Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Cornelia went on. “It’s about him, and it’s about some one else, too,” and she had no pity on herself in telling Charmian all about that early, shabby affair with Dickerson.

  “I knew it,” said Charmian, with a sigh of utter content, “I told you, the first time I saw you, that you had lived. Well: and has he — turned up?”

  “He has turned up — three times,” said Cornelia.

  Charmian shivered with enjoyment of the romantic situation. She reached a hand behind her and tried to clutch one of Cornelia’s but had to get on without it. “And well: have they met?”

  “No, they haven’t,” said Cornelia crossly, but not so much with Charmian as with the necessity she was now in of telling her about her last meeting with Ludlow. She began, “They almost did,” and when Charmian in the intensity of her interest could not keep turning around to stare at her, Cornelia took hold of her head and turned her face toward the fire again. Then she went on to tell how it had all happened. She did not spare herself at any point, and she ended the story with the expression of her belief that she had deserved it all. “It wasn’t boxing that little wretch’s ears that was the disgrace; it was having brought myself to where I had to box them.”

  “Yes, that was it,” sighed Charmian, with deep conviction.

  “And I had to tell him that I could never care for him, because I couldn’t bear to tell him what a fool I had been.”

  “No, no; you never could do that!”

  “And I couldn’t bear to have him think I was better than I really was, or let him care for me unless I told him all about that miserable old affair.”

  “No, you couldn’t, Cornelia,” said Charmian solemnly. “Some girls might; most girls would. They would just consider it a flirtation, and not say anything about it, or not till after they were engaged, and then just laugh. But you are different from other girls — you are so true! Yes, you would have to tell it if it killed you; I can see that; and you couldn’t tell it, and you had to break his heart. Yes, you had to!”

  “Oh, Charmian Maybough! How cruel you are!” Cornelia flung herself forward and cried; Charmian whirled round, and kneeling before her, threw her arms around her, in a pose of which she felt the perfection, and kissed her tenderly.

  “Why didn’t you let me see how you were looking? How I have gone on — —”

  Cornelia pulled herself loose. “Charmian! Do you dare to mean that I want him to ever speak to me again — or look at me?”

  “No, no — —”

  “Or that I’m sorry I did it?”

  “No; it’s this cold that’s making me so stupid.”

  “If he were to come back again this instant, I should have to tell him just the same, or else tell him about that — that — and you know I couldn’t do that if I lived a thousand years.”

  Now she melted, indeed, and suffered Charmian to moan over her, and fortify her with all the reasons she had urged herself in various forms of repetition. Charmain showed her again how impossible everything that she had thought impossible was, and convinced her of every conviction. She made Cornelia’s tragedy her romance, and solemnly exulted in its fatality, while she lifted her in her struggle of conscience to a height from which for the present at least, Cornelia could not have descended without a ruinous loss of self-respect. In the renunciation in which the worshipper confirmed her saint, Ludlow and his rights and feelings were ignored, and Cornelia herself was offered nothing more substantial than the prospect that henceforth she and Charmian could live for each other in a union that should be all principle on one side and all adoration on the other.

  XXXIII.

  Cornelia did not go to pass that week in Lent with Mrs. Westley. When she went, rather tardily, to withdraw her promise, she said that the time was now growing so short she must give every moment to the Synthesis. Mrs. Westley tacitly arranged to cancel some little plans she had made for her, and in the pity a certain harassed air of the girl’s moved in her, she accepted her excuses as valid, and said, “But I am afraid you are overworking at the Synthesis, Miss Saunders. Are you feeling quite well?”

  “Oh, perfectly,” Cornelia answered with a false buoyancy from which she visibly fell. She looked down, and said, “I wish the work was twice as hard!”

  “Ah, you have come to that very soon,” said Mrs. Westley; and then they were both silent, till she added, “How are you getting on with your picture of Miss Maybough?”

  “Oh, I’m not doing anything with that,” said Cornelia, and she stood up to go.

  “But you are going to exhibit it?” Mrs. Westley persisted.

  “No, T don’t know as I am. I should have to offer it first.”

  “It would be sure to be accepted; Mr. Ludlow thinks it would.”

  “Oh, yes; I know,” said Cornelia, feeling herself get very red. “But I guess I won’t offer it. Goodbye.”

  Mrs. Westley kept the impression of something much more personal than artistic in Cornelia’s reference to her picture, and when she met Ludlow a few days after, she asked him if he knew that Miss Saunders was not going to offer her picture to the Exhibition.

  He said simply that he did not know it.

  “Don’t you think she ought? I don’t think she’s looking very well, of late; do you?”

  “I don’t know; isn’t she? I haven’t seen her — —” He began carelessly; he added anxiously. “When did you see her?”

  “A few days ago. She came to say she could not take the time from the Synthesis to pay me that little visit. I’m afraid she’s working too hard. Of course, she’s very ambitious; but I can’t understand her not wanting to show her picture, there, and trying to sell it.”

  Ludlow stooped forward and pulled the long ears of Mrs. Westley’s fashionable dog which lay on the rug at his feet.

  “Have you any idea why she’s changed her mind?”

  “Yes,” said Ludlow. “I think it’s because I helped her with it.”

  “Is she so independent? Or perhaps I am not quite discreet — —”

  “Why not? You say she didn’t look well?”

  “She looked — worried.”

  He asked, as if it immediately followed, “Mrs. Westley, should you mind giving me a little advice about a matter — a very serious matter?”

  “If you won’t follow it.”

  “Do we ever?”

  “Well?”

  “How much use can a man be to a girl when he knows that he can’t be of the greatest?”

  “None, if he is sure.”

  “He is perfectly sure.”

  “He had better let her alone, then. He had better not try.”

  “I am going to try. But I thank you for your advice more than if I were going to take it.”

  They parted laughing; and Mrs. Westley was contented to be left with the mystery which she believed was no mystery to her.

  Ludlow went home and wrote to Cornelia:

  “Dear Miss Saunders: I hear you are not going to try to get your picture into the Exhibition. I will not pretend not to understand why, and you would not wish me to; so I feel free to say that you are making a mistake. You ought to offer your picture; I think it would be accepted, and you have no right to forego the chance it would give you, for the only reason you can have. I know that Mr. Wetmore would be glad to advise you about it; and I am sure you will believe that I have not asked him to do so.

  “Yours sincerely,

  “W. Ludlow.”

  Cornelia turned this letter in many lights, and tried to take it in many ways; but in the end she could only take it in the right way, and she wrote back:

  “Dear Mr. Ludlow: I thank you very much for your letter, and I am going to do what you say. Yours sincerely,

  “Cornelia Saunders.

  “P. S. I do appreciate your kindness very much.”

  She added this postscript after trying many times to write a reply that would seem less blunt and dry; but she could not write anything at all between a letter that she felt was gushing a
nd this note which certainly could not be called so; she thought the postscript did not help it much, but she let it go.

  As soon as she had done so, it seemed to her that she had no reason for having done so, and she did not see how she could justify it to Charmian, whom she had told that she should not offer her picture. She would have to say that she had changed her mind simply because Mr. Ludlow had bidden her, and she tried to think how she could make that appear sufficient. But Charmian was entirely satisfied. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that was the least you could do, when he asked you. You certainly owed him that much. Now,” she added mystically, “he never can say a thing.”

  They were in Charmian’s studio, where Cornelia’s sketch of her had been ever since she left working on it; and Charmian ran and got it, and set it where they could both see it in the light of the new event.

  It’s magnificent, Cornelia. There’s no other word for it. Did you know he was going to give me his?”

  “Yes, he told me he was going to,” said Cornelia, looking at her sketch, with a dreamy suffusion of happiness in her face.

  “It’s glorious, but it doesn’t come within a million miles of yours. Mr. Wetmore isn’t on the Committee, this year, but he knows them all, and — —”

  Cornelia turned upon her. “Charmian Maybough, if you breathe, if you dream a word to him about it I will never speak to you. If my picture can’t get into the Exhibition without the help of friends — —”

  “Oh, I shan’t speak to him about it,” Charmian hastened to assure her. In pursuance of her promise, she only spoke to Mrs. Wetmore, and at the right time Wetmore used his influence with the committee. Then, for the reason, or the no reason that governs such matters, or because Cornelia’s picture was no better than too many others that were accepted, it was refused.

  XXXIV.

  The blow was not softened to Cornelia by her having prophesied to Charmian as well as to herself, that she knew her picture would be refused. Now she was aware that at the bottom of her heart she had always hoped and believed it would be accepted. She had kept it all from her mother, but she had her fond, proud visions of how her mother would look when she got her letter saying that she had a picture in the Exhibition, and how she would throw on her sacque and bonnet, and run up to Mrs. Burton for an explanation and full sense of the honor. In these fancies Cornelia even had them come to New York, to see her picture in position; it was not on the line, of course, and yet it was not skyed.

  Her pride was not involved, and she suffered no sting of wounded vanity from its rejection: her hurt was in a tenderer place. She would not have cared how many people knew of her failure, if her mother and Mrs. Burton need not have known; but she wrote faithfully home of it, and tried to make neither much nor little of it. She forbade Charmian the indignation which she would have liked to vent, but she let her cry over the event with her. No one else knew that it had actually happened except Wetmore and Ludlow; she was angry with them at first for encouraging her to offer the picture, but Wetmore came and was so mystified and humbled by its refusal, that she forgave him and even comforted him for his part in the affair.

  “She acted like a little man about it,” he reported to Ludlow. “She’ll do. When a girl can take a blow like that the way she does, she makes you wish that more fellows were girls. When I had my first picture refused, it laid me up. But I’m not going to let this thing rest. I’m going to see if that picture can’t be got into the American Artists’.”

  “Better not,” said Ludlow so vaguely that Wetmore thought he must mean something.

  “Why?”

  “Oh — I don’t believe she’d like it.”

  “What makes you think so? Have you seen her?”

  “No — —”

  “You haven’t? Well, Ludlow, I didn’t lose any time. Perhaps you think there was no one else to blame for the mortification of that poor child.”

  “No, I don’t. I am to blame, too. I encouraged her to try — I urged her.”

  “Then I should think you would go and tell her so.”

  “Ah, I think she knows it. If I told her anything, I should tell her no one was to blame but myself.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Wetmore lighted his pipe. “Confound those fellows! I should like to knock their heads together. If there is anything like the self-righteousness of a committee when it’s wrong — but there isn’t, fortunately.”

  It was not the first time that Ludlow had faltered in the notion of going to Cornelia and claiming to be wholly at fault. In thought he was always doing it, and there were times when he almost did it in reality, but he let these times pass effectless, hoping for some better time when the thing would do itself, waiting for the miracle which love expects, when it is itself the miracle that brings all its desires to fulfilment. He certainly had some excuses for preferring a passive part in what he would have been so glad to have happen. Cornelia had confessed that she had once cared for him, but at the same time she had implied that she cared for him no longer, and she had practically forbidden him to see her again. Much study of her words could make nothing else of them, and it was not until Ludlow saw his way to going impersonally in his quality of mistaken adviser, from whom explanation and atonement were due, that he went to Cornelia. Even then he did not quite believe that she would see him, and he gladly lost the bet he made himself, at the sound of a descending step on the stairs, that it was the Irish girl coming back to say that Miss Saunders was not at home.

  They met very awkwardly, and Ludlow had such an official tone in claiming responsibility for having got Cornelia to offer her picture, and so have it rejected, that he hardly knew who was talking. “That is all,” he said, stiffly; and he rose and stood looking into his hat. “It seemed to me that I couldn’t do less than come and say this, and I hope you don’t feel that I’m — I’m unwarranted in coming.”

  “Oh, no,” cried Cornelia, “it’s very kind of you, and no one’s to blame but me. I don’t suppose I should care; only” — she bit her lips hard, and added deep in her throat— “I hated to have my mother —— But I am rightfully punished.”

  She meant for the Dickerson business, but Ludlow thought she meant for her presumption, and his heart smote him in tender indignation as her head sank and her face averted itself. It touched him keenly that she should speak to him in that way of her mother, as if from an instinctive sense of his loving and faithful sympathy; and then, somehow he had her in his arms, there in Mrs. Montgomery’s dim parlor; he noted, as in a dream, that his hat had fallen and was rolling half the length of it.

  “Oh, wait!” cried the girl. “What are you doing —— You don’t know. There is something I must tell you — that will make you hate me — —” She struggled to begin somehow, but she did not know where.

  “No,” he said. “You needn’t tell me anything. There isn’t anything in the world that could change me to you — nothing that you could tell me! Sometime, if you must — if you wish; but not now. I’ve been too miserable, and now I’m so happy.”

  “But it’s very foolish, it’s silly! I tell you — —”

  “Not now, not now!” He insisted. He made her cry, he made her laugh; but he would not listen to her. She knew it was all wrong, that it was romantic and fantastic, and she was afraid of it; but she was so happy too, that she could not will it for the moment to be otherwise. She put off the time that must come, or let him put it off for her, and gladly lost herself in the bliss of the present. The fear, growing more and more vague and formless, haunted her rapture, but even this ceased before they parted, and left her at perfect peace in his love — their love.

  He told her how much she could be to him, how she could supplement him in every way where he was faltering and deficient, and he poured out his heart in praises of her that made her brain reel. They talked of a thousand things, touching them, and leaving them, and coming back, but always keeping within the circle of their relation to themselves. They flattered one another with the tireles
s and credulous egotism of love; they tried to tell what they had thought of each other from the first moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since had a thought that was not the other’s; they believed this. The commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to live for the highest things.

  They began this life by spending the whole afternoon together. When some other people came into the parlor, they went out to walk. They walked so long and far, that they came at last to the Park without meaning to, and sat on a bench by a rock. Other people were doing the same: nurses with baby-carriages before them; men smoking and reading; elderly husbands with their elderly wives beside them, whom they scarcely spoke to; it must have been a very common, idle thing, but to them it had the importance, the distinction of something signal, done for the first time. They staid there till it was almost dark, and then they went and had tea together in the restaurant of one of the vast hotels at the entrance of the Park. It was a very Philistine place, with rich-looking, dull-looking people, travellers and sojourners, dining about in its spacious splendor; but they got a table in a corner and were as much alone there as in the Park; their happiness seemed to push the world away from them wherever they were, and to leave them free within a wide circle of their own. She poured the tea for them both from the pot which the waiter set at her side; he looked on in joyful wonder and content. “How natural it all is,” he sighed. “I should think you had always been doing that for me. But I suppose it is only from the beginning of time!”

  She let him talk the most, because she was too glad to speak, and because they had both the same thoughts, and it did not need two to utter them. Now and then, he made her speak; he made her answer some question; but it was like some question that she had asked herself. From time to time they spoke of others besides themselves; of her mother and the Burtons, of Charmian, of Mrs. Westley, of Wetmore; but it was in relation to themselves; without this relation, nothing had any meaning.