Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  ‘He seems very much in love, and we feel as happy as we can about him without knowing his fiancée. He has been so long like a son to Mrs. Faulkner, that of course it is a little pang to her, but she reconciles herself to losing him by thinking of his good. I am thoroughly glad, for I think his life was very lonely, and that he longed for companionship. He is of a very simple nature — you cannot always see it under the ecclesiasticism and I think he has missed Douglas almost as much as we have. He hints in his letter that if Douglas were living, and the old place here could welcome him as of old, he could wish for no other home.’

  “Look here, Isabel!” I broke off again. “These seem to me rather wild and whirling words. If Mrs. Faulkner mère is so very happy, why does she have a little pang and have to brace up by thinking of his good? And if Mr. Nevil is so very ecstatic about his betrothed, why does he intimate that if the old home of his friends could still be his, he would not want a new home of his own?”

  “That is very weak in him,” my wife admitted.

  “Yes; let’s hope the future Mrs. Nevil may never get hold of that letter of his. She probably hates the very name of Faulkner already.”

  “If you will go on,” said my wife, “you will see what Hermia says of all that.”

  “Hannah,” I corrected her; but I went on.

  “‘I suppose,’” the letter ran, “‘that this is the last of Mr. Nevil, as far as we are concerned. I could not adopt his old friends, if I were in her place, and I am persuading Mrs. Faulkner to disappear out of his life as promptly and as voluntarily as possible, after his marriage. I know that this is one of the things that men laugh at us for; but I cannot help it, and I grieve to think now that I could not help showing poor Douglas that his friends were less welcome to me than they were to him. Mrs. Faulkner sees the matter as I do; but she will have to play the part of mother-in-law at least so far as the infare is concerned. Mr. Nevil has no relations of his own (he is the most bereft and orphaned person I ever knew), and she has asked him to bring his bride here as he would to his mother’s house. Of course it will all be very quiet; but we must go through some social form of welcome. The marriage is to be very soon — in a month. I will write you about it.’

  I folded up the letter and gave it back to Mrs. March.

  “Now, what have you got to say?” she demanded.

  “I? Oh! May I ask why you didn’t tell me about this letter in the beginning, instead of allowing me to go on with my defamatory conjectures?”

  “I wanted to see you cover yourself with confusion; I wished to give you a lesson.”

  “Pshaw, Isabel! You know that you were so curious about what Wingate told me that it put the letter all out of your head.”

  “And do you say now,” she retorted, quite as if she had got the better of me, and were making one triumph follow upon another, “do you still mean to say that she expected to get him to help her bear the — the shadow of Faulkner’s dream?”

  “Isn’t that rather attenuating it?” I asked. But upon reflection I found that the phrase accurately expressed the case. “Why yes, that’s just what it is. It’s the burden of a shadow! In spite of Wingate’s scientific reluctances, I believe that it crushed poor Faulkner; and I’m glad the weight of it isn’t to fall upon her or upon Nevil. Weight! Why, Isabel, that letter has simply removed mountains from my mind! And the affair was really none of my business, either.”

  “Yes, I’m glad it’s all over,” said my wife, with a sigh of relief. “Now I can respect her without the slightest reservation.”

  “And isn’t it strange,” I suggested, “that this kind of burden she can bear alone, but if she had divided it with him she could not bear it?”

  “Yes, it’s strange,” she answered. “And, as you say, this letter is a great relief. Dr. Wingate may account for it all on scientific grounds if he chooses, and say that Faulkner’s disease caused the dream, and not the dream his disease. But if this had not happened, if this engagement did not give the lie so distinctly to the worst that we ever thought when we thought our worst about it, I never could have felt exactly easy. There would always have been, don’t you know, the misgiving that there was a consciousness of something drawing them together during his life that frightened them apart after his death. But now I feel perfectly sure!”

  There had never been any doubt with us as to the nature of Faulkner’s dream, though we could only conjecture its form and facts. Sometimes these appeared to us very gross and palpable, and again merely a vaguely accusing horror, a ghastly adumbration, a mere sensation, a swiftly vanishing impression. We had talked it over a great deal at first, and then it had faded more and more out of our minds. We had our own cares, our own concerns, which were naturally first with us; and I feel that in giving the idea of our preoccupation with those of others, however interesting, however fascinating, I am contributing to one of those false effects of perspective which have always annoyed me in history. The events of the past are pressed together in that retrospect, as if the past were entirely composed of events, and not, like the present, of long intermediate stretches and spaces of eventlessness, which the rapidly approaching lines and the vanishing point can give no hint of. In spite of everything, since the story only secondarily concerns ourselves, we must appear concerned in it alone, though for that very reason we ought to be able to seem what we really were: spectators giving it a sympathetic and appreciative glance now and then, while we kept about our own business.

  IV

  FOR A WHILE we expected with vivid interest Mrs. Faulkner’s account of the infare, and her description of the bride, and of the bridegroom in his new relations. Then we ceased to talk of it, and I, at least, forgot all about it. The time for her letter had passed when it came, and then we reckoned up the weeks since the last one came, and found that this was almost a month overdue. When we had ascertained this fact, my wife opened the letter, and began to snatch a phrase from this page and another from that, turning to the last and returning to the first, in that provoking way women have with a letter, instead of reading it solidly through from beginning to end. As she did this I saw her eyes dilate, and she grew more and more excited.

  “Well, well?” I called out to her. when this spectacle became intolerable.

  “Oh, my dear, my dear!” she answered, and went on snatching significant fragments from the letter.

  “What is it? Doesn’t the bride suit? Was Nevil too silly about her? Were the dresses from Worth’s? Or what’s the matter?”

  “The engagement — the engagement is off! Nevil is perfectly killed by it; and he’s back on their hands, down sick, and they’re taking care of him. Oh, horrors upon horrors! I never heard of anything so dreadful! And the details — well, the whole thing is simply inexpressible!”

  “Suppose you give Mrs. Faulkner a chance at the inexpressible. I’d rather hear of the calamity at first hands and in a mass, than have it doled out to me piecemeal by a third person, and snatched back at every mouthful.” I put out my hand for the letter, and after a certain hesitation my wife gave it me.

  “Well, see what you can make of it.”

  “I shall make nothing of it; I shall leave that to the facts.”

  These appeared to be that the engagement had gone on like other engagements up to a certain point. The preparations were made; the dresses were bought; the presents were provided, presumably with the usual fatuity and reluctance; the cards were out; the day was fixed. All this had gone forward with no hint of misgiving from the young lady. She seemed excited, Nevil could remember; but to seem excited in such circumstances was to seem natural. Suddenly, a week before the day fixed for the wedding, she discovered that she had made a mistake: she could never have truly loved him, and now she was sure that she did not love him at all. She was not fit to be a clergyman’s wife; she never could make him happy. He must release her; that was the substance of it; but there were decorative prayers to be forgiven and forgotten and accepted in the relation of a friend. She was the onl
y daughter of rich and vulgar parents, and her father added a secret anguish to Nevil’s open shame by offering to make it right with him in any sum he would name; the millionaire wished to act handsomely. Nevil could perhaps have borne both the secret anguish and the open shame; but the Sunday edition of the leading newspaper of the place found the affair a legitimate field of journalistic enterprise. It gave column after column of imagined and half-imagined detail; it gave biographical sketches of what it called the high retracting parties; it gave Nevil’s portrait, the young lady’s portrait, the portraits of the young lady’s parents. It was immensely successful, and it drove Nevil out of town. He came back crushed and broken to his old home, and sought refuge with his old friends from the disgrace of his wrong. He would not see any one but the doctor, outside of their house; he was completely prostrated. The worst ofit was that he seemed really to have been in love with the girl, whom he believed to have been persuaded by her parents to break off the match; though he could not understand why they should have allowed her to go so far. Mrs. Faulkner had her own opinions on this point, which she expressed in her letter, and they were to the effect that the girl was weak and fickle, but that she was right in thinking she never had loved him, however wrong she had been in once thinking differently. This could not be suggested for Nevil’s comfort, and they were obliged tacitly to accept his theory of the matter; he could not bear to think slightingly of her. In fact, it had been a perfect infatuation, and it had been all the more complete because Nevil, though past thirty-five, had never been in love before, and gave himself to his passion with the ardor of an untouched heart, and the strength of a manhood matured in the loftiest worship, and the most childlike ignorance of women, and especially girls. This was what Mrs. Faulkner gathered at second-hand from his talk with her mother-in-law; and she found herself embarrassed in deciding just how to treat the bruised and broken man, so strangely cast upon their compassion. He wanted to talk with her about his misery, but it seemed to her that she ought not to let him; and yet she could not well avoid it, when he turned to her with such a confident expectation of her sympathy. It was very awkward having him in the house; but they could not turn him out of doors; and he clung to Douglas’s mother with all the trusting helplessness of a sick son. It was pathetic to see a man who had once been to her the very embodiment of strong common-sense and spiritual manliness, so weak and helpless. The doctor said he must get away as soon as he could; and he had better go to Europe and travel about. But Nevil was poor; they could send him, of course, and would be glad to do so; but he was sensitive about money, and had none of that innocent clerical willingness to take it.

  The letter closed rather abruptly with civil remembrances to me.

  “Isn’t it cruel, dear?” my wife said, pleadingly, as if to forestall any ironical view I might be inclined to take of the case.

  “Yes, it is cruel,” I answered, quite in earnest, and we went on to talk it over in all the lights. We said, what a strange thing it was, in the distribution of sorrow and trouble, that this one should receive blow after blow, all through life, and that one go untouched from the beginning to the end. Any man would have thought that Mrs. Faulkner had certainly had her share of suffering in her husband’s sickness and death, without having this calamity of his friend laid upon her; for in the mystery of our human solidarity it was clear that she must help him support it. But apparently God did not think so; or was existence all a miserable chance, a series of stupid, blundering accidents? We could not believe that, for our very souls’ sake; and for our own sanity we must not. We who were nowhere when the foundations of the earth were laid, and knew not who had laid the measures of it, or stretched the line upon it, could only feel that our little corner of cognition afforded no perspective of the infinite plan; and we left those others to their place in it, not without commiseration, but certainly without trying to account for what had happened to them, or with any hope of ever offering a justification of it.

  V

  THE SITUATION, which seemed to our despondent philosophy tragically permanent, was of course only a transitory phase; and we quickly had news of a change. Nevil had grown better; he had been invited to resume his former charge, with a year’s leave of absence for travel and the complete recovery of his health. The sort of indignant tenderness with which all his old friends had taken up his cause against his cruel fate had gone far to console and restore him. Mrs. Faulkner spoke of his joy in their affection as something very beautiful, and she dwelt upon the pleasure it gave them to see the old Nevil coming back day by day, in the old unselfish manliness. He had been troubled, in his depression, by the consciousness that it was ignoble to give way to it, and his courage was rising with his strength to resist. But still it was thought best for him to go abroad and complete his recovery by an entire change; and he was going very soon. He had accepted the means from his people as an advance of salary for services which he expected to render, and so the obstacle of his poverty and pride was got over.

  I cannot say that it pleased us greatly to learn that Nevil thought of sailing from Boston, and hoped to see us; but we had our curiosity to satisfy, as well as our intangible obligation of hospitality to fulfil, and my wife wrote asking him to our house for such time as he should have between arriving and departing. He was delayed in one way or other so that he came in the morning, and sailed at noon; she did not meet him at all, but I went over to the ship in East Boston, and saw him off; and then gave her such report of him as I could. I am afraid it was rather vague. I said he seemed shy, as if he were embarrassed by his knowledge that I knew his story; he seemed a little cold; he seemed a little more clerical. I suppose I had really expected him to speak with intense feeling of the Faulkners, and that it disappointed me when he only mentioned them in giving me the messages they had sent. I do not know why I should have felt repelled, almost hurt by his manner; but I dare say it was because I had met him so full of a sympathy which I could not express and which he could not recognize. I was aware afterward of having derived my mood rather from Mrs. Faulkner’s representations of him than from my own recollections. Perhaps I had a romantic wish to behold a man whom the waters had passed over, and who gave evidence of what he had undergone. But Nevil appeared as he had always appeared to me: pure, gentle, serene; not broken, not bruised, and by no means prepared for the compassion which I was prepared to lavish upon him. I did not reflect that the intimacy had proceeded much more rapidly on my part than on his.

  He was in company with a wealthy parishioner, and he presented me as a fellow-Westerner. His friend ordered some champagne in celebration of this fact and of the parting hour, and we had it in their large state-room, the captain’s room, which the parishioner was very proud of having secured. He filled Nevil’s glass slowly, so that he should lose nothing in mere effervescence, and said, “Doctor’s orders, you know.” He explained to me that for his own part he did not care about Europe; he had seen too much of it; but he was going along to watch out that Nevil took care of himself.

  My wife was even less satisfied with this interview at secondhand than I was at first-hand. She insisted that I should search my conscience and say whether I had not met Nevil with too great effusion, which he might justly resent as patronizing. I brought myself in not guilty of this crime, and then she said she had always thought he was tepid and limited, and she was disposed to console herself by finding in my rebuff; as she called it, a just punishment for my having liked Nevil so much. “You can see by that champagne business,” she said, “that, after all, he’s just as much a Westerner at heart as Faulkner. I doubt if he was so much hurt by that newspaper notoriety of his broken engagement as he pretended to be.”

  I admitted that he was a fraud in every respect, and that he had been guilty of something very like larceny in depriving her of a hero. “But,” I said, “you have your heroine left.”

  “Yes, thank goodness! She’s a woman!”

  “A heroine usually is — unless she’s an angel.”


  Nevil was gone a year, and during this time the correspondence between Mrs. Faulkner and Mrs. March, fevered to an abnormal activity by recent events, fell back into the state of correspondence in health, which tends to an exchange of apologies for not having written. Mrs. Faulkner’s letters contained some report of Nevil’s movements; and we had got so used to his being abroad that it seemed very sudden, when one came saying that he had got home, perfectly well, and had gone at once to work in his parish, with all his old energy. She sent some newspapers with marked notices of him; and then it seemed to me that we heard nothing more from her till the next spring, when a most joyful letter burst upon us, as it were, with the announcement of her engagement to Nevil.

  I cannot say exactly what it was about this fact that shocked us both. The affair, superficially, was in every way right and proper. We were sure that, as Hermia reported, Faulkner’s mother was as happy in it as herself, and that it was the just and lawful recompense of suffering that Hermia and Nevil had jointly and severally undergone for no wrong or fault of theirs; we ought to have been glad for them; and yet, somehow, we could not; somehow we were not reconciled to that comfortable close for the most painful passage of life we had ever witnessed. Instead of being the end of trouble, it seemed like the beginning. It brought up again with dreadful vividness all the experiences of that day when Faulkner died. It was as if he rose from the dead, and walked the earth again in the agony of body we had seen, and the anguish of mind we had imagined. Once more I saw him, with a face full of hate, push her from him, and fall back and gasp and die.

  Hermia’s letter came in the morning; and during the forenoon I received a telegram at my office from her asking if Dr. Wingate were in Boston. I sent out and found that the doctor was at home, and answered accordingly. Then I sent the telegram to my wife, and I hurried away from the office rather early in the afternoon, to learn what she made of it.