Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I never liked this family very much,” said Mrs. Meredith. “They seemed very estimable people, but not—”

  “Our kind? No, decidedly. Did Dr. Olney stay long?”

  “No. Why do you ask? “ Mrs. Meredith returned, with a startled look.

  “Oh, nothing. You seemed to be quite chummy with him, and not to want me round a great deal when I came in.” Miss Aldgate had discovered the toe of her boot just beyond her skirt, apparently with some surprise, and she leaned forward to touch it with the point of her parasol, as if to make sure of it. “Is he coming again this evening? “ she asked, leaning back in her chair, and twisting her parasol by its handle.

  “Not unless I send for him. I have his sleeping medicine.”

  “Yes. And I know how to drop it. Did he think it strange my being away from you so much when you needed a doctor?”

  “He knew I didn’t need any doctor. Why do you ask such a question as that?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it might have struck him. But I thought I had better try and see if I could get used to them or not. They’re pretty formal people — conventional. I mean in the way of dress and that kind of thing. They’re formal in their ideals, don’t you know. They would want to do just what they thought other people were doing; they would be dreadfully troubled if there was anything about them that was not just like everybody else. Do you think Mr. Bloomingdale would be so?”

  “I never — liked his family very much,” Mrs. Meredith repeated. “What little I saw of them,” she added, as if conscientiously.

  “Oh, that doesn’t count, Aunt Caroline!” said the girl, with a laugh. “You never liked the families of any of the Americans that you thought fancied me. But the question is not whether we like his family, but whether he’s like them.”

  “You can’t separate him from his family, Rhoda. You must remember that. Each of us is bound by a thousand mysterious ties to our kindred, our ancestors; we can’t get away from them—”

  “Oh, what stuff, aunty! “ Miss Aldgate was still greatly amused. “I should like to know how I’m bound to my mother’s family, that I never saw one of; or to her father or grandfather?”

  “How?” Mrs. Meredith gasped.

  “Yes. Or how much they were bound to me, if they never tried to find me out or make themselves known by any sort of sign? I’m bound to you because we’ve always been together, and I was bound to Uncle Meredith because he was good to me. But there isn’t anything mysterious about it. And Mr. Bloomingdale is bound to his family in the same way. He’s fond of them because he’s been nice to them and they’ve been nice to him. I wonder,” she mused, while Mrs. Meredith felt herself slowly recoil from the point which she had been suddenly caught up to, “whether I really care for him or not? There were very nice things about him; and no, he was not tiresome and formal-minded like them. I wish I had been a little in love with some one, and then I could tell. But I’ve never had anything but decided dislikings, though I didn’t dislike him decidedly. No, I rather liked him. That is, I thought he was good. Yes, I respected his goodness. It’s about the only thing in this world you can respect. But now, I remember, he seemed very young, and all the younger because he thought it was his duty as a minister to seem old. Did you care very much for his sermon?”

  Rhoda came to the end of her thinking aloud with a question that she had to repeat before her aunt asked, drearily in answer, “What sermon?”

  “Why, we only heard him once! The one he preached in Florence. I didn’t have a full sense of his youth till I heard that. Isn’t it strange that there are ever young ministers? I suppose people think they can make up in inspiration what they lack in experience. But that day when I looked round at those men and women, some of them gray-haired, and most of them middle-aged, and all of them knowing so much more about life, and its trials and temptations, and troubles and sorrows, than poor Mr. Bloomingdale — I oughtn’t to call him poor — and heard him going on about the birds and the flowers, I wondered how they could bear it. Of course it was all right; I know that. But if the preacher shouldn’t happen to be inspired, wouldn’t it be awful? How old do you suppose Dr. Olney is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He seems rather bald. Do you think he is forty?”

  “Dear me, no, child! He isn’t thirty yet, I dare say. Some men are bald much earlier than others. It’s a matter of — heredity.”

  “Heredity! Everything’s heredity with you, Aunt Caroline!” the girl laughed. “I’ll bet he’s worn it off by thinking too much in one particular spot. “You know that they say now they can tell just what place in the brain a person thinks this or that; and just where the will-power comes from when you wink your eye, or wiggle your little finger. I wonder if Dr. Olney knows all those things? Have you tried him on your favorite heredity yet?”

  “What do you mean, Rhoda?”

  “I know you have!” the girl exulted. “Well, he is the kind of man I should always want to have for my doctor if I had to have one; though I don’t think he’s done you a great deal of good yet, Aunt Caroline: you look wretched, and I shall feel like scolding Dr. Olney when he comes again. But what I mean is, he has such noble ideas: don’t you think he has?”

  “Yes — yes. About what?”

  “Why, about the negroes, you know.” Mrs. Meredith winced at the word. “I never happened to see it in that light before. I thought when we had set them free, we had done everything. But I can see now we haven’t. We do perfectly banish them, as far as we can; and we don’t associate with them half as much as we do with the animals. I got to talking with the Bloomingdales this afternoon, and I had to take the negroes’ part. Don’t you think that was funny for a Southern girl?” Mrs. Meredith looked at her with a ghastly face, and moved her lips in answer, without making any sound. “They said that the negroes were an inferior race, and they never could associate with the whites because they never could be intellectually equal with them. I told them about that black English lawyer from Sierra Leone that talked so well at the table d’hôte in Venice — better than anybody else — but they wouldn’t give way. They were very narrow-minded; or the mother was; the rest didn’t say anything; only made exclamations. Mrs. Bloomingdale said Dr. Olney must be a very strange physician, to have those ideas. I hope Mr. Bloomingdale isn’t like her. You would say he was a good deal younger than Dr. Olney, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes — not so very. But why—”

  Rhoda broke out into a laugh of humorous perplexity. “Why, if he were only a little older, or a good deal older, he could advise me whether to marry him or not?” The laughter faded suddenly from her eyes, and she fell back dejectedly against her chair, and remained looking at her aunt, as if trying to read in her face the silent working of her thought. “Well?” she demanded, finally.

  Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes. “Why need you marry any one?”

  “What a funny question! “ the girl answered, with the sparkle of a returning smile. “So as to have somebody to take care of me in my old age!” The young like to speak of age so, with a mocking incredulity; they feel that, however it may have fared with all the race hitherto, they never can be old, and they like to make a joke of the mere notion. “You’ll be getting old yourself some day, Aunt Caroline, and then what shall I do? Don’t you think that a woman ought to got married?

  “Yes — yes. Not always — not necessarily. Certainly not to have some one to take care of her.”

  “Of course not! That would be a very base motive. I suppose I really meant, have somebody for me to take care of. I think that is what keeps one from being lonesome more than anything else. I do feel so alone sometimes. It seems to me there are very few girls so perfectly isolated. Why, just think! With the exception of you, I don’t believe I’ve got a single relation in the world.” Rhoda seemed interested rather than distressed by the fact. “Now there are the Bloomingdales,” she went on; “it seems as if they had connections everywhere. That is something like a family. If I married Mr. B
loomingdale, I could always have somebody to take care of as long as I lived. To be sure, they would be Bloomingdales,” she added, dreamily.

  “Rhoda!” said her aunt, “I cannot let you speak so. If you are in earnest about Mr. Bloomingdale—”

  “I am. But not about his family — or not so much so.”

  “You cannot take him without taking his family; that is always the first thing to be thought of in marriage, and young people think of it the last. The family on each side counts almost as much as the couple themselves in a marriage.”

  “Mine wouldn’t,” the girl interpolated. “There’s so very little of it!”

  If Mrs. Meredith was trying to bring the talk to this point, she now seemed to find herself too suddenly confronted with it, and she shrank back a little. “I don’t mean that family is the first thing.”

  “You just said it was, aunty!”

  “The first thing,” Mrs. Meredith continued, ignoring the teasing little speech, “is to make sure of yourself, to be satisfied that you love him.”

  “It’s so much easier,” the girl sighed in mock-seriousness, “to be satisfied that I don’t love them.”

  “But that won’t do, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Meredith, and I can’t let you treat the matter in this trivial spirit. It is a most important matter — far more important than you can realize.”

  “I can’t realize anything about it — that’s the trouble.”

  “You can realize whether you wish to accept him or not.”

  “No; that’s just what I can’t do.”

  “You’ve had time enough.”

  “I’ve had nearly a week. But I want all the time there is; it wouldn’t be any too much. I must see him again — after seeing so much of his family.”

  “Rhoda!” her aunt called sternly to her from the sofa.

  But Rhoda did not respond with any sort of intimidation. She was looking down into the street from the window where she sat, and she suddenly bowed. “It was Dr. Olney,” she explained. “He was just coming into the hotel, and he looked up. I wonder how he knew it was our window? He seems twice as young with his hat on. I wish he’d wear his hat in the room. But of course he can’t.”

  Everything that had happened since Rhoda came in made it more difficult for Mrs. Meredith to discharge the duty that she thought she had nerved herself up to. She had promised herself that if Rhoda had decided to accept Mr. Bloomingdale, she would speak, and tell her everything; but she was not certain yet that the girl had decided, though from the way in which she played with the question, and her freedom from all anxiety about it, she felt pretty sure that she had. She wished, vaguely, perversely, weakly, that she had not, for then the ordeal for them both could be postponed indefinitely again. She sympathized with the girl in her trials through the young minister’s family, who were so repugnant to her in their eagerness for her, and she burned with a prophetic indignation in imagining how such people would cast her off when they knew what she really was. The young man himself seemed kind and good, and if it were a question of him alone, she believed she could trust him; but these others! that mother, those sisters! She recoiled from the duty of humiliating the poor girl before them, so helplessly, innocently, ignorantly guilty of her own origin. The child’s gayety and lightness, her elfish whimsicality and thoughtless superficiality, as well as those gleams and glimpses of a deeper nature which a word or action gave from time to time, smote the elder woman’s heart with a nameless pain and a tender compassion. By all her circumstance Rhoda had a right to be the somewhat spoiled and teasing pretty thing that she was; and all that sovereign young-ladyishness which sat so becomingly upon her was proper to the station a beautiful young girl holds in a world where she has had only to choose and to command. But Mrs. Meredith shuddered to think with what contempt, open or masquerad- ing as pity, all this would be denied to her. Doubtless she exaggerated; the world slowly changes; it condones many things to those who are well placed in it; and it might not have fared so ill with the child as the woman thought; but Mrs. Meredith bad brooded so long upon her destiny that she could see it only in the gloomiest colors. She was darkling in its deepest shadow when she heard Rhoda saying, as if at the end of some speech that she had not caught, “But he doesn’t seem to have any more family than I have.”

  “Who? “ Mrs. Meredith asked.

  “Dr. Olney.”

  “You don’t know anything about his family.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about my own,” Rhoda answered, lightly. She added, soberly, after a moment: “Don’t you think it’s rather strange that my mother’s family never cared to look us up in any way? Even if they were opposed to her marrying papa, one would think they might have forgiven it by this time. The family ties are so strong, among the French.”

  Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes, and murmured, “It may be different with the Creoles.”

  “No, I don’t believe it is. I’ve heard it’s more so. Did papa never see any of mamma’s family but her father? It seems so strange that she should have been as much alone as I am. I know I have you, Aunt Caroline. Well, I don’t know what to think about Mr. Bloomingdale. I’m always summing up his virtues; he’s very good, and he’s good-looking, and he’s good-natured. He’s rich, though I don’t let that count. He parts his hair too much on one side, but that doesn’t matter, I could make him part it in the middle, and it’s a very pretty shade of brown. His eyes are good, and his mouth wouldn’t be weak if he wore his beard full. I think he has very good ideas, and I’m sure he would be devoted all his days. It isn’t so easy to sum a person up, though, is it? I wish I knew whether I cared for him. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in love with anybody yet. Of course, I’ve had my fancies. I do respect Mr. Bloomingdale, and when I think how very anxious he was to have me care for him, I don’t know but I could if I really tried. But ought one to have to try? That’s the question. Oughtn’t the love to go of itself, without being pushed or pulled? I wish I knew! Aunt Caroline, do you believe in ‘learning to love’ your husband after marriage? That’s what happens in some of the stories; but it seems very ridiculous. I wish it was my duty to marry him — or not to; then I could decide. I believe I’m turning out quite a slave of duty. I must have I caught it from you, Aunt Caroline. Now I can imagine myself sacrificing anything to duty. If Mr. Bloomingdale were to step ashore from the next steamer, and drive to the hotel without stopping to take breath, and get himself shown up here, and say, ‘I’ve just dropped in, Miss Aldgate, to offer you the opportunity of uniting your life with mine in a high and holy purpose — say working among the poor on the east side in New York, or going down to edu- cate the black race in the South! — I believe I should seize the opportunity without a murmur. Perhaps he may. Do you think he will?”

  Rhoda ended her monologue with a gay look at her aunt, who was silent at the end, as she had been throughout, turning the trouble before them over and over in her mind. As happens when we are preoccupied with one thing, all other things seem to tend toward it and bear upon it; half a dozen mere accidents of the girl’s spoken reverie touched the sore place in Mrs. Meredith’s soul and fretted it to an anguish that she asked herself how she could bear. It all accused and judged and condemned her, because she had kept putting by the duty she had to discharge, and making it contingent upon that decision of the girl’s which she was still far from ascertaining. In her recoil from this duty she had believed that if it need not be done at this time, it somehow need never be done; or she had tried to believe this. If Rhoda rejected this young man, she might keep her safe forever from the fact which she felt must wreck the life of the light-hearted, high-spirited girl. That was the refuge which Mrs. Meredith had taken from the task which so strongly beset her; but when she had formulated the case to herself, the absurdity, the impossibility of her position appeared to her. If Rhoda cared nothing for Mr. Bloomingdale, the day would come when she would care everything for some one else; and that day could not be postponed, nor the duty of that day. It would be
crueler to leave her unarmed against the truth until the moment when her heart was set upon a love, and then strike her down with it. Mrs. Meredith now saw this; she saw that the doubt in which she was resting was the very moment of action for her; and that the occasion was divinely appointed for dealing more mercifully with the child than any other that could have offered. She had often imagined herself telling Rhoda what she had to tell, and with the romantic coloring from the novels she had read, she had painted herself in the heroic discharge of her duty at the instant when the girl was radiant in the possession of an accepted love, and had helped her to renounce, to suffer, and to triumph. She had always been very strong in these dramatized encounters, and had borne herself with a stony power throughout, against which the bruised and bleeding girl had rested her broken spirit; but now she cowered before her. She longed to fail upon her knees at her feet, and first implore her forgiveness for what she was going to do, and not speak till she had been forgiven; but habit is strong, really stronger than emotion of any sort, and so Mrs. Meredith remained lying on her sofa, and merely put up her fan to shut out the sight of the child, as she said, “And if it were your duty to give up Mr. Bloomingdale, could you do it?”

  “Oh, instantly Aunt Caroline! “ answered Rhoda, with a gay burlesque of fortitude. “I would not hesitate a single week. But why do you ask such an awful question?”

  “Is it a very awful question? “ Mrs. Meredith palpitated.

  “Well, rather! One may wish to give a person up, but not as a duty.”

  Mrs. Meredith understood this well enough, but it was her perfect intelligence concerning the whole situation that seemed to disable her. She made out to say, “Then you have decided not to give him up yet?”