Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “We are both saints,” I suggested. “I endured him.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not. Nevil really loved him, and I believe he loves his memory to this day.”

  “Well, at any rate Faulkner’s out of the story,” I urged.

  “I’m not so sure of that!” cried my friend. “I’m afraid it’s their foolish constancy to him that keeps those two from thinking of each other.”

  “Are you, really?” I asked, and I found a perverse amusement in playing with her shrewd ignorance so near my knowledge, which it could so easily have penetrated. “It seems to me that if they were inclined to each other, their allegiance to the dead would have very little effect. I suspect that conscience, or the moral sentiments, or whatever we call the supersensuous equipment, has nothing to do with people’s falling in love, except to find reasons and justifications for it, and to add a zest to it.”

  “I will write that to Mrs. March,” said my friend, “and ask her if those are her ideas, too.”

  “Oh, I know!” I answered airily. “You ladies like to pretend that it’s an affair of the soul, or if possible, of the intellect; and as your favor is the breath of the novelists’ nostrils, they all flatter you up in your pretension, till you get to believing in it yourselves. But at the bottom of your hearts, you know, as we do, that it’s a plain, earthly affair, for this life, for this trip and train only.”

  “Shocking! shocking!” said my friend, shaking her head, which had grown charmingly gray, in a marquise manner, and evincing her delight in the boldness with which I handled the matter.

  “You may be sure,” I concluded, “that if these two people have not fallen in love, it’s because they don’t fancy each other. If they did, there would be no consideration of sentiment, no air-woven tie of fealty to a love or a friendship of the past, which would hold them in the leash. If Faulkner’s ghost rose between them, they would plunge through it into each other’s arms.”

  “Ah, now you are talking atrociously!” said my friend.

  I had indeed been hurried a little beyond myself by a sudden realization of the fact that so far as Hermia was concerned, the past was obliterated by her determination to leave everything to Nevil; and that as soon as Nevil knew everything, he would decide, as I should have decided, that every consideration of honor and delicacy and duty, as well as of love, bound him to her. An added impulse had been given to my words by the consciousness that I was the only means of making her determination known to him, that whether she had inspired her mother to ask this service of me or not, she tacitly hoped it, and that in the end I should probably somehow render it.

  But I instinctively fought off from it as long as I could, and I resolved to leave town without rendering it if possible. I spent most of the afternoon with my friend; and she sent a late embassy to the Faulkners to know if she might keep me to dinner. They consented, as they must; Hermia herself wrote that she consented only because she was so completely prostrated that she could not hope to see me at dinner, and her mother was not well; they counted upon having me several days with them, and they would not be selfish.

  VII

  THE FAULKNERS of course knew nothing of my intention of going that night, and I staid rather late after dinner, so that I should not have much more time than I needed to pack my bag and catch my train. I thought that if I could not altogether escape an embarrassing urgence from them to stay longer, I could at least cut it short. But I found that it was a needless precaution when I went back to them. Mrs. Faulkner, the mother, received my reasons for hurrying home with all the acquiescence I could have wished. She said she knew I must be anxious to get back to my family whom I had left at such short notice; that Hermia and herself appreciated my kindness and my wife’s goodness more than they could ever express; and they hoped and prayed that if our need should ever be like theirs we might find such friends in it as we had been to them. I felt an unintentional irony in these thanks so far as they concerned the perfection of my own friendship, but I still had no disposition to repair its lack by offering to see Nevil for her. That, I felt, more and more, I could not do; but I stood a moment, questioning whether I ought not to renew my expressions of regret that I could not do it. I ended by saying that I hoped all would turn out for the best with them; and I added some platitudes and inanities which she seemed not to hear, for she broke in upon them with excuses for Hermia, who would not be able to see me, she was afraid. I said, I knew what a wretched day she had been having, and I left my adieux with Mrs. Faulkner for her. Perhaps if I had not myself been so distraught I might have noticed more the incoherent attention Mrs. Faulkner was able to give me throughout this interview. But I did not realize it till afterward. I went to my room, glad to have it over so easily, and resolved to get out of the house with all possible despatch. I had a carriage at the gate, and I looked forward to waiting an hour and a half in the depot before my train started with more pleasure than such a prospect ever inspired in me before.

  In the confusion which afterward explained and justified itself, Mrs. Faulkner had failed to offer me the superfluous help of a servant to fetch down my bag, and I was descending the stairs with it in my hand when I heard a door close in the corridor which led to Faulkner’s den. Steps uneven and irregular advanced toward the square hall at the foot of the stairs, and in a moment I saw a man stagger into the light, and stay himself by a clutch at the newel-post. He looked around as if dazed, and then vaguely up at me, where I stood as motionless and helpless as he. I have no belief he saw me; but at any rate, Nevil turned at the cry of “James! James!” which came in Hermia’s voice from the corridor, and caught her in his arms as she flew upon him. She locked her arms around his neck, and wildly kissed him again and again, with sobs such as break from the ruin of life and love; with gasps like dying, and with a fond, passionate moaning broken by the sound of those fierce, swift kisses.

  I pitied her far too much to feel ashamed of my involuntary witness of the scene; though as for that I do not believe she would have foregone one caress if she had known that all the world was looking. I perceived that this was the end; and I understood as clearly as if I had been told that she had confided her secret to him, had left their fate in his hands, and that he had decided against their love. It maddened me against him, to think he had done that. I did not know, I did not care, what motive, what reason, what scruple had governed him; I felt that there could be only one good in the world, and that was the happiness of that woman. For the moment, this happiness seemed centred and existent solely in her possession of him. But I was sensible, through my compassion and my indignation, that whatever he had done, she was admiring, adoring him for it. I saw that, in a flash of her upturned face, as I stood, with my heart in my mouth, before the tragedy of their renunciation. The play suddenly ended. With one last long kiss, she pushed him from her, and fled back into the corridor.

  VIII

  I FOUND MYSELF outside in the night, and at the gate I found Nevil in parley with my coachman, who was explaining to him that he was engaged to take a gentleman inside the house, there, to the depot, and could not carry Nevil home.

  “Get in, Mr. Nevil,” I said. “I’ve plenty of time, and can drop you wherever you say.”

  It was as if we had both just come Out of the theatre, and actor and spectator had met on the same footing of the commonplace world of reality.

  “Oh, Mr. March!” he said. “Is that you? I will drive with you as far as my study, if you’ll let me. I don’t feel quite able to walk.”

  “Yes, certainly. Get in.”

  He gave the direction, “St. Luke’s Church,” and I followed him into the hack, and he shrank into the corner, and scarcely spoke till we reached the church. By the gleams that the street lamps threw into the windows as we passed them I had glimpses of his face, haggard and estranged. He tried to fit his latch-key to the door in the church edifice, and then gave it to me, saying with pathetic feebleness, “You do it. I can’t. And don’t go — don’t leave me,” he added, a
s we entered. “Come in, a moment.”

  I told the driver to wait, and I suppose he had his conjectures as to the condition in which I was getting the Rev. James Nevil into his study. He was like one drunk, and he went reeling and stumbling before me. Once within he seemed almost unconscious of me, where he sat sunken in an arm-chair, staring at the fire in the grate, and I waited for him to speak. At last I made a movement, and he took it as a sign of departure, and put out his hand entreatingly. “No, no! You mustn’t go. I want to tell you—” And then he lapsed again into his silence. At last he broke from it with a long sigh: that “Ah-h-h!” which I remembered from the time when he spoke, on the cliffs by the sea, of Faulkner’s unkindness to Hermia. “Well, it is ended!”

  I had not the heart to pretend that I did not know what he meant. I said nothing, and he lifted his face toward me where I stood, leaning on his chimney-piece.

  “Hermia has told me that you know about this unhappiness of ours,” he said, hoarsely. “Your knowledge makes you the one human being whom I can speak to of it; perhaps it gives you the right to know all — all there is.”

  “No, no,” I protested. “I have no claim, and I haven’t the wish.” I mechanically referred to my watch, and seeing that I had abundant time before my train went, I dropped into the chair beside the hearth, and ended by saying, “But I should be glad if I could in any way serve you or help you. I do know the painful situation in which you are placed, and though I can truly say that neither my wife nor I have ever tried to know of it, I confess that we have been most deeply interested, and you have both had our sympathy in a measure which I needn’t try to express.” I instinctively calmed my tone to an effect of quiet upon his agitation.

  “You have been very good — far kinder friends than we could have hoped to find, and there is nothing that such friends as you may not know, so far as we are concerned. But there is very little more to tell. It is all over.”

  I thought he wished me to ask how, and I said, “Mrs. Faulkner’s mother told me this morning that they were waiting to see you — or rather to let you know on your return—”

  “Yes. I expected to return to-night, but I came back late this afternoon, and I went directly to them, of course. It was not what Hermia wished — it was what she dreaded most — but it was doubtless for the best; at any rate it happened. In a moment we were confronted with our question. She told me, fully and fearlessly, as she deals with everything, just what it was, and we set ourselves to solve it — to solve it, if possible, in favor of ourselves, our weakness, perhaps our sin!” His head dropped on his breast, and I saw his eyes fixed with a dreary stare on the smouldering fire. I was sensible, without looking about it much, of the character of the room. It was one of those studies which clergymen for their convenience sometimes have in their church buildings, and where I suppose they go to read and write and think, and transact church business with the officers of their church, and receive people who come to them for counsel or comfort in such straits as those which bring us in piteous entreaty before the ministers of conscience. It is a kind of Protestant confessional; and while I waited for Nevil to speak again, I recalled stories I had heard of guilty souls seeking such an asylum for that relief which we shall all know at the judgment-day, when we shall be stripped bare before the divine compassion down to our inmost thoughts and purposes. Women who have betrayed their husbands go there to own their shame; men that have cheated and stolen and lied, go there to lay the burden of their wrong-doing upon the priest of God; and with these a mass of minor sinners, with their peccadilloes of temper and breeding and deceit; as well as the self-accusers who wish to purge their spirits even of the dread of sin, and to receive the acquittal which they cannot give themselves. More and more as Nevil went on it seemed to me that the place was not favorable to a judicial examination of his own case; that the color of things he had heard there must stain and blacken the facts of his own experience, and prevent him from seeing them aright.

  “The question was,” he said, lifting his head, and bending that hopeless stare on me, “not what we should do, with that shadow of Faulkner’s dream hanging over us, but what we had done — what I had done — to cause him the torment of such a dream.”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Mr. Nevil,” I broke in, “don’t take that way of looking at it. You had no more to do with causing that dream than I had. The pain he suffered — the physical pain — caused the craze which his dream came from. It was a somnambulic mania — nothing more and nothing less. Dr. Wingate assured Mrs. Faulkner in the most solemn manner—”

  “Ah, the sincerity of a doctor with his patient! He is a skilful man, very able, very learned; he knows all about the body, but the soul and its secrets are beyond science. There are facts in the case that he has never had before him. I knew Hermia first, in the loveliness of her young girlhood, and I brought her and Faulkner together.”

  I murmured, “Yes, I remember you told me.”

  “I saw the impression she instantly made upon him: it was love at first sight. But though the love of her had possessed his whole soul, he was first faithful to his friendship with me. In that childlike, simple, cordial truthfulness of his, which no one ever knew so fully as I, and which I shall never see in any other man, he pressed me to tell him whether I had any feeling for her myself, for then he would go away, and live his passion down, as best he could, and leave her to me. I assured him that I had no such feeling, no feeling but that pleasure in her beauty and goodness which every one must have in her presence; and they were married.”

  The silence following upon the gasp in which these words ended was not such as I could break. After a moment Nevil went on.

  “I believed what I said; I have never doubted it till this day. But — how do I know — how do I know — that I was not in love with her then, that I have not always been in love with her through all his life and death? It is such a subtle, such a fatal thing in its perversion! I have seen it in others; why shouldn’t it be in me? Why shouldn’t we have been playing a part unknowingly to ourselves, hypocrites before our own souls? Why should I ever have consented to be with them, to qualify their home by an alien presence, through the daily, hourly lie of friendship for him, except that I loved her, and longed to be near her? Why could not I have kept the love of that poor foolish young girl, innocent and harmless, for all her levity, which she gave me Out there in the West, except that in the guilty inmost of my heart there was no room for anything but love for my friend’s wife, whom it had made his widow? Why—”

  “Hold on! Wait! This is monstrous!” I broke in upon him. “It’s atrocious. You’re the victim of your own morbid introspection, of a kind of self-analysis that never ends in anything but self-conviction. I know what it is, every one knows; and it’s your right, it’s your duty as a man to stand out against it, and not let the honest and lawful feeling you now have damn the past to shame!”

  I spoke vehemently, far beyond any explicit right I had to adjure him, but I could see that my words had not the slightest weight with him.

  “And Hermia,” he went on, “why should she have cared nothing for Faulkner at first? Why, when she believed she had schooled herself to love him, should she have suffered the ever-repeated intrusion of my presence in her home? Why should she have refused so long to know what his dream was? Why should we have made such haste to separate after Faulkner’s death; and then why should my thoughts have turned so instantly to her, with such longing for her pity, in that shame I underwent; and why should she have honored and not despised me for a misfortune that my own folly had provoked? There is one answer to it all!”

  “And the answer is that your view of the case is as purely an aberration as Faulkner’s dream.”

  “Ah, you can’t account for everything on the ground of madness! Somewhere, some time, there must be responsibility for wrong.”

  “Even if we have to find it in innocence! I tell you that your view of the situation is as false as that which the lowest scandal-mongering m
ind of an enemy could take of it. You are bound to let your own character — or if not your character, then her character, her nature — count for something in making up such a judgment. I will leave you out of the question, if you like, but I would stake my life upon the singleness of her devotion, in thought, feeling, and deed, to that wretched man whose misery seems such an inextinguishable poison. It’s preposterous that I should be defending her to you; but if you have suffered her to share these misgivings of yours, I say you’ve done a cruel thing. I know — her mother told me — that after what she underwent from learning just what Faulkner’s dream was — and my wife and I saw something of her suffering, both in Boston and on the way out here—”