Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham,” said the young man. “Every one saw how it was. Don’t — —”

  “Did they talk it over after I left?” asked Lapham vulgarly.

  “Excuse me,” said Corey, blushing, “my father doesn’t talk his guests over with one another.” He added, with youthful superfluity, “You were among gentlemen.”

  “I was the only one that wasn’t a gentleman there!” lamented Lapham. “I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before his friends!” His head dropped. “I showed that I wasn’t fit to go with you. I’m not fit for any decent place. What did I say? What did I do?” he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting Corey. “Out with it! If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear to know it!”

  “There was nothing — really nothing,” said Corey. “Beyond the fact that you were not quite yourself, there was nothing whatever. My father DID speak of it to me,” he confessed, “when we were alone. He said that he was afraid we had not been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit of taking only water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table. The others said nothing about you.”

  “Ah, but what did they think?”

  “Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune — an accident.”

  “I wasn’t fit to be there,” persisted Lapham. “Do you want to leave?” he asked, with savage abruptness.

  “Leave?” faltered the young man.

  “Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?”

  “I haven’t the remotest idea of it!” cried Corey in amazement. “Why in the world should I?”

  “Because you’re a gentleman, and I’m not, and it ain’t right I should be over you. If you want to go, I know some parties that would be glad to get you. I will give you up if you want to go before anything worse happens, and I shan’t blame you. I can help you to something better than I can offer you here, and I will.”

  “There’s no question of my going, unless you wish it,” said Corey. “If you do — —”

  “Will you tell your father,” interrupted Lapham, “that I had a notion all the time that I was acting the drunken blackguard, and that I’ve suffered for it all day? Will you tell him I don’t want him to notice me if we ever meet, and that I know I’m not fit to associate with gentlemen in anything but a business way, if I am that?”

  “Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind,” retorted Corey. “I can’t listen to you any longer. What you say is shocking to me — shocking in a way you can’t think.”

  “Why, man!” exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment; “if I can stand it, YOU can!”

  “No,” said Corey, with a sick look, “that doesn’t follow. You may denounce yourself, if you will; but I have my reasons for refusing to hear you — my reasons why I CAN’T hear you. If you say another word I must go away.”

  “I don’t understand you,” faltered Lapham, in bewilderment, which absorbed even his shame.

  “You exaggerate the effect of what has happened,” said the young man. “It’s enough, more than enough, for you to have mentioned the matter to me, and I think it’s unbecoming in me to hear you.”

  He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham stopped him with the tragic humility of his appeal. “Don’t go yet! I can’t let you. I’ve disgusted you, — I see that; but I didn’t mean to. I — I take it back.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing to take back,” said Corey, with a repressed shudder for the abasement which he had seen. “But let us say no more about it — think no more. There wasn’t one of the gentlemen present last night who didn’t understand the matter precisely as my father and I did, and that fact must end it between us two.”

  He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham helpless to prevent his going. It had become a vital necessity with him to think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him the night before in the company of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognised his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His eye fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the night, and he said to himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than his master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense, the purblind ambition, the stupid arrogance were the same in both, and the difference was in a brute will that probably left the porter the gentler man of the two. The very innocence of Lapham’s life in the direction in which he had erred wrought against him in the young man’s mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in his shame than in his trespass. He said to himself that he was a Corey, as if that were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission in the end. It was almost with the girl’s voice that it seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices. It WAS in Lapham’s favour that he was so guiltless in the past, and now Corey asked himself if it were the first time he could have wished a guest at his father’s table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly where a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue. He asked himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him the sympathy to which such ABANDON had the right; and he had to own that he had met him on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and asserting the superiority of his sort, and not recognising that Lapham’s humiliation came from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.

  He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to go anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to find his way out of the chaos, which now seemed ruin, and now the materials out of which fine actions and a happy life might be shaped. Three hours later he stood at Lapham’s door.

  At times what he now wished to do had seemed for ever impossible, and again it had seemed as if he could not wait a moment longer. He had not been careless, but very mindful of what he knew must be the feelings of his own family in regard to the Laphams, and he had not concealed from himself that his family had great reason and justice on their side in not wishing him to alienate himself from their common life and associations. The most that he could urge to himself was that they had not all the reason and justice; but he had hesitated and delayed because they had so much. Often he could not make it appear right that he should merely please himself in what chiefly concerned himself. He perceived how far apart in all their experiences and ideals the Lapham girls and his sisters were; how different Mrs. Lapham was from his mother; how grotesquely unlike were his father and Lapham; and the disparity had not always amused him.

  He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes he said that he must forego the hope on which his heart was set. There had been many times in the past months when he had said that he must go no further, and as often as he had taken this stand he had yielded it, upon this or that excuse, which he was aware of trumping up. It was part of the complication that he should be unconscious of the injury he might be doing to some one besides his family and himself; this was the defect of his diffidence; and it had come to him in a pang for the first time when his mother said that she would not have the Laphams think she wished to make more of the acquaintance than he did; and then it had come too late. Since that he had suffered quite as much
from the fear that it might not be as that it might be so; and now, in the mood, romantic and exalted, in which he found himself concerning Lapham, he was as far as might be from vain confidence. He ended the question in his own mind by affirming to himself that he was there, first of all, to see Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own perfect faith and unabated respect, and to offer him what reparation this involved for that want of sympathy — of humanity — which he had shown.

  XVI.

  THE Nova Scotia second-girl who answered Corey’s ring said that Lapham had not come home yet.

  “Oh,” said the young man, hesitating on the outer step.

  “I guess you better come in,” said the girl, “I’ll go and see when they’re expecting him.”

  Corey was in the mood to be swayed by any chance. He obeyed the suggestion of the second-girl’s patronising friendliness, and let her shut him into the drawing-room, while she went upstairs to announce him to Penelope. “Did you tell him father wasn’t at home?”

  “Yes. He seemed so kind of disappointed, I told him to come in, and I’d see when he WOULD be in,” said the girl, with the human interest which sometimes replaces in the American domestic the servile deference of other countries.

  A gleam of amusement passed over Penelope’s face, as she glanced at herself in the glass. “Well,” she cried finally, dropping from her shoulders the light shawl in which she had been huddled over a book when Corey rang, “I will go down.”

  “All right,” said the girl, and Penelope began hastily to amend the disarray of her hair, which she tumbled into a mass on the top of her little head, setting off the pale dark of her complexion with a flash of crimson ribbon at her throat. She moved across the carpet once or twice with the quaint grace that belonged to her small figure, made a dissatisfied grimace at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a drawer and slid it into her pocket, and then descended to Corey.

  The Lapham drawing-room in Nankeen Square was in the parti-coloured paint which the Colonel had hoped to repeat in his new house: the trim of the doors and windows was in light green and the panels in salmon; the walls were a plain tint of French grey paper, divided by gilt mouldings into broad panels with a wide stripe of red velvet paper running up the corners; the chandelier was of massive imitation bronze; the mirror over the mantel rested on a fringed mantel-cover of green reps, and heavy curtains of that stuff hung from gilt lambrequin frames at the window; the carpet was of a small pattern in crude green, which, at the time Mrs. Lapham bought it, covered half the new floors in Boston. In the panelled spaces on the walls were some stone-coloured landscapes, representing the mountains and canyons of the West, which the Colonel and his wife had visited on one of the early official railroad excursions. In front of the long windows looking into the Square were statues, kneeling figures which turned their backs upon the company within-doors, and represented allegories of Faith and Prayer to people without. A white marble group of several figures, expressing an Italian conception of Lincoln Freeing the Slaves, — a Latin negro and his wife, — with our Eagle flapping his wings in approval, at Lincoln’s feet, occupied one corner, and balanced the what-not of an earlier period in another. These phantasms added their chill to that imparted by the tone of the walls, the landscapes, and the carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams invited company.

  Corey had not been in this room before; the family had always received him in what they called the sitting-room. Penelope looked into this first, and then she looked into the parlour, with a smile that broke into a laugh as she discovered him standing under the single burner which the second-girl had lighted for him in the chandelier.

  “I don’t understand how you came to be put in there,” she said, as she led the way to the cozier place, “unless it was because Alice thought you were only here on probation, anyway. Father hasn’t got home yet, but I’m expecting him every moment; I don’t know what’s keeping him. Did the girl tell you that mother and Irene were out?”

  “No, she didn’t say. It’s very good of you to see me.” She had not seen the exaltation which he had been feeling, he perceived with half a sigh; it must all be upon this lower level; perhaps it was best so. “There was something I wished to say to your father —— I hope,” he broke off, “you’re better to-night.”

  “Oh yes, thank you,” said Penelope, remembering that she had not been well enough to go to dinner the night before.

  “We all missed you very much.”

  “Oh, thank you! I’m afraid you wouldn’t have missed me if I had been there.”

  “Oh yes, we should,” said Corey, “I assure you.”

  They looked at each other.

  “I really think I believed I was saying something,” said the girl.

  “And so did I,” replied the young man. They laughed rather wildly, and then they both became rather grave.

  He took the chair she gave him, and looked across at her, where she sat on the other side of the hearth, in a chair lower than his, with her hands dropped in her lap, and the back of her head on her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face. She let her eyes fall, and then lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the clock on the mantel.

  “Mother and Irene have gone to the Spanish Students’ concert.”

  “Oh, have they?” asked Corey; and he put his hat, which he had been holding in his hand, on the floor beside his chair.

  She looked down at it for no reason, and then looked up at his face for no other, and turned a little red. Corey turned a little red himself. She who had always been so easy with him now became a little constrained.

  “Do you know how warm it is out-of-doors?” he asked.

  “No, is it warm? I haven’t been out all day.”

  “It’s like a summer night.”

  She turned her face towards the fire, and then started abruptly. “Perhaps it’s too warm for you here?”

  “Oh no, it’s very comfortable.”

  “I suppose it’s the cold of the last few days that’s still in the house. I was reading with a shawl on when you came.”

  “I interrupted you.”

  “Oh no. I had finished the book. I was just looking over it again.”

  “Do you like to read books over?”

  “Yes; books that I like at all.”

  “That was it?” asked Corey.

  The girl hesitated. “It has rather a sentimental name. Did you ever read it? — Tears, Idle Tears.”

  “Oh yes; they were talking of that last night; it’s a famous book with ladies. They break their hearts over it. Did it make you cry?”

  “Oh, it’s pretty easy to cry over a book,” said Penelope, laughing; “and that one is very natural till you come to the main point. Then the naturalness of all the rest makes that seem natural too; but I guess it’s rather forced.”

  “Her giving him up to the other one?”

  “Yes; simply because she happened to know that the other one had cared for him first. Why should she have done it? What right had she?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose that the self-sacrifice — —”

  “But it WASN’T self-sacrifice — or not self-sacrifice alone. She was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn’t appreciate him half as much as she could. I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book — for I did cry. It’s silly — it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?”

  “Perhaps they couldn’t make it so attractive,” suggested Corey, with a smile.

  “It would be novel, at any rate,” said the girl. “But so it would in real life, I suppose,” she added.

  “I don’t know. Why shouldn’t people in love behave sensibl
y?”

  “That’s a very serious question,” said Penelope gravely. “I couldn’t answer it,” and she left him the embarrassment of supporting an inquiry which she had certainly instigated herself. She seemed to have finally recovered her own ease in doing this. “Do you admire our autumnal display, Mr. Corey?”

  “Your display?”

  “The trees in the Square. WE think it’s quite equal to an opening at Jordan & Marsh’s.”

  “Ah, I’m afraid you wouldn’t let me be serious even about your maples.”

  “Oh yes, I should — if you like to be serious.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Well not about serious matters. That’s the reason that book made me cry.”

  “You make fun of everything. Miss Irene was telling me last night about you.”

  “Then it’s no use for me to deny it so soon. I must give Irene a talking to.”

  “I hope you won’t forbid her to talk about you!”

  She had taken up a fan from the table, and held it, now between her face and the fire, and now between her face and him. Her little visage, with that arch, lazy look in it, topped by its mass of dusky hair, and dwindling from the full cheeks to the small chin, had a Japanese effect in the subdued light, and it had the charm which comes to any woman with happiness. It would be hard to say how much of this she perceived that he felt. They talked about other things a while, and then she came back to what he had said. She glanced at him obliquely round her fan, and stopped moving it. “Does Irene talk about me?” she asked. “I think so — yes. Perhaps it’s only I who talk about you. You must blame me if it’s wrong,” he returned.

  “Oh, I didn’t say it was wrong,” she replied. “But I hope if you said anything very bad of me you’ll let me know what it was, so that I can reform — —”

  “No, don’t change, please!” cried the young man.