’s all right now — with her,” rejoined Fenton quickly.

  “And with him too, I reckon,” suggested his comrade.

  “Yes, it must be,” sighed Fenton. If the situation was in anywise incomprehensible to Giffen, he did not try to explore it. He remained deferentially content with what Fenton had volunteered, and he was sympathetically patient when Fenton tried to make him understand where Mr. Harkness’s house was, by a plan of the Common, which he drew on a smooth surface of the plastered wall, with Park Street running up one side, and Beacon Street along the other, and Beacon Steps ascending from it into the quiet Place, where the house stood. He made a plot of the house, up-stairs and down, with the different rooms marked off: Helen’s room at the front, Mr. Harkness’s room; the room that he used to have when he came home from school; the parlours, and the library. He lingered fondly on the details; and then he mapped the whole town for Giffen, accurately placing the principal streets and squares and public buildings. He marked the lines of railroad running out of the city, and the different depots. “This,” he said, placing the Albany Station, “is where you would have to start for Kankakee. It’s a little south of Chicago, isn’t it? — on one of the lines from Chicago to St. Louis? There’s a Kankakee line, isn’t there?” He laughed for joy in the assent which seemed to confirm the existence of the places; the sound of the names alone re-established them. At times he stealthily glanced from this work at the rim of the sea, where, as he had been silen
tly making-believe while he talked, there must be a sail. But he bore the inevitable disappointment patiently, and returned enthusiastically to his map; he projected another map in sections, on a larger scale, where the details could be more fully given.

  Giffen did not speak much of his own life; it was nothing worth speaking of, he said; but sometimes at night he would drop a hint or scrap of his history from which Fenton could infer what remained unspoken. It was the career of a feeble nature, constantly pushed to the wall in the struggle of a new country. All his life, Giffen had failed; he had always had bad crops, bad partners, bad luck, hard times; if he went away from home to better his condition, he made it worse; when he came back he found that he would have done better to stay away. He bought on a rising market, and sold with the first fall in prices. When a crash came, it found him extended; the return of prosperity overtook him without money or credit. He had tried all sorts of things with equal disaster: he had farmed, he had kept store, he had run a sawmill, he had been a book-agent, and agent for many patent rights. In any other country he would have remained quietly in some condition of humble dependence; but the unrest of the new world had infected him; he had spent his life in vain experiments, and his last venture had been the most ruinous of all. He had sold everything to get the means of going to China, and when the common calamity, that could scarcely be said to have blasted any hopes of his, overtook him, he was coming home little better than a beggar.