Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “First-rate. I should like it,” said Dan, rising on the waft of his father’s suggestion, but gloomily lapsing again. Still, it was pleasing to picture himself going about through Europe with a broken heart, and he did not deny himself the consolation of the vision.

  “Well, there’s nobody to dislike it,” said his father cheerily. He was sure now that Dan had been jilted; otherwise he would have put forth some objection to a scheme which must interrupt his lovemaking. “There’s no reason why, with our resources, we shouldn’t take the lead in this business.”

  He went on to speak more fully of his plans, and Dan listened with a nether reference of it all to Alice, but still with a surface intelligence on which nothing was lost.

  “Are you going home with me to-morrow?” asked his father as they rose from the table.

  “Well, perhaps not to-morrow. I’ve got some of my things to put together in Cambridge yet, and perhaps I’d better look after them. But I’ve a notion I’d better spend the winter at home, and get an idea of the manufacture before I go abroad. I might sail in January; they say it’s a good month.”

  “Yes, there’s sense in that,” said his father.

  “And perhaps I won’t break up in Cambridge till I’ve been to New York and Philadelphia. What do you think? It’s easier striking them from here.”

  “I don’t know but you’re right,” said his father easily.

  They had come out of the dining-room, and Dan stopped to get some cigarettes in the office. He looked mechanically at the theatre bills over the cigar case. “I see Irving’s at the ‘Boston.’”

  “Oh, you don’t say!” said his father. “Let’s go and see him.”

  “If you wish it, sir,” said Dan, with pensive acquiescence. All the Maverings were fond of the theatre, and made any mood the occasion or the pretext of going to the play. If they were sad, they went; if they were gay, they went. As long as Dan’s mother could get out-of-doors she used to have herself carried to a box in the theatre whenever she was in town; now that she no longer left her room, she had a dominant passion for hearing about actors and acting; it was almost a work of piety in her husband and children to see them and report to her.

  His father left him the next afternoon, and Dan, who had spent the day with him looking into business for the first time, with a running accompaniment of Alice in all the details, remained to uninterrupted misery. He spent the evening in his room, too wretched even for the theatre. It is true that he tried to find Boardman, but Boardman was again off on some newspaper duty; and after trying at several houses in the hope, which he knew was vain, of finding any one in town yet, he shut himself up with his thoughts. They did not differ from the thoughts of the night before, and the night before that, but they were calmer, and they portended more distinctly a life of self-abnegation and solitude from that time forth. He tested his feelings, and found that it was not hurt vanity that he was suffering from: it was really wounded affection. He did not resent Alice’s cruelty; he wished that she might be happy; he could endure to see her happy.

  He wrote a letter to the married one of the two ladies he had spent the day with in Portland, and thanked them for making pass pleasantly a day which he would not otherwise have known how to get through. He let a soft, mysterious melancholy pervade his letter; he hinted darkly at trouble and sorrow of which he could not definitely speak. He had the good sense to tear his letter up when he had finished it, and to send a short, sprightly note instead, saying that if Mrs. Frobisher and her sister came to Boston at the end of the month, as they had spoken of doing, they must be sure to let him know. Upon the impulse given him by this letter he went more cheerfully to bed, and fell instantly asleep.

  During the next three weeks he bent himself faithfully to the schemes of work his father had outlined for him. He visited New York and Philadelphia, and looked into the business and the processes there; and he returned to Ponkwasset Falls to report and compare his facts intelligently with those which he now examined in his father’s manufactory for the first time. He began to understand how his father, who was a man of intellectual and artistic interests, should be fond of the work.

  He spent a good deal of time with his mother, and read to her, and got upon better terms with her than they usually were. They were very much alike, and she objected to him that he was too light and frivolous. He sat with his sisters, and took an interest in their pursuits. He drove them about with his father’s sorrels, and resumed something of the old relations with them which the selfish years of his college life had broken off. As yet he could not speak of Campobello or of what had happened there; and his mother and sisters, whatever they thought, made no more allusion to it than his father had done.

  They mercifully took it for granted that matters must have gone wrong there, or else he would speak about them, for there had been some gay banter among them concerning the objects of his expedition before he left home. They had heard of the heroine of his Class Day, and they had their doubts of her, such as girls have of their brothers’ heroines. They were not inconsolably sorry to have her prove unkind; and their mother found in the probable event another proof of their father’s total want of discernment where women were concerned, for the elder Mavering had come home from Class Day about as much smitten with this mysterious Miss Pasmer as Dan was. She talked it over indignantly with her daughters; they were glad of Dan’s escape, but they were incensed with the girl who could let him escape, and they inculpated her in a high degree of heartless flirtation. They knew how sweet Dan was, and they believed him most sincere and good. He had been brilliantly popular in college, and he was as bright as he could be. What was it she chose not to like in him? They vexed themselves with asking how or in what way she thought herself better. They would not have had her love Dan, but they were hot against her for not loving him.

  They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very much hurt.

  It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. There were times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless, waiting. There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one. He never knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them as long as he lived. He thought this would be something rather fine. He had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache, like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years. He bent over, and kissed her hand.

  “You idiot!” said Mavering to himself. Throughout he kept a good appetite. In fact, after that first morning in Portland, he had been hungry three times a day with perfect regularity. He lost the idea of being sick; he had not even a furred tongue. He fell asleep pretty early, and he slept through the night without a break. He had to laugh a great deal with his mother and sisters, since he could not very well mope without expecting them to ask why, and he did not wish to say why. But there were some laughs which he really enjoyed with the Yankee foreman of the works, who was a droll, after a common American pattern, and said things that were killingly funny, especially about women, of whom his opinions were sarcastic.

  Dan Mavering suffered, but not solidl
y. His suffering was short, and crossed with many gleams of respite and even joy. His disappointment made him really unhappy, but not wholly so; it was a genuine sorrow, but a sorrow to which he began to resign himself even in the monotony of Ponkwasset Falls, and which admitted the thought of Mrs. Frobisher’s sister by the time business called him to Boston.

  XXIV.

  Before the end of the first week after Dan came back to town, that which was likely to happen whenever chance brought him and Alice together had taken place.

  It was one of the soft days that fall in late October, when the impending winter seems stayed, and the warm breath of the land draws seaward and over a thousand miles of Indian summer. The bloom came and went in quick pulses over the girl’s temples as she sat with her head thrown back in the corner of the car, and from moment to moment she stirred slightly as if some stress of rapture made it hard for her to get her breath; a little gleam of light fell from under her fallen eyelids into the eyes of the young man beside her, who leaned forward slightly and slanted his face upward to meet her glances. They said some words, now and then, indistinguishable to the others; in speaking they smiled slightly. Sometimes her hand wavered across her lap; in both their faces there was something beyond happiness — a transport, a passion, the brief splendour of a supreme moment.

  They left the car at the Arlington Street corner of the Public Garden, and followed the winding paths diagonally to the further corner on Charles Street.

  “How stupid we were to get into that ridiculous horse-car!” she said. “What in the world possessed us to do it?”

  “I can’t imagine,” he answered. “What a waste of time it was! If we had walked, we might have been twice as long coming. And now you’re going to send me off so soon!”

  “I don’t send you,” she murmured.

  “But you want me to go.”

  “Oh no! But you’d better.”

  “I can’t do anything against your wish.”

  “I wish it — for your own good.”

  “Ah, do let me go home with you, Alice?”

  “Don’t ask it, or I must say yes.”

  “Part of the way, then?”

  “No; not a step! You must take the first car for Cambridge. What time is it now?”

  “You can see by the clock on the Providence Depot.”

  “But I wish you to go by your watch, now. Look!”

  “Alice!” he cried, in pure rapture.

  “Look!”

  “It’s a quarter of one.”

  “And we’ve been three hours together already! Now you must simply fly. If you came home with me I should be sure to let you come in, and if I don’t see mamma alone first, I shall die. Can’t you understand?”

  “No; but I can do the next best thing: I can misunderstand. You want to be rid of me.”

  “Shall you be rid of me when we’ve parted?” she asked, with an inner thrill of earnestness in her gay tone.

  “Alice!”

  “You know I didn’t mean it, Dan.”

  “Say it again.”

  “What?”

  “Dan.”

  “Dan, love! Dan, dearest!”

  “Will that car of yours never come? I’ve promised myself not to leave you till it does, and if I stay here any longer I shall go wild. I can’t believe it’s happened. Say it again!”

  “Say what?”

  “That—”

  “That I love you? That we’re engaged?”

  “I don’t believe it. I can’t.” She looked impatiently up the street. “Oh, there comes your car! Run! Stop it!”

  “I don’t run to stop cars.” He made a sign, which the conductor obeyed, and the car halted at the further crossing.

  She seemed to have forgotten it, and made no movement to dismiss him. “Oh, doesn’t it seem too good to be standing here talking in this way, and people think it’s about the weather, or society?” She set her head a little on one side, and twirled the open parasol on her shoulder.

  “Yes, it does. Tell me it’s true, love!”

  “It’s true. How splendid you are!” She said it with an effect for the world outside of saying it was a lovely day.

  He retorted, with the same apparent nonchalance, “How beautiful you are! How good! How divine!”

  The conductor, seeing himself apparently forgotten, gave his bell a vicious snap, and his car jolted away.

  She started nervously. “There! you’ve lost your car, Dan.”

  “Have I?” asked Mavering, without troubling himself to look after it.

  She laughed now, with a faint suggestion of unwillingness in her laugh. “What are you going to do?”

  “Walk home with you.”

  “No, indeed; you know I can’t let you.”

  “And are you going to leave me here alone on the street corner, to be run over by the first bicycle that comes along?”

  “You can sit down in the Garden, and wait for the next car.”

  “No; I would rather go back to the Art Museum, and make a fresh start.”

  “To the Art Museum?” she murmured, tenderly.

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you like to see it again?”

  “Again? I should like to pass my whole life in it!”

  “Well, walk back with me a little way. There’s no hurry about the car.”

  “Dan!” she said, in a helpless compliance, and they paced very, very slowly along the Beacon Street path in the Garden. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Yes, but it’s delightful.”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant. Do you suppose any one ever — ever—”

  “Made love there before?”

  “How can you say such things? Yes. I always supposed it would be — somewhere else.”

  “It was somewhere else — once.”

  “Oh, I meant — the second time.”

  “Then you did think there was going to be a second time?”

  “How do I know? I wished it. Do you like me to say that?”

  “I wish you would never say anything else.”

  “Yes; there can’t be any harm in it now. I thought that if you had ever — liked me, you would still—”

  “So did I; but I couldn’t believe that you—”

  “Oh, I could.”

  “Alice!”

  “Don’t you like my confessing it! You asked me to.”

  “Like it!”

  “How silly we are!”

  “Not half so silly as we’ve been for the last two months. I think we’ve just come to our senses. At least I have.”

  “Two months!” she sighed. “Has it really been so long as that?”

  “Two years! Two centuries! It was back in the Dark Ages when you refused me.”

  “Dark Ages! I should think so! But don’t say refused. It wasn’t refusing, exactly.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Don’t speak of it now.”

  “But, Alice, why did you refuse me?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You mustn’t ask me now. I’ll tell you some time.”

  “Well, come to think of it,” said Mavering, laughing it all lightly away, “there’s no hurry. Tell me why you accepted me to-day.”

  “I — I couldn’t help it. When I saw you I wanted to fall at your feet.”

  “What an idea! I didn’t want to fall at yours. I was awfully mad. I shouldn’t have spoken to you if you hadn’t stopped me and held out your hand.”

  “Really? Did you really hate me, Dan?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly doted on you since we last met.”

  She did not seem offended at this. “Yes, I suppose so. And I’ve gone on being fonder and fonder of you every minute since that day. I wanted to call you back when you had got half-way to Eastport.”

  “I wouldn’t have come. It’s bad luck to turn back.”

  She laughed at his drolling. “How funny you are! Now I’m of rather a gloomy temperament. Did, you know it?”

  “You don’t look it.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, but I am. Just now I’m rather excited and — happy.”

  “So glad!”

  “Go on! go on! I like you to make fun of me.”

  The benches on either side were filled with nursemaids in charge of baby-carriages, and of young children who were digging in the sand with their little beach shovels, and playing their games back and forth across the walk unrebuked by the indulgent policemen. A number of them had enclosed a square in the middle of the path with four of the benches, which they made believe was a fort. The lovers had to walk round it; and the children, chasing one another, dashed into them headlong, or, backing off from pursuit, bumped up against them. They did not seem to know it, but walked slowly on without noticing: they were not aware of an occasional benchful of rather shabby young fellows who stared hard at the stylish girl and well-dressed young man talking together in such intense low tones, with rapid interchange of radiant glances.

  “Oh, as to making fun of you, I was going to say—” Mavering began, and after a pause he broke off with a laugh. “I forget what I was going to say.”

  “Try to remember.”

  “I can’t.”

  “How strange that we should have both happened to go to the Museum this morning!” she sighed. Then, “Dan,” she broke in, “do you suppose that heaven is any different from this?”

  “I hope not — if I’m to go there.”

  “Hush, dear; you mustn’t talk so.”

  “Why, you provoked me to it.”

  “Did I? Did I really? Do you think I tempted you to do it? Then I must be wicked, whether I knew I was doing it or not. Yes.”

  The break in her voice made him look more keenly at her, and he saw the tears glimmer in her eyes. “Alice!”

  “No; I’m not good enough for you. I always said that.”

  “Then don’t say it any more. That’s the only thing I won’t let you say.”