Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The father got himself indoors unnoticed in the excitement of the brother’s arrival. This would have been the best moment for Dan to tell his sister of his engagement; he knew it, but he parried her curiosity about his coming; and then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not speak. They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas, and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag to his room, and then come down again. He knew that he had left them to think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters. He recollected that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her. Alice now seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving about his room. For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become of his happiness. It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in transport from Alice.

  He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it was nearly half an hour before he went down to them. By that time his father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.

  XXIX.

  A family of rich people in the country, apart from intellectual interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious. They prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like to get home just in time for tea when he came up from Harvard; it was always very jolly, and he brought a boy’s hunger to its abundance. The dining-room, full of shining light, and treated from the low-down grate, was a pleasant place. But now his spirits failed to rise with the physical cheer; he was almost bashfully silent; he sat cowed in the presence of his sisters, and careworn in the place where he used to be so gay and bold. They were waiting to have him begin about himself, as he always did when he had been away, and were ready to sympathise with his egotism, whatever new turn it took. He mystified them by asking about them and their affairs, and by dealing in futile generalities, instead of launching out with any business that he happened at the time to be full of. But he did not attend to their answers to his questions; he was absent-minded, and only knew that his face was flushed, and that he was obviously ill at ease.

  His younger sister turned from him impatiently at last. “Father, what is the matter with Dan?”

  Her bold recognition of their common constraint broke it down. Dan looked at his father with helpless consent, and his father said quietly, “He tells me he’s engaged.”

  “What nonsense!” said his sister Eunice.

  “Why, Dan!” cried Minnie; and he felt a reproach in her words which the words did not express. A silence followed, in which the father along went on with his supper. The girls sat staring at Dan with incredulous eyes. He became suddenly angry.

  “I don’t know what’s so very extraordinary about it, or why there should be such a pother,” he began; and he knew that he was insolently ignoring abundant reasons for pother, if there had been any pother. “Yes, I’m engaged.”

  He expected now that they would believe him, and ask whom he was engaged to; but apparently they were still unable to realise it. He was obliged to go on. “I’m engaged to Miss Pasmer.”

  “To Miss Pasmer!” repeated Eunice.

  “But I thought—” Minnie began, and then stopped.

  Dan commanded his temper by a strong effort, and condescended to explain. “There was a misunderstanding, but it’s all right now; I only met her yesterday, and — it’s all right.” He had to keep on ignoring what had passed between him and his sisters during the month he spent at home after his return from Campobello. He did not wish to do so; he would have been glad to laugh over that epoch of ill-concealed heart-break with them; but the way they had taken the fact of his engagement made it impossible. He was forced to keep them at a distance; they forced him. “I’m glad,” he added bitterly, “that the news seems to be so agreeable to my family. Thank you for your cordial congratulations.” He swallowed a large cup of tea, and kept looking down.

  “How silly!” said Eunice, who was much the oldest of the three. “Did you expect us to fall upon your neck before we could believe it wasn’t a hoax of father’s?”

  “A hoax!” Dan burst out.

  “I suppose,” said Minnie, with mock meekness, “that if we’re to be devoured, it’s no use saying we didn’t roil the brook. I’m sure I congratulate you, Dan, with all my heart,” she added, with a trembling voice.

  “I congratulate Miss Pasmer,” said Eunice, “on securing such a very reasonable husband.”

  When Eunice first became a young lady she was so much older than Dan that in his mother’s absence she sometimes authorised herself to box his ears, till she was finally overthrown in battle by the growing boy. She still felt herself so much his tutelary genius that she could not let the idea of his engagement awe her, or keep her from giving him a needed lesson. Dan jumped to his feet, and passionately threw his napkin on his chair.

  “There, that will do, Eunice!” interposed the father. “Sit down, Dan, and don’t be an ass, if you are engaged. Do you expect to come up here with a bombshell in your pocket, and explode it among us without causing any commotion? We all desire your happiness, and we are glad if you think you’ve found it, but we want to have time to realise it. We had only adjusted our minds to the apparent fact that you hadn’t found it when you were here before.” His father began very severely, but when he ended with this recognition of what they had all blinked till then, they laughed together.

  “My pillow isn’t dry yet, with the tears I shed for you, Dan,” said Minnie demurely.

  “I shall have to countermand my mourning,” said Eunice, “and wear louder colours than ever. Unless,” she added, “Miss Pasmer changes her mind again.”

  This divination of the past gave them all a chance for another laugh, and Dan’s sisters began to reconcile themselves to the fact of his engagement, if not to Miss Pasmer. In what was abstractly so disagreeable there was the comfort that they could joke about his happiness; they had not felt free to make light of his misery when he was at home before. They began to ask all the questions they could think of as to how and when, and they assimilated the fact more and more in acquiring these particulars and making a mock of them and him.

  “Of course you haven’t got her photograph,” suggested Eunice. “You know we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the young lady yet.”

  “Yes,” Dan owned, blushing, “I have. She thought I might like to show it to mother: But it isn’t—”

  “A very good one — they never are,” said Minnie.

  “And it was taken several years ago — they always are,” said Eunice.

  “And she doesn’t photograph well, anyway.”

  “And this one was just after a long fit of sickness.”

  Dan drew it out of his pocket, after some fumbling for it, while he tolerated their gibes.

  Eunice put her nose to it. “I hope it’s your cigarettes it smells of,” she said.

  “Yes; she doesn’t use the weed,” answered Dan.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that, exactly,” returned his sister, holding the picture off at arm’s length, and viewing it critically with contracted eyes.

  Dan could not help laughing. “I don’t think it’s been near any other cigar-case,” he answered tranquilly.

  Minnie looked at it very near to, covering all but the face with her hand. “Dan, she’s lovely!” she cried, and Dan’s heart leaped into his throat As he gratefully met his sister’s eyes.

  “You’ll like her, Min.”

  Eunice took the photograph from her for a second scrutiny. “She’s ce
rtainly very stylish. Rather a beak of a nose, and a little too bird — like on the whole. But she isn’t so bad. Is it like her?” she asked with a glance at her father.

  “I might say — after looking,” he replied.

  “True! I didn’t know but Dan had shown it to you as soon as you met. He seemed to be in such a hurry to let us all know.”

  The father said, “I don’t think it flatters her,” and he looked at it more carefully. “Not much of her mother there?” he suggested to Dan.

  “No, sir; she’s more like her father.”

  “Well, after all this excitement, I believe I’ll have another cup of tea, and take something to eat, if Miss Pasmer’s photograph doesn’t object,” said Eunice, and she replenished her cup and plate.

  “What coloured hair and eyes has she, Dan?” asked Minnie.

  He had to think so as to be exact. “Well, you might say they were black, her eyebrows are so dark. But I believe they’re a sort of greyish-blue.”

  “Not an uncommon colour for eyes,” said Eunice, “but rather peculiar for hair.”

  They got to making fun of the picture, and Dan told them about Alice and her family; the father left them at the table, and then came back with word from Dan’s mother that she was ready to see him.

  XXX.

  By eight o’clock in the evening the pain with which every day began for Mrs. Mavering was lulled, and her jarred nerves were stayed by the opiates till she fell asleep about midnight. In this interval the family gathered into her room, and brought her their news and the cheer of their health. The girls chattered on one side of her bed, and their father sat with his newspaper on the other, and read aloud the passages which he thought would interest her, while she lay propped among her pillows, brilliantly eager for the world opening this glimpse of itself to her shining eyes. That was on her good nights, when the drugs did their work, but there were times when they failed, and the day’s agony prolonged itself through the evening, and the sleep won at last was a heavy stupor. Then the sufferer’s temper gave way under the stress; she became the torment she suffered, and tore the hearts she loved. Most of all, she afflicted the man who had been so faithful to her misery, and maddened him to reprisals, of which he afterward abjectly repented. Her tongue was sharpened by pain, and pitilessly skilled to inculpate and to punish; it pierced and burned like fire but when a good day came again she made it up to the victims by the angelic sweetness and sanity which they felt was her real self; the cruelty was only the mask of her suffering.

  When she was better they brought to her room anybody who was staying with them, and she liked them to be jolly in the spacious chamber. The pleasantest things of the house were assembled, and all its comforts concentrated, in the place which she and they knew she should quit but once. It was made gay with flowers and pictures; it was the salon for those fortunate hours when she became the lightest and blithest of the company in it, and made the youngest guest forget that there was sickness or pain in the world by the spirit with which she ignored her own. Her laugh became young again; she joked; she entered into what they were doing and reading and thinking, and sent them away full of the sympathy which in this mood of hers she had for every mood in others. Girls sighed out their wonder and envy to her daughters when they left her; the young men whom she captivated with her divination of their passions or ambitions went away celebrating her supernatural knowledge of human nature. The next evening after some night of rare and happy excitement, the family saw her nurse carrying the pictures and flowers and vases out of her room, in sign of her renunciation of them all, and assembled silently, shrinkingly, in her chamber, to take each their portion of her anguish, of the blame and the penalty. The household adjusted itself to her humours, for she was supreme in it.

  When Dan used to come home from Harvard she put on a pretty cap for him, and distinguished him as company by certain laces hiding her wasted frame, and giving their pathetic coquetry to her transparent wrists. He was her favourite, and the girls acknowledged him so, and made their fun of her for spoiling him. He found out as he grew up that her broken health dated from his birth, and at first this deeply affected him; but his young life soon lost the keenness of the impression, and he loved his mother because she loved him, and not because she had been dying for him so many years.

  As he now came into her room, and the waiting-woman went out of it with her usual, “Well, Mr. Dan!” the tenderness which filled him at sight of his mother was mixed with that sense of guilt which had tormented him at times ever since he met his sisters. He was going to take himself from her; he realised that.

  “Well, Dan!” she called, so gaily that he said to himself, “No, father hasn’t told her anything about it,” and was instantly able to answer her as cheerfully, “Well, mother!”

  He bent over her to kiss her, and the odour of the clean linen mingling with that of the opium, and the cologne with which she had tried to banish its scent, opened to him one of those vast reaches of associations which perfumes can unlock, and he saw her lying there through those years of pain, as many as half his life, and suddenly the tears gushed into his eyes, and he fell on his knees, and hid his face in the bed-clothes and sobbed.

  She kept smoothing his head, which shook under her thin hand, and saying, “Poor Dan! poor Dan!” but did not question him. He knew that she knew what he had come to tell her, and that his tears, which had not been meant for that, had made interest with her for him and his cause, and that she was already on his side.

  He tried boyishly to dignify the situation when he lifted his face, and he said, “I didn’t mean to come boohooing to you in this way, and I’m ashamed of myself.”

  “I know, Dan; but you’ve been wrought up, and I don’t wonder. You mustn’t mind your father and your sisters. Of course, they’re rather surprised, and they don’t like your taking yourself from them — we, none of us do.”

  At these honest words Dan tried to become honest too. At least he dropped his pretence of dignity, and became as a little child in his simple greed for sympathy. “But it isn’t necessarily that; is it, mother?”

  “Yes, it’s all that, Dan; and it’s all right, because it’s that. We don’t like it, but our not liking it has nothing to do with its being right or wrong.”

  “I supposed that father would have been pleased, anyway; for he has seen her, and — and. Of course the girls haven’t, but I think they might have trusted my judgment a little. I’m not quite a fool.”

  His mother smiled. “Oh, it isn’t a question of the wisdom of your choice; it’s the unexpectedness. We all saw that you were very unhappy when you were here before, and we supposed it had gone wrong.”

  “It had, mother,” said Dan. “She refused me at Campobello. But it was a misunderstanding, and as soon as we met—”

  “I knew you had met again, and what you had come home for, and I told your father so, when he came to say you were here.”

  “Did you, mother?” he asked, charmed at her having guessed that.

  “Yes. She must be a good girl to send you straight home to tell us.”

  “You knew I wouldn’t have thought of that myself,” said Dan joyously. “I wanted to write; I thought that would do just as well. I hated to leave her, but she made me come. She is the best, and the wisest, and the most unselfish — O mother, I can’t tell you about her! You must see her. You can’t realise her till you see her, mother. You’ll like each other, I’m sure of that. You’re just alike.” It seemed to Dan that they were exactly alike.

  “Then perhaps we sha’n’t,” suggested his mother. “Let me see her picture.”

  “How did you know I had it? If it hadn’t been for her, I shouldn’t have brought any. She put it into my pocket just as I was leaving. She said you would all want to see what she looked like.”

  He had taken it out of his pocket, and he held it, smiling fondly upon it. Alice seemed to smile back at him. He had lost her in the reluctance of his father and sisters; and now his mother — it was his
mother who had given her to him again. He thought how tenderly he loved his mother.

  When he could yield her the photograph, she looked long and silently at it. “She has a great deal of character, Dan.”

  “There you’ve hit it, mother! I’d rather you would have said that than anything else. But don’t you think she’s beautiful? She’s the gentlest creature, when you come to know her! I was awfully afraid of her at first. I thought she was very haughty. But she isn’t at all. She’s really very self-depreciatory; she thinks she isn’t good enough for me. You ought to hear her talk, mother, as I have. She’s full of the noblest ideals — of being of some use in the world, of being self-devoted, and — all that kind of thing. And you can see that she’s capable of it. Her aunt’s in a Protestant sisterhood,” he said, with a solemnity which did not seem to communicate itself to his mother, for Mrs. Mavering smiled. Dan smiled too, and said: “But I can’t tell you about Alice, mother. She’s perfect.” His heart overflowed with proud delight in her, and he was fool enough to add, “She’s so affectionate!”

  His mother kept herself from laughing. “I dare say she is, Dan — with you.” Then she hid all but her eyes with the photograph, and gave way.

  “What a donkey!” said Dan, meaning himself. “If I go on, I shall disgust you with her. What I mean is that she isn’t at all proud, as I used to think she was.”

  “No girl is, under the circumstances. She has all she can do to be proud of you.”

  “Do you think so, mother?” he said, enraptured with the notion. “I’ve done my best — or my worst — not to give her any reason to be so.”

  “She doesn’t ‘want any — the less the better. You silly boy! Don’t you suppose she wants to make you out of whole cloth just as you do with her? She doesn’t want any facts to start with; they’d be in the way. Well, now, I can make out, with your help, what the young lady is; but what are the father and mother? They’re rather important in these cases.”