Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Then one of them called out to the strange figure, with matted hair, and long beard, and haggard eyes, that had stopped as if with the impulse to turn and fly,— “Hallo!’

  A shudder went through Fenton as he stayed himself, and faced the men again. He could not speak, but the men waited. At last, “For God’s sake,” he gasped, “are you something in a dream?”

  “No,” replied the leader with slow gentleness, as if giving the idea consideration. “We ‘re a boat’s crew from the whale-ship Martha Brigham of New Bedford, come ashore to see what that smoke means. Who are you?”

  XXI.

  “I WISH to speak with you, Marian — instantly!” cried Helen, re-appearing at the Butlers’. Marian was alone in her room; Mrs. Butler was lying down, and the younger sisters were on the rocks by the sea, looking across the cove to the rocks on the Wilson place, as if they might hope to rend from them the secret of what had happened when Helen and Lord Rainford met in the Wilson cottage. With the inhumanity of their youth and inexperience they thought it very funny, and they had come away where they could enjoy this sense of it, apart from those to whom it seemed a serious affair.

  It had become so serious to Marian that she quaked in rising to meet Helen, as if she had been rising to meet Helen’s ghost, and she no more thought of asking her to sit down than of offering a chair to an apparition.

  “I didn’t know he was to be there, Helen, indeed I didn’t,” she made out to say, after the moment in which she had remained fascinated by the intensity of the girl’s face.

  “Oh, it’s long past, that!” cried Helen. “What I wish you to tell me is simply this, Marian Ray: Is your husband part of your whole life, and was he from the very first instant?”

  “From the very first instant?”

  “That you were married — so that you couldn’t think, couldn’t consider — whether you cared for him — loved him?”

  “Of course! It was all settled long before. Did—”

  “I knew it! And if it isn’t settled before, it’s no time afterwards?”

  “What an idea! What do you mean, Helen?”

  “And it’s all false about girls that marry a man because they respect and honour him, and then have a romantic time finding out that they love him?”

  “What nonsense! It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world! But—”

  “I was sure of it! If there’s anything sacred about marrying, it’s the love that makes it so; and they might as well marry for money or position!” She hid her face in her hands, and then burst out again: “But I will never have such a hideous thing on my conscience — such a ghastly wrong to him! He said himself that if I wasn’t sure that I cared for Robert, it would have been unjust to marry him; and now how is it better with him? It’s worse! He said it to comfort me, and it seems monstrous to turn his words against him; but if the truth kills him he had better die! Yes, a thousand times! And don’t suppose I didn’t see all the advantages of accepting him that you did; and that I wasn’t tempted to persuade myself that I should care for him. I only blush and burn to think that I saw them, and that I’ve come away, even now, without crushing every spark of hope out of him! I do respect and honour him — yes, he is high-minded and good every way; but if I don’t love him, his being so good is all the more reason why I shouldn’t marry him. Hush! Don’t say a word, Marian!” she cried, hastening to spoil her point, as women will, with hysterical insistence. “That dreadful old man who bought our house came, while you were gone, and offered himself to me one day: it makes me creep! How would it be any better to marry Lord Rainford, if I didn’t love him, than to marry Mr. Everton?”

  She did not wait for the indignant protest that was struggling through Marian’s bewilderment at this extraordinary revelation and assumption. “I shall always say that you meant the kindest and best; but if you try to argue with me now, I shall never forgive you! Good-bye, dear!” She flew at her friend, and catching her round the neck, convulsively kissed her, and ran out of the house, without seeing any one else. “To the station,” she gasped, climbing into the Wilson phaeton. “And, do hurry, please!”

  Mrs. Butler came into Marian’s room as soon as Helen had driven away. “Well?” she said.

  “Oh, she’s refused him, — or just the same thing! How shall we meet him? What shall we do?”

  “I’m not concerned about that. What will she do, poor thing? That’s what wrings my heart. She has thrown away the greatest chance that a girl ever did: wealth, position, devoted goodness, the truest and noblest heart! — Marian!” cried Mrs. Butler, abandoning herself for a moment to her compassionate impatience, “why did she do it?”

  “She said she didn’t love him,” answered Marian shortly, with a cast of contempt in the shortness.

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Butler, with resignation. She had found, as every woman must, who lives to her age, that life has so many great interests besides love, that for the time she was confused as to the justice of its paramount claim in a question of marriage.

  In fact, Helen found her champions in two men. When Mrs. Butler stated the case to the Captain, he promptly approved of Helen’s decision.

  Mrs. Butler stood surprised. “Why, do you think that people ought to marry from a fancy?” she asked.

  “I hope my girls will never marry without it,” said the Captain.

  Marion reported the result to Ray, with a vexation at Helen’s ridiculous behaviour, which he allowed her to vent freely before he answered her a word, chewing the end of his cigarette, as they walked to the house together from the beach, where she found him pulling his dory up on the sand. “It’s not only that she’s thrown away such a splendid chance, but she’s thrown it away for the mere memory of a man who couldn’t compare with Lord Rainford in any way — even if he were alive. And when Robert Fenton was alive, she wasn’t certain, till it was too late, that she cared for him; and kept him waiting for years and years, till she could make up her mind, and had to quarrel with him then before she was sure of it. And now for her to pretend that she never can care for any one else, and that she can’t marry Lord Rainford because she doesn’t love him — as if she were a girl of seventeen, instead of twenty-five! Oh! I’ve no patience with her!”

  Ray said nothing for a moment. Then, “There’s some difference between not being sure you do, and being sure you don’t,” he remarked quietly, “and the difference doesn’t seem to be in Rainford’s favour.” After a moment, he asked, without looking at her, “What did you marry me for?”

  “What nonsense! You know!”

  “Yes, I always thought it was for love. How would you like to have me think it wasn’t?”

  “Don’t be absurd!” cried his wife. But his words went deep, and at the bottom of her heart she felt in them a promise of the perpetual reconsecration of their marriage.

  A story was at one time current (and still has its adherents among those who knew vaguely something of Helen’s romance) to the effect that Fenton returned at a moment when his presence seemed a miracle opportunely wrought to save her from further struggle, and to reward her for all her suffering and self-sacrifice in the past. It fixed with much accuracy of date and circumstance the details of their dramatic meeting at the little house in the Port, where she found him waiting for her one hot, dusty afternoon in the summer, when she came back, broken in health and spirit, from a visit with some friends at the sea-side. If the story had been true, it would have brought them together the very day Helen refused Lord Rainford.

  But, as a matter of fact, she went back to her work of making bonnets for cooks and second-girls in Margaret’s cottage on Limekiln Avenue, under conditions that would have caused an intelligent witness of it to wonder whether she were not expiating an error rather than enjoying the recompense of devotion to a high ideal. The rewards of principle are often scarcely distinguishable from penalties, and the spectator is confounded between question of the martyrs wisdom and a dark doubt of the value of living out any real conviction in a wo
rld so badly constituted as this. Helen, however, was harassed by neither of these misgivings. She never regretted her refusal of Lord Rainford, except for the pain it inflicted; she never blamed herself for anything but the hesitation in which she was tempted to accept him without loving him. Her sense of self-approval grew only the stronger and clearer with the trials which gathered upon her in what might have seemed to others a sort of malign derision. Her custom fell off, and the patrons who remained to her grew inevitably more and more into an odious mastery; their exactions increased as her health failed, and she could not always keep her promises to them; they complained that other people’s bonnets were better made, and “more in the style.”

  One night she overheard through the thin partition that separated her chamber from Margaret’s a tipsy threat from Margaret’s husband that he was going to be master in his own house; and that he was going to turn that girl and her bonnets into the street. He went off to his work in the morning, sullen and lowering, and she and Margaret could not look at each other. She fled to Boston for the day, which she passed in incoherent terror at Clara Kingsbury’s; when she turned from this misery the next morning and ventured back to Margarets, an explosion at the glass-works, so opportune that it seemed to her for a black instant as if she were guilty of the calamity through which she escaped, had freed her from all she had to dread from Margaret’s husband.

  But quite the same end of her experiment had come. Margaret could not live upon the little sum that Helen paid her for board; in spite of her impassioned devotion to her darling, and her good intention (witnessed again and again to all the saints), she was forced to break up her little establishment and find a servant’s place; and Helen did not know where else to go.

  In her extremity she appealed, of course, neither to the Butlers nor to Clara Kingsbury, but to Cornelia Root, and this proved to be the most fortunate as well as the most natural course. Zenas Pearson had just moved his photographic establishment up from Hanover Street to the fashionable quarter of the town, and had applied to Cornelia for some pretty-appearing, respectable girl, to stay in the front room and receive people, and show them the different styles of photographs, and help them to decide in what shape and size they would be taken. There was nothing mean about Zenas Pearson, and he was willing, he told Cornelia, to pay the right girl ten dollars a week as a start-off, and to put it up to twelve within the year if she behaved herself, and showed any sconce for the business.

  Cornelia trembled with excitement and eagerness in laying the proposition before a person so perfectly adapted to the place in every respect as Helen, and they did not lose an instant in going to Zenas and closing with him. Did she want to come right off? he asked Helen, and at a little hesitation on her part he looked more closely at her worn face and said, “Well, take a week to recuperate, and come the 20th. I don’t know as I’ll be ready for you much before that time any way.”

  She spent the week with the Butlers, who were now too well used to her eccentricity to attempt any protest against this new phase of it. They had all reconciled themselves to her refusal of Lord Rainford; even Marian Ray had accepted the inevitable, and she and Helen had a long quiet talk about the matter, in which they fully made up what had almost been a quarrel between them about it, and Marian told her the latest news of him, and how splendidly he had behaved about her, justifying and applauding her with a manly self-abnegation which permitted no question of her conduct throughout.

  “Yes, he is very generous,” said Helen, with a sigh; and something happened that day which made her feel that the word was hardly adequate. She had gone with Marian, who wished to give some instructions about a picture she was having framed, to the shop where Helen had her memorable meeting with Lord Rainford; and when the business was finished the proprietor said with a certain hesitation: “ Miss Harkness, you remember being in our place about a year ago with an English gentleman who was looking at some imitation limoges in the window?”

  Helen looked an amazed and perhaps alarmed, assent.

  “He came back and bought them after you went away, and said he would send his address; but we’ve never heard of him from that day to this, and we don’t want his jars and his money. I thought perhaps you could tell me who he was.”

  “Yes,” said Helen, “it was Lord Rainford. But he’s in England now.”

  “Oh!” said the proprietor. And as she said nothing more, he presently bowed himself apologetically away.

  “Why didn’t you let me give his address?” asked Marian, who had been checked in a wish to do so by a glance from Helen.

  “I don’t believe he ever intended to take them away; he thought they were hideous,” Helen answered. She added presently, “He must have gone back to buy them because I said that the poor wretch who painted them was to be pitied!” Marian had now been at home more than six months, and her Anglo-mania had in some degree abated. She no longer expected to establish an hereditary aristocracy and a State Church among us, whatever she secretly wished to do. She Had grown resigned to the anomalies of our civilisation in some degree. She had rediscovered certain traits of it that compared favourably even with those of England; but she cherished a conviction that an English noble was the finest gentleman in the world; that her own husband was still finer was a mystery of faith, easily tenable, though not susceptible of exegesis.

  She now preserved the silence of one whose point has been sufficiently made for her, and left Helen to recognise it. Helen was not reluctant to do so.

  “Yes, Marian,” she said fervently, “considering what had just happened, that was very magnanimous in him. It was exquisite!”

  “Oh, it was merely what he owed to himself as a gentleman,” said Marian, with well-concealed triumph.

  It seemed to be a day of trial for Helen. A gaunt, shabby man, coming down the pavement towards them, lifted his hand half-way to his hat at sight of her, and then, as if seeing himself unrecognised, dropped it to his side again, and slunk by. Helen turned and stopped him. “Mr. Kimball! Is that you?”

  “Yes, what there is left,” answered Kimball, with a ghost of his old quizzical smile, and the spectre of his municipal, office holding patronage of manner, as he took Helen’s extended hand.

  “Why — why — what’s the matter?”

  “Well, I’ve been sick for a spell back. Just got to knocking round again,” said Kimball evasively. “You don’t look over and above well yourself, Miss Harkness.”

  “No, no, I’m not well. But I’m better now. Are you—” She stopped, with her eyes upon his conspicuous shabbiness, and, through an irresistible association of ideas, she added— “Mr. Kimball, I hope you got the money that I returned to you safely?”

  Kimball hung his head, and kicked the pavement with his toe. “Well, no,” he answered reluctantly, “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t get it?”

  “It’s all right. I told my wife at the time that I knew you sent it. But I guess somebody in the Post-Office got the start of me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded Helen.

  “Well, you know, I couldn’t do that,” said Kimball.

  Helen took out her purse. There were only twelve dollars in it, and Marian had walked on, so that she could not borrow of her, and make up the whole sum at once. But she put the money in Kimball’s hand, and said, “I will bring you the rest this very day. Shall I bring it to the Custom-House?”

  “O no; there’s been a change, you know. My collector was kicked out, and all our heads went into the basket together.’ I ain’t there any more. I guess we’ll call this square now. I don’t feel just right about taking this money, Miss Harkness. But I’ve been sick, and my wife ain’t very well herself; and — well, I guess it’s a godsend.” His lips twitched. “I feel kind of mean about it, but I’ll have to stand it. There ain’t a thing in the house, or I wouldn’t take it. My wife and me both said we knew you sent it.”

  “Who in the world is your shabby friend. Helen?” demanded Marian when Helen h
ad overtaken her at last.

  “Oh, he used to be in the Custom-House. He’s a character. He’s the one who told Lord Rainford, when he offered to deposit money for the duties on those Egyptian things he brought me from you, that it wasn’t necessary between gentlemen!”

  “How amusing!”

  “Yes, I thought it was amusing too. But I don’t think I can ever laugh at him again.” She shut her lips till she could command her voice sufficiently to tell what had just passed between her and Kimball.

  Marian continued amused by it. In the flush of her re-Anglicisation, she said it was a very American affair. But she added that something ought really to be done for the chivalric simpleton, and that she was going to tell Ray about him.

  During the week that Helen spent with the Butlers, before she was to take her place in Zenas Pearson’s Photographic Parlours, as he called them, the wisdom of her decision was tested by another incident or accident — one of those chances of real life which one must hesitate to record because they have so much the air of having been contrived. From her life in the Port she had contracted the suburban habit of lunching at restaurants, so alien to the Bostonian lady proper; and one day, when she was down town alone, she found herself at a table in Parkers, so near that of two other ladies that she could not help hearing what they said. They were both dressed with a certain floridity, and one was of a fearless, good-humoured beauty, who stared a great deal about the room and out of the window, and, upon the whole, seemed amused to realise herself in Boston, as if it were a place whose peculiarities she had reflected much upon, without being greatly awed or dazzled by them. “We used to see a great many Bostonians in California when the Pacific road was first opened. They came out there in shoals, and I afterwards met them in Japan, — men, I mean, of course. I had quite a flirtation with one — the pleasantest one I ever met.” The lady breathed, above the spoil of the quail-on-toast before her, a sigh to the memory of this agreeable passage of her life. “Yes, a regular flirtation. It was on the steamer coming to San Francisco; and he was on his way home to be married, poor fellow, and I suppose he thought, Now or never! The steamer broke her shaft, and had to put back to Japan, and he took passage home on a sailing vessel that we hailed, and she was lost, and the last that was known of him he was left on a reef in the Pacific with three others, while a boatful of people went off to prospect for land. When the boat came back they were gone, and nobody ever knew what became of them.”