Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Colville did not attempt to reply on this point. He feebly reverted to the inquiry regarding himself, and was far enough from mirth in resuming it.

  “I couldn’t imagine,” he said, “that you cared anything for me when you warned another against me. If I could—”

  “You put me in a false position from the beginning. I ought to have sympathised with her and helped her instead of making the poor child feel that somehow I hated her. I couldn’t even put her on guard against herself, though I knew all along that she didn’t really care for you, but was just in love with her own fancy for you, Even after you were engaged I ought to have broken it off; I ought to have been frank with her; it was my duty; but I couldn’t without feeling that I was acting for myself too, and I would not submit to that degradation. No! I would rather have died. I dare say you don’t understand. How could you? You are a man, and the kind of man who couldn’t. At every point you made me violate every principle that was dear to me. I loathed myself for caring for a man who was in love with me when he was engaged to another. Don’t think it was gratifying to me. It was detestable; and yet I did let you see that I cared for you. Yes, I even tried to make you care for me — falsely, cruelly, treacherously.”

  “You didn’t have to try very hard,” said Colville, with a sort of cold resignation to his fate.

  “Oh no; you were quite ready for any hint. I could have told her for her own sake that she didn’t love you, but that would have been for my sake too; and I would have told you if I hadn’t cared for you and known how you cared for me. I’ve saved at least the consciousness of this from the wreck.”

  “I don’t think it’s a great treasure,” said Colville. “I wish that you had saved the consciousness of having been frank even to your own advantage.”

  “Do you dare to reproach me, Theodore Colville? But perhaps I’ve deserved this too.”

  “No, Lina, you certainly don’t deserve it, if it’s unkindness, from me. go?”

  She sank into a chair in sign of assent. He also sat down. He had a dim impression that he could talk better if he took her hand, but he did not venture to ask for it. He contented himself with fixing his eyes upon as much of her face as he could make out in the dusk, a pale blur in a vague outline of dark.

  “I want to assure you, Lina — Lina, my love, my dearest, as I shall call you for the first and last time! — that I do understand everything, as delicately and fully as you could wish, all that you have expressed, and all that you have left unsaid. I understand how high and pure your ideals of duty are, and how heroically, angelically, you have struggled to fulfil them, broken and borne down by my clumsy and stupid selfishness from the start. I want you to believe, my dearest love — you must forgive me! — that if I didn’t see everything at the time, I do see it now, and that I prize the love you kept from me far more than any love you could have given me to the loss of your self-respect. It isn’t logic — it sounds more like nonsense, I am afraid — but you know what I mean by it. You are more perfect, more lovely to me, than any being in the world, and I accept whatever fate you choose for me. I would not win you against your will if I could. You are sacred to me. If you say we must part, I know that you speak from a finer discernment than mine, and I submit. I will try to console myself with the thought of your love, if I may not have you. Yes, I submit.”

  His instinct of forbearance had served him better than the subtlest art. His submission was the best defence. He rose with a real dignity, and she rose also. “Remember,” he said, “that I confess all you accuse me of, and that I acknowledge the justice of what you do — because you do it.” He put out his hand and took the hand which hung nerveless at her side. “You are quite right. Good-bye.” He hesitated a moment. “May I kiss you, Lina?” He drew her to him, and she let him kiss her on the lips.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered. “Go—”

  “I am going.”

  Effie Bowen ran into the room from the kitchen.

  “Aren’t you going to take—” She stopped and turned to her mother. She must not remind Mr. Colville of his invitation; that was what her gesture expressed.

  Colville would not say anything. He would not seize his advantage, and play upon the mother’s heart through the feelings of her child, though there is no doubt that he was tempted to prolong the situation by any means. Perhaps Mrs. Bowen divined both the temptation and the resistance. “Tell her,” she said, and turned away.

  “I can’t go with you to-night, Effie,” he said, stooping toward her for the inquiring kiss that she gave him. “I am — going away, and I must say good-bye.”

  The solemnity of his voice alarmed her. “Going away!” she repeated.

  “Yes — away from Florence. I’m afraid I shall not see you again.”

  The child turned from him to her mother again, who stood motionless. Then, as if the whole calamitous fact had suddenly flashed upon her, she plunged her face against her mother’s breast. “I can’t bear it!” she sobbed out; and the reticence of her lamentation told more than a storm of cries and prayers.

  Colville wavered.

  “Oh, you must stay!” said Lina, in the self-contemptuous voice of a woman who falls below her ideal of herself.

  XXIV

  In the levities which the most undeserving husbands permit themselves with the severest of wives, there were times after their marriage when Colville accused Lina of never really intending to drive him away, but of meaning, after a disciplinary ordeal, to marry him in reward of his tested self-sacrifice and obedience. He said that if the appearance of Effie was not a coup de théâtre contrived beforehand, it was an accident of no consequence whatever; that if she had not come in at that moment, her mother would have found some other pretext for detaining him. This is a point which I would not presume to decide. I only know that they were married early in June before the syndic of Florence, who tied a tricolour sash round his ample waist for the purpose, and never looked more paternal or venerable than when giving the sanction of the Italian state to their union. It is not, of course, to be supposed that Mrs. Colville was contented with the civil rite, though Colville may have thought it quite sufficient. The religious ceremony took place in the English chapel, the assistant clergyman officiating in the absence of the incumbent, who had already gone out of town.

  The Rev. Mr. Waters gave away the bride, and then went home to Palazzo Pinti with the party, the single and singularly honoured guest at their wedding feast, for which Effie Bowen went with Colville to Giacosa’s to order the ices in person. She has never regretted her choice of a step father, though when Colville asked her how she would like him in that relation she had a moment of hesitation, in which she reconciled herself to it; as to him she had no misgivings. He has sometimes found himself the object of little jealousies on her part, but by promptly deciding all questions between her and her mother in Effie’s favour he has convinced her of the groundlessness of her suspicions.

  In the absence of any social pressure to the contrary, the Colvilles spent the summer in Palazzo Pinti. Before their fellow-sojourners returned from the villeggiatura in the fall, however, they had turned their faces southward, and they are now in Rome, where, arriving as a married couple, there was no inquiry and no interest in their past.

  It is best to be honest, and own that the affair with Imogene has been the grain of sand to them. No one was to blame, or very much to blame; even Mrs. Colville says that. It was a thing that happened, but one would rather it had not happened.

  Last winter, however, Mrs Colville received a letter from Mrs. Graham which suggested, if it did not impart, consolation. “Mr. Morton was here the other day, and spent the morning. He has a parish at Erie, and there is talk of his coming to Buffalo.”

  “Oh, Heaven grant it!” said Colville, with sudden piety.

  “Why?” demanded his wife.

  “Well, I wish she was married.”

  “You have nothing whatever to do with her.”

  It took him some time to realis
e that this was the fact.

  “No,” he confessed; “but what do you think about it?”

  “There is no telling. We are such simpletons! If a man will keep on long enough — But if it isn’t Mr. Morton, it will be some one else — some young person.”

  Colville rose and went round the breakfast table to her. “I hope so,” he said. “I have married a young person, and it would only be fair.”

  This magnanimity was irresistible.

  THE END

  THE MINISTER’S CHARGE

  OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER.

  CONTENTS

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  XXV.

  XXVI.

  XXVII

  XXVIII.

  XXIX.

  XXX.

  XXXI.

  XXXII.

  XXXIII

  XXXIV.

  XXXV.

  XXXVI

  I.

  On their way back to the farm-house where they were boarding, Sewell’s wife reproached him for what she called his recklessness. “You had no right,” she said, “to give the poor boy false hopes. You ought to have discouraged him — that would have been the most merciful way — if you knew the poetry was bad. Now, he will go on building all sorts of castles in the air on your praise, and sooner or later they will come tumbling about his ears — just to gratify your passion for saying pleasant things to people.”

  “I wish you had a passion for saying pleasant things to me, my dear,” suggested her husband evasively.

  “Oh, a nice time I should have!”

  “I don’t know about your nice time, but I feel pretty certain of my own. How do you know — Oh, do get up, you implacable cripple!” he broke off to the lame mare he was driving, and pulled at the reins.

  “Don’t saw her mouth!” cried Mrs. Sewell.

  “Well, let her get up, then, and I won’t. I don’t like to saw her mouth; but I have to do something when you come down on me with your interminable consequences. I dare say the boy will never think of my praise again. And besides, as I was saying when this animal interrupted me with her ill-timed attempts at grazing, how do you know that I knew the poetry was bad?”

  “How? By the sound of your voice. I could tell you were dishonest in the dark, David.”

  “Perhaps the boy knew that I was dishonest too,” suggested Sewell.

  “Oh no, he didn’t. I could see that he pinned his faith to every syllable.”

  “He used a quantity of pins, then; for I was particularly profuse of syllables. I find that it requires no end of them to make the worse appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you. But come, now, Lucy, let me off a syllable or two. I — I have a conscience, you know well enough, and if I thought — But pshaw! I’ve merely cheered a lonely hour for the boy, and he’ll go back to hoeing potatoes to-morrow, and that will be the end of it.”

  “I hope that will be the end of it,” said Mrs. Sewell, with the darkling reserve of ladies intimate with the designs of Providence.

  “Well,” argued her husband, who was trying to keep the matter from being serious, “perhaps he may turn out a poet yet. You never can tell where the lightning is going to strike. He has some idea of rhyme, and some perception of reason, and — yes, some of the lines were musical. His general attitude reminded me of Piers Plowman. Didn’t he recall Piers Plowman to you?”

  “I’m glad you can console yourself in that way, David,” said his wife relentlessly.

  The mare stopped again, and Sewell looked over his shoulder at the house, now black in the twilight, on the crest of the low hill across the hollow behind them. “I declare,” he said, “the loneliness of that place almost broke my heart. There!” he added, as the faint sickle gleamed in the sky above the roof, “I’ve got the new moon right over my left shoulder for my pains. That’s what comes of having a sympathetic nature.”

  The boy was looking at the new moon, across the broken gate which stopped the largest gap in the tumbled stone wall. He still gripped in his hand the manuscript which he had been reading to the minister.

  “There, Lem,” called his mother’s voice from the house, “I guess you’ve seen the last of ’em for one while. I’m ‘fraid you’ll take cold out there ‘n the dew. Come in, child.”

  The boy obeyed. “I was looking at the new moon, mother. I saw it over my right shoulder. Did you hear — hear him,” he asked, in a broken and husky voice,— “hear how he praised my poetry, mother?”

  “Oh, do make her get up, David!” cried Mrs. Sewell. “These mosquitoes are eating me alive!”

  “I will saw her mouth all to the finest sort of kindling-wood, if she doesn’t get up this very instant,” said Sewell, jerking the reins so wildly that the mare leaped into a galvanic canter, and continued without further urging for twenty paces. “Of course, Lucy,” he resumed, profiting by the opportunity for conversation which the mare’s temporary activity afforded, “I should feel myself greatly to blame if I thought I had gone beyond mere kindness in my treatment of the poor fellow. But at first I couldn’t realise that the stuff was so bad. Their saying that he read all the books he could get, and was writing every spare moment, gave me the idea that he must be some sort of literary genius in the germ, and I listened on and on, expecting every moment that he was coming to some passage with a little lift or life in it; and when he got to the end, and hadn’t come to it, I couldn’t quite pull myself together to say so. I had gone there so full of the wish to recognise and encourage, that I couldn’t turn about for the other thing. Well! I shall know another time how to value a rural neighbourhood report of the existence of a local poet. Usually there is some hardheaded cynic in the community with native perception enough to enlighten the rest as to the true value of the phenomenon; but there seems to have been none here. I ought to have come sooner to see him, and then I could have had a chance to go again and talk soberly and kindly with him, and show him gently how much he had mistaken himself. Oh, get up!” By this time the mare had lapsed again into her habitual absent-mindedness, and was limping along the dark road with a tendency to come to a full stop, from step to step. The remorse in the minister’s soul was so keen that he could not use her with the cruelty necessary to rouse her flagging energies; as he held the reins he flapped his elbows up toward his face, as if they were wings, and contrived to beat away a few of the mosquitoes with them; Mrs. Sewell, in silent exasperation, fought them from her with the bough which she had torn from an overhanging birch-tree.

  In the morning they returned to Boston, and Sewell’s parish duties began again; he was rather faithfuller and busier in these than he might have been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all sorts, and so little upon beliefs. He declared that he envied the ministers of the good old times who had only to teach their people that they would be lost if they did not do right; it was much simpler than to make them understand that they were often to be good for reasons not immediately connected with their present or future comfort, and that they could not confidently expect to be lost for any given transgression, or even to be lost at all. He found it necessary to do his work largely in a personal way, by meeting and talking with people, and this took up a great deal of his time, especially after the summer vacation, when he had to get into relations with them anew, and to help them recover themselves from the moral lassitude into which people fall during that season of physical recuperation.

  He was occupied with these matters one morning late in October when a letter came addressed in a handwrit
ing of copybook carefulness, but showing in every painstaking stroke the writer’s want of training, which, when he read it, filled Sewell with dismay. It was a letter from Lemuel Barker, whom Sewell remembered, with a pang of self-upbraiding, as the poor fellow he had visited with his wife the evening before they left Willoughby Pastures; and it enclosed passages of a long poem which Barker said he had written since he got the fall work done. The passages were not submitted for Sewell’s criticism, but were offered as examples of the character of the whole poem, for which the author wished to find a publisher. They were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of versification, that Sewell wondered how the writer should have mastered the notion of anything so literary as publication, till he came to that part of the letter in which Barker spoke of their having had so much sickness in the family that he thought he would try to do something to help along. The avowal of this meritorious ambition inflicted another wound upon Sewell’s guilty consciousness; but what made his blood run cold was Barker’s proposal to come down to Boston, if Sewell advised, and find a publisher with Sewell’s assistance.

  This would never do, and the minister went to his desk with the intention of despatching a note of prompt and total discouragement. But in crossing the room from the chair into which he had sunk, with a cheerful curiosity, to read the letter, he could not help some natural rebellion against the punishment visited upon him. He could not deny that he deserved punishment, but he thought that this, to say the least, was very ill-timed. He had often warned other sinners who came to him in like resentment that it was this very quality of inopportuneness that was perhaps the most sanative and divine property of retribution; the eternal justice fell upon us, he said, at the very moment when we were least able to bear it, or thought ourselves so; but now in his own case the clear-sighted prophet cried out and revolted in his heart. It was Saturday morning, when every minute was precious to him for his sermon, and it would take him fully an hour to write that letter; it must be done with the greatest sympathy; he had seen that this poor foolish boy was very sensitive, and yet it must be done with such thoroughness as to cut off all hope of anything like literary achievement for him.