Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  As they drew near their journey’s end he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to break it to them.”

  “Oh, probably break itself,” said Boardman. “These things usually do.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dan assented.

  “Know from your looks that something’s up. Or you might let me go ahead a little and prepare them.”

  Dan laughed. “It was awfully good of you to come, Boardman. I don’t know what I should have done without you.”

  “Nothing I like more than these little trips. Brightens you up to sere the misery of others; makes you feel that you’re on peculiarly good terms with Providence. Haven’t enjoyed myself so much since that day in Portland.” Boardman’s eyes twinkled.

  “Yes,” said Dan, with a deep sigh, “it’s a pity it hadn’t ended there.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You won’t have to go through with it again. Something that had to come, wasn’t it? Never been satisfied if you hadn’t tried it. Kind of aching void before, and now you’ve got enough.”

  “Yes, I’ve got enough,” said Dan, “if that’s all.”

  When they got out of the train at Ponkwasset Falls, and the conductor and the brakeman, who knew Dan as his father’s son, and treated him with the distinction due a representative of an interest valued by the road, had bidden him a respectfully intimate good-night, and he began to climb the hill to his father’s house, he recurred to the difficulty before him in breaking the news to his family. “I wish I could have it over in a flash. I wish I’d thought to telegraph it to them.”

  “Wouldn’t have done,” said Boardman. “It would have given ’em time to formulate questions and conjectures, and now the astonishment will take their breath away till you can get your second wind, and then — you’ll be all right.”

  “You think so?” asked Dan submissively.

  “Know so. You see, if you could have had it over in a flash, it would have knocked you flat. But now you’ve taken all the little steps, and you’ve got a lot more to take, and you’re all braced up. See? You’re like rock, now — adamant.” Dan laughed in forlorn perception of Boardman’s affectionate irony. “Little steps are the thing. You’ll have to go in now and meet your family, and pass the time of day with each one, and talk about the weather, and account for my being along, and ask how they all are; and by the time you’ve had dinner, and got settled with your legs out in front of the fire, you’ll be just in the mood for it. Enjoy telling them all about it.”

  “Don’t, Boardman,” pleaded Dan. “Boardy, I believe if I could get in and up to my room without anybody’s seeing me, I’d let you tell them. There don’t seem to be anybody about, and I think we could manage it.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” said Boardman. “Got to do it yourself.”

  “Well, then, wait a minute,” said Dan desperately; and Boardman knew that he was to stay outside while Dan reconnoitred the interior. Dan opened one door after another till he stood within the hot brilliantly lighted hall. Eunice Mavering was coming down the stairs, hooded and wrapped for a walk on the long verandahs before supper.

  “Dan!” she cried.

  “It’s all up, Eunice,” he said at once, as if she had asked him about it. “My engagement’s off.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad!” She descended upon him with outstretched arms, but stopped herself before she reached him. “It’s a hoax. What do you mean? Do you really mean it, Dan?”

  “I guess I mean it. But don’t — Hold on! Where’s Minnie?”

  Eunice turned, and ran back upstairs. “Minnie! Min!” she called on her way. “Dan’s engagement’s off.”

  “I don’t believe it!” answered Minnie’s voice joyously, from within some room. It was followed by her presence, with successive inquiries. “How do you know? Did you get a letter? When did it happen? Oh, isn’t it too good?”

  Minnie was also dressed for the verandah promenade, which they always took when the snow was too deep. She caught sight of her brother as she came down. “Why, Dan’s here! Dan, I’ve been thinking about you all day.” She kissed him, which Eunice was now reminded to do too.

  “Yes, it’s true, Minnie,” said Dan gravely. “I came up to tell you. It don’t seem to distress you much.”

  “Dan!” said his sister reproachfully. “You know I didn’t mean to say anything I only felt so glad to have you back again.”

  “I understand, Minnie — I don’t blame you. It’s all right. How’s mother? Father up from the works yet? I’m going to my room.”

  “Indeed you’re not!” cried Eunice, with elder sisterly authority. “You shall tell us about it first.”

  “Oh no! Let him go, Eunice!” pleaded Minnie, “Poor Dan! And I don’t think we ought to go to walk when—”

  Dan’s eyes dimmed, and his voice weakened a little at her sympathy. “Yes, go. I’m tired — that’s all. There isn’t anything to tell you, hardly. Miss Pasmer—”

  “Why, he’s pale!” cried Minnie. “Eunice!”

  “Oh, it’s just the heat in here.” Dan really felt a little sick and faint with it, but he was not sorry to seem affected by the day’s strain upon his nerves.

  The girls began to take off their wraps. “Don’t. I’ll go with you. Boardman’s out there.”

  “Boardman! What nonsense!” exclaimed Eunice.

  “He’ll like to hear your opinion of it,” Dan began; but his sister pulled the doors open, and ran out to see if he really meant that too.

  Whether Boardman had heard her, or had discreetly withdrawn out of earshot at the first sound of voices, she could not tell, but she found him some distance away from the snow-box on the piazza. “Dan’s just managed to tell us you were here,” she said, giving him her hand. “I’m glad to see you. Do come in.”

  “Come along as a sort of Job’s comforter,” Boardman explained, as he followed her in; and he had the silly look that the man who feels himself superfluous must wear.

  “Then you know about it?” said Eunice, while Minnie Mavering and he were shaking hands.

  “Yes, Boardman knows; he can tell you about it,” said Dan, from the hall chair he had dropped into. He rose and made his way to the stairs, with the effect of leaving the whole thing to them.

  His sisters ran after him, and got him upstairs and into his room, with Boardman’s semi-satirical connivance, and Eunice put up the window, while Minnie went to get some cologne to wet his forehead. Their efforts were so successful that he revived sufficiently to drive them out of his room, and make them go and show Boardman to his.

  “You know the way, Mr. Boardman,” said Eunice, going before him, while Minnie followed timorously, but curious for what he should say. She lingered on the threshold, while her sister went in and pulled the electric apparatus which lighted the gas-burners. “I suppose Dan didn’t break it?” she said, turning sharply upon him.

  “No; and I don’t think he was to blame,” said Boardman, inferring her reserved anxiety.

  “Oh, I’m quite sure of that,” said Eunice, rejecting what she had asked for. “You’ll find everything, Mr. Boardman. It was kind of you to come with Dan. Supper’s at seven.”

  “How severe you were with him!” murmured Minnie, following her away.

  “Severe with Dan?”

  “No — with Mr. Boardman.”

  “What nonsense! I had to be. I couldn’t let him defend Dan to me. Couple of silly boys!”

  After a moment Minnie said, “I don’t think he’s silly.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Boardman.”

  “Well, Dan is, then, to bring him at such a time. But I suppose he felt that he couldn’t get here without him. What a boy! Think of such a child being engaged! I hope we shan’t hear any more of such nonsense for one while again — at least till Dan’s got his growth.”

  They went down into the library, where, in their excitement, they sat down with most of their outdoor things on.

  Minnie had the soft contrary-mindedness of gentle natures. “I should like t
o know how you would have had Dan bear it,” she said rebelliously.

  “How? Like a man. Or like a woman. How do you suppose Miss Pasmer’s bearing it? Do you suppose she’s got some friend to help her?”

  “If she’s broken it, she doesn’t need any one,” urged Minnie.

  “Well,” said Eunice, with her high scorn of Dan unabated, “I never could have liked that girl, but I certainly begin to respect her. I think I could have got on with her — now that it’s no use. I declare,” she broke off, “we’re sitting here sweltering to death! What are we keeping our things on for?” She began to tear hers violently off and to fling them on chairs, scolding, and laughing at the same time with Minnie, at their absent-mindedness.

  A heavy step sounded on the verandah without.

  “There’s father!” she cried vividly, jumping to her feet and running to the door, while Minnie, in a nervous bewilderment, ran off upstairs to her room. Eunice flung the door open. “Well, father, we’ve got Dan back again.” And at a look of quiet question in his eye she hurried on: “His engagement’s broken, and he’s come up here to tell us, and brought Mr. Boardman along to help.”

  “Where is he?” asked the father, with his ruminant quiet, pulling off first one sleeve of his overcoat, and pausing for Eunice’s answer before he pulled off the other.

  XLVI.

  “He’s up in his room, resting from the effort.” She laughed nervously, and her father made no comment. He took off his articles, and then went creaking upstairs to Dan’s room. But at the door he paused, with his hand on the knob, and turned away to his own room without entering.

  Dan must have heard him; in a few minutes he came to him.

  “Well, Dan,” said his father, shaking hands.

  “I suppose Eunice has told you? Well, I want to tell you why it happened.”

  There was something in his father that always steadied Dan and kept him to the point. He now put the whole case fairly and squarely, and his candour and openness seemed to him to react and characterise his conduct throughout. He did not realise that this was not so till his father said at the close, with mild justice, “You were to blame for letting the thing run on so at loose ends.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Dan, seeing that he was. “But there was no intention of deceiving any one of bad faith—”

  “Of course not.”

  “I thought it could be easily arranged whenever it came to the point.”

  “If you’d been older, you wouldn’t have thought that. You had women to deal with on both sides. But if it’s all over, I’m not sorry. I always admired Miss Pasmer, but I’ve been more and more afraid you were not suited to each other. Your mother doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?”

  “How did your sisters take it?”

  Dan gave a rueful laugh. “It seemed to be rather a popular move with them.”

  “I will see your mother first,” said the father.

  He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a little later Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.

  He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness. “It’s no use pretending that I’m not a pretty large plurality here,” he said to Minnie.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you came!” she cried, with a kindness which was as real as if it had been more sincere.

  “Do you think mother will feel it much?” asked Dan anxiously, as he went upstairs with Eunice.

  “Well, she’ll hate to lose a correspondent — such a regular one,” said Eunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, she laughed the rest of the way to their mother’s room.

  The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs. Mavering’s life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their peculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some very marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited characteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side, were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and her mother’s father, had these qualities in the same combination.

  When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was sharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what their characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving to their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded the student of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity of circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant misbehaviour of others.

  As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she stretched the other towards him.

  “I’m glad of it, Dan!” she called, at the moment he opened the door, and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: “I know all about it, and I don’t blame you a bit! And I don’t blame her! Poor helpless young things! But it’s a perfect mercy it’s all over; it’s the greatest deliverance I ever heard of! You’d have been eaten up alive. I saw it, and I knew it from the very first moment, and I’ve lived in fear and trembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you’d been left to yourselves, but that you couldn’t have been nor hope to be as long as you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!”

  By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her arm round her boy’s neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after his peril, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeated her accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.

  Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude and tenderness he felt for his mother’s partisanship; and when she went on in almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he had done as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could not imagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into a promise that she knew must break his mother’s heart, he found her so right on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs. Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at the bottom of it all? She was very sly, and she might be very false, and it was certainly she who had first proposed their going abroad together. It looked as if it might be as his mother said, and at any rate it was no time to dispute her, and he did not say a word in behalf of Mrs. Pasmer, whom she continued to rend in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds till she had to stop breathless.

  “Yes! it’s quite as I expected! She did everything she could to trap you into it. She fairly flung that poor girl at you. She laid her plans so that you couldn’t say no — she understood your character from the start! — and then, when it came out by accident, and she saw that she had older heads to deal with, and you were not going to be quite at her mercy, she dropped the mask in an instant, and made Alice break wit
h you. Oh, I could see through her from the beginning! And the next time, Dan, I advise you, as you never suspect anybody yourself, to consult with somebody who doesn’t take people for what they seem, and not to let yourself be flattered out of your sensor, even if you see your father is.”

  Mrs. Mavering dropped back on her pillow, and her husband smiled patiently at their daughter.

  Dan saw his patient smile and understood it; and the injustice which his father bore made him finally unwilling to let another remain under it. Hard as it was to oppose his mother in anything when she was praising him so sweetly and comforting him in the moment of his need, he pulled himself together to protest: “No, no, mother! I don’t think Mrs. Pasmer was to blame; I don’t believe she had anything to do with it. She’s always stood my friend—”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt she’s made you think so, Dan,” said his mother, with unabated fondness for him; “and you think so because you’re so simple and good, and never suspect evil of any one. It’s this hideous optimism that’s killing everything—”

  A certain note in the invalid’s falling voice seemed to warn her hearers of an impending change that could do no one good. Eunice rose hastily and interrupted: “Mother, Mr. Boardman’s here. He came up with Dan. May Minnie come in with him?”

  Mrs. Mavering shot a glance of inquiry at Dan, and then let a swift inspection range over all the details of the room, and finally concentrate itself on the silk and lace of her bed, over which she passed a smoothing hand. “Mr. Boardman?” she cried, with instantly recovered amiability. “Of course she may!”

  XLVII.

  In Boston the rumour of Dan’s broken engagement was followed promptly by a denial of it; both the rumour and the denial were apparently authoritative; but it gives the effect of a little greater sagacity to distrust rumours of all kinds, and most people went to bed, after the teas and dinners and receptions and clubs at which the fact was first debated, in the self-persuasion that it was not so. The next day they found the rumour still persistent; the denial was still in the air too, but it seemed weaker; at the end of the third day it had become a question as to which broke the engagement, and why; by the end of a week it was known that Alice had broken the engagement, but the reason could not be ascertained.