Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, give my love to all the folks!” He called back from the door.

  “Yes, yes!” said the woman. “Do get off, quick!”

  He laughed again, and in looking back from the door he struck against a young man who was coming in. “Oh, excuse me!” he said, and went out while the young man came forward. He looked from side to side keenly, and then, with a smile that flashed through Sister Althea’s tears, he came swiftly down the aisle to where she sat, near the end of the car.

  “Well, well!” he cried, and he stood a moment with his hands upon the seat-backs, looking down at her where she sat, helpless to move her bag and parcels from her side. “A’n’t you going to let me set with you, Althea? A’n’t you going to look round and let me see if it’s really you? First, I didn’t know but it was Eldress Susan.”

  “‘Sh!” said Sister Althea, and she turned up towards him the deep tunnel of her bonnet, with her young face at the bottom of it, and clutched her parcels into her lap.

  He swung her bag to the floor, and let himself sink easily into the seat, and stretched his arm along the top behind her. “Oh, I guess she won’t hear us,” said the young man. “Did you know me when I came into the car? I don’t believe you did!” He laughed, and his eyes shone. They were gay blue eyes, and his hair, now that he took his soft hat off, had glints of gold in the dun tone that the close shingling of the barber gave it. His face was clean shaven and boyishly handsome. He was dressed in a new suit of diagonals which betrayed the clothing-store; but his figure was not vulgar, though his hands, thrusting out of the coat-sleeves without the shirt-cuffs that might have partly hidden them, were large and red, and rough with work. “I saw you through the window as I came along the platform outside, and I wanted to stop and watch you. But you had your head down, as if you wa’n’t feeling any too bright, and I hurried right in. I thought you would be frightened if I didn’t come in as soon as the cars stopped. But I was waiting here so long expecting the train that I forgot to get my bag checked till the last minute, and I had to run and do it after you got in. That’s what kept me. Did you think I wa’n’t going to be here, after all?” He let his arm drop from the seat-top, and he sought with his the little hand lying weak on the seat between them. It closed upon his fingers at their touch, and then tried to free itself, and then trembled and remained quiet. “Oh, I guess I did frighten you,” he murmured, fondly.

  “Hush! Yee,” said Althea. “But I knew you would be sure to be here. I wasn’t afraid, but I was — scared a little. I was anxious. When you came in I could see it was you, but you looked so strange.” She cast a glance up and down the car.

  “Don’t you like it?” he asked, with a smile of innocent pride and a downward look at his clothes.

  “Yee, yee,” she said. “But, Lorenzo, do you think — do you think you had ought to — sit in the same seat with me — so close? Won’t folks—”

  Lorenzo laughed securely. “Think I ought to set across the aisle, same as in meeting? I guess folks won’t mind us much.” In fact, in the going and coming and settling in place no one seemed to notice them. “If they do, they’ll think I’m just your brother or some relation. It’s this old bonnet, if anything, that will make them look. I thought Friend Ella Shewall was going to lend you a hat.”

  “Yee, she was. But I didn’t get to her house till it was almost time for the cars, and then we had to just race to the depot. I’ve got the hat here in this paper, and that’s a sack in this bundle. I hadn’t time to put it on, either. I was almost ready to drop when I reached Friend Ella’s.” He peered into the depths of the bonnet she turned towards him, and she added: “I ran nearly the whole way from Harshire to the Junction.”

  “Ran?”

  “Yee. I couldn’t get out of the house without some of the Family seeing me before dusk; and if they had I should have died. I was so ashamed, Lorenzo, and I felt so — I can’t tell you! I kept close to the walls and in the woods all I could, and I had this bag—”

  Lorenzo stooped forward and lifted the bag from the floor. “You carried that all the way from Harshire to the Junction?”

  “Yee.”

  “Well!”

  “I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t the bag that was so heavy. Oh, Lorenzo, do you think we’re doing right?”

  “I know we are! Why, Althea, it’s what everybody does in the world-outside.”

  “In the world-outside, yee.”

  “Well, we’re in the world-outside, ain’t we?”

  “Yee, I presume we are. We are going to be of the earthly order, Lorenzo; we are going to give up the angelic life! Have you thought enough of it, Lorenzo? Do you think you have? Because if you haven’t—”

  “Why, haven’t we both thought of it till we couldn’t think any more? What did Friend Ella Shewall say? Didn’t she say that we ought to take our feelin’ for each other as a sign from spirit-land that we were meant for each other from all eternity?”

  “Yee; but she isn’t living with her own husband; she’s trying to get a divorce from him, and she used to be so fond of him.”

  “Well, then, the signs failed in her case—”

  “Oh, don’t laugh at it, Lorenzo! If they failed in ours, what should we have? Am I worth all you’re risking for me in this world and the next? Think of it, Lorenzo! I can get out at the next stopping-place and go back to the Family; I know they’ll let me; and you — Think of it! Am I worth it?” She spoke in a low, intense whisper.

  “Am I?” retorted the young man, lightly.

  “Oh yee! You are! I’d go through it all for you.”

  “Then I guess that settles it.”

  “Nay, nay; it doesn’t! I’m wicked, and that’s why I feel so. You don’t know how bad I am. I deceived! It was all right for you, for you left the Family open and above-board, and you told the Trustees you were going, and you made them give back your proerty and everything; but I stole away like a thief in the night; and I made Friend Ella take part in my deceit; and, Lorenzo, I don’t believe there’s going to be any end to it. I’ve told two lies already, here in this very car — just before it stopped. There was a man asked me whether I expected to meet friends at Fitchburg, and I said nay; and he asked me if I wasn’t from the Family at Yardley, and I said yee, I was, and—”

  “He no business to asked you anything,” said Lorenzo, hotly, “and I d’ know as you can call it lyin’, anyway. I a’n’t friends in the sense he meant, and Yardley and Harshire, it’s almost the same thing, and it don’t matter which Family you come from, so you’re out of it.”

  “Do you think so, Lorenzo?”

  “Yee, I do. And now look here, Althea; you’re nervous, and you can’t see things in the true light, and so everything looks wrong to you. We’re doing what we have a perfect right to do, and what everybody in the world-outside does, as I said before. If you had to steal away, as you call it, from the Family, whose fault was it? ‘Twa’n’t yours. You did it, if anything, to save their fellin’s, didn’t you?”

  “Yee, I presume so.”

  “Don’t you know you did? Now I want you to try and look at it in the light of the world-outside; for that’s all the light we’ve got now, or that we’re going to have.”

  A little troubled sigh exhaled from the depths of the bonnet, and Lorenzo threw himself back in despair. “Oh, well, if that’s the way you’re goin’ to feel about it.”

  “Nay, nay, Lorenzo! I’m not going to. I shall be all right in a minute. I’m just nervous, that’s all. I think just as you do about it. Wasn’t I perfectly willing and glad to do it?”

  “I guess you wa’n’t half so willing nor half so glad as I was,” said the young man, and now he drooped towards her again. “And, as you say, I had the easiest part of it, too, as far forth as getting away from the Family went. But, Althea,” he added, with a touch of pride, “I haven’t had a very easy time since I’ve been in the world-outside. ‘Ta’n’t but a few days, but it seems as if it was years, worrying about you all the while, and trying
to sell my lot in Fitchburg, and look up something for me to do when we get back.”

  “Yee, we have got to think of that now, I suppose,” said Althea. “In the Family it came without our thinking.”

  “Yee, too many things came there without our thinking,”said Lorenzo, resentfully. “Not that I want to talk against the Family. I presume I feel just as you do about that. Our own fathers and mothers couldn’t have been better to us. But if we was to have each other, we had to leave ‘em. There wa’n’t any two ways about it. And I guess I do like to think for myself, even of my bread and butter. And I guess I’ve arranged for all that. I’m going into the drug business with Friend Nason.”

  “That used to come and buy our herbs at Harshire?”

  Lorenzo nodded. “It’s just the place for me. He’s goin’ to put a new remedy on the market for lung difficulty — Pulmine, he calls it — and he wants me, because I know about herbs; it’s going to be purely vegetable. He’s bought my lot, too, and he’s advanced me a hundred dollars on it.” The young fellow leaned a little nearer and tapped his breast-pocket. “I’ve got it with me! And I’ve seen the nicest little set of rooms for us to go to house-keeping in when we get back. Friend Nason calls it a flat; and I guess when you see that kitchen, Althea! Friend Nason says it’s just as well we’re going to Saratoga, for we sha’n’t have to get a license in York state; and if it had to be in Fitchburg, and we was to settle down there, right from the Family, it might make talk. But if we come back just like anybody else from the world-outside it’ll all blow over before anybody notices. He wouldn’t want it to get into the newspapers any more than we would or the Family would.”

  II

  THE train, which had started long before, advanced by smooth leaps through the dark, and the rhythmical clangor of the wheels upon the rails lost itself in Lorenzo’s tones while he talked on and mapped out the future to Althea. Already, though he had been so few days in the world-outside, he knew many things unknown to her, and he looked at everything from a point of view that she could not yet imagine. He used words that she had never heard before, and he used familiar phrases in a new sense. He spoke low, and not to lose anything he said she had to turn her deep bonnet towards him, and peer up into his face with eyes so still and solemn in their fixity that at last he laughed out.

  “What are you laughing at?” she half grieved.

  “Oh, nothing. Your eyes down there in that old bonnet made me think of a rabbit that I got into a hole once, and it kept looking up at me. What is there to scare anybody, anyway, Althea?”

  “Nothing. I’m not scared now.”

  “Well, I believe it’s that bonnet, after all. Why don’t you take the old thing off?”

  “I don’t know. They would look.”

  She glanced round the car at their fellow-passengers, and Lorenzo did so too. “Well, let them look!” He said, with a petulant impulse; and then, as if he had given way too far, he added, “They’ve all got their backs turned, anyway.”

  “So they have!” said Althea. “I took this seat at the end of the car on purpose, so they wouldn’t notice me so much. I forgot about that.”

  Still she did not offer to remove her bonnet, and he repeated, “Why don’t you take the old thing off?”

  “Do you truly want me to?”

  “Yee; I want to see how you’ll look.”

  “Why, you know already how I look with my cap on.”

  “Got that on too?”

  “Yee.”

  “Oh, what’s the use of yeeing and naying it all the time, Althea? We’ve got to say yes and no after this.”

  “You said yee yourself half a minute ago.”

  “Did I?” asked Lorenzo; and after a moment’s thought, he said, “Well, so I did,” and he laughed at himself. “But it’s all that old bonnet makes me do it. I say yes to other folks straight enough. Do take it off!”

  “Well, I will, if you want I should so very much,” said Althea, and she kept watching his face while she began to undo the bonnet strings.

  “Want I should help you any?”

  “Nay; I guess I can get along.”

  “There’s that nay again!” said Lorenzo, desperately, and they both laughed. “ Take off your cap, too. Wouldn’t you just as lives?”

  “Yee, if you say so.”

  “There it goes again!” And they laughed together, but very softly, so that the other passengers should not notice. The woman with the child was making up a bed on the seat in front of her for the little one; she looked over her shoulder a moment, but she did not seem to take them in with her vague glance. Althea stopped untying her bonnet-strings, and then went on. She lifted the drab tunnel from her head at last, and showed the wire-framed gauze cap, closely fitted to her head. “Now the cap,” said the young man, and she untied that too, and took it off, and turned her face full upon him.

  She looked like a pretty boy, with her dark hair cropped to her head all round, and her severe turn-down collar, which came so high up on her throat that her soft round chin almost touched it. She had dark eyes, very tender and truthful, a little straight nose, and a mouth that smiled unspeakable question at the young man with its red lips; delicate brows arched themselves above her dovelike eyes, and her forehead was a smooth and white wall to the edge of her hair. The ugly bonnet had served well to keep her complexion fair; its indoors pallor had now a faint flush in it.

  Lorenzo caught his breath, and turned his face with a slight cough.

  “What is the matter? Have you got a cold?” she asked.

  “Nay. It seemed as if my heart skipped a beat. I guess it was the surprise.”

  “Do I surprise you very much, Lorenzo?” her pretty lips entreated, fondly. “Do I look so very funny? You made me do it!”

  “Nay, nay! You look — beautiful, Althea. I don’t know as I ought to say it, Althea, but I didn’t know how beautiful you was before.”

  He stared at her so helplessly and awe-strickenly that she could not help laughing.

  “You’re fine-appearing, too, Lorenzo. I noticed it when you came into the car. I presume it’s my hair that makes me look so funny. But it isn’t half as short as yours,” she said, with an arch glance at his hair as far as it showed itself under his hat. He took his hat off, and she pressed her hand against her mouth to keep from laughing too loud. “I guess we’re a pair of them!”

  He still sat embarrassed, looking at her, and studying every little motion of her head and face as she put her cap inside her bonnet, and made as if to tie the string of the bonnet over both. “But maybe,” she said, “you want I should put them on again?”

  “Nay,” he began, and she mocked him with “Nay? There it is again!” But he would not laugh.

  “Althea, I don’t hardly feel as if I had any right to you. It’s all well enough to talk, but I didn’t know that till you looked — the way you do look; and if you say, I’ll give up right now.”

  “And what shall I do if you give up now?” she asked, with eyes full of laughter.

  “That’s true,” he sighed.

  “I didn’t know how well you looked, either, till I saw you with that suit of clothes on.”

  “Do you like them?” he asked, with a proud glance at the sleeves of his coat and the legs of his trousers. “I had to pay twenty dollars for the suit. Friend Nason thought it was a good deal — he went with me — but he said he guessed I better have them if I was going off with you; I’d get more comfort out of them than what I would a cheaper suit.”

  “Yee,” said Althea, thoughtfully. “ If we’re in the world-outside we have got to do the same as the rest.” She drew a little away from him to add, with a touch of tender reproach, “But I began to feel foolish about you, Lorenzo, long before I saw you in that suit of clothes — as foolish as I ever could.”

  “And I felt foolish about you when I couldn’t hardly see your face in the bottom of that bonnet, let alone know what a pretty head you had, or anything. It was something the way you walked — I d’ kn
ow — and your — your waist, Althea—”

  She turned away from him to take up the parcel on the other side. She put it in her lap, and asked. “Do you want I should show you the sack Friend Ella lent me?”

  “Why, yee; of course!”

  “She said it was quite the fashion.” Althea undid it and held it up and whirled it about, so that the jet trimming would show, and she made him feel the texture of the silk. “Now, I’ll try it on if you want I should.” She flung it across his knees, and unpinned the Shaker shawl from over her breast, and let it fall from her shoulders. She stopped suddenly with a fiery flush.

  “What is it?” asked Lorenzo. He looked in the direction of her eyes, and saw one of the men passengers coming straight down the car towards them; but the man went on to the water-cooler in the corner just beyond them, and after he had solemnly filled himself up from the tank there he lumbered back to his place again at the other end of the car. They looked at each other as people do who have had a narrow escape. Althea pulled the shawl up on her shoulders again. “I guess I’ll wait till morning to put it on.”

  “Yee, just as well,” said Lorenzo, and he could not have seen the filmy shade of disappointment that passed over her face. “What are you going to do with that old thing?”

  He touched her Shaker bonnet, and she glanced down at it. “Oh, keep it, I presume,” she sighed— “keep it always. Any rate, I shall keep it till morning.” She tied it up with the paper that had wrapped her sack.

  Lorenzo rose from the seat and stood beside it. “Look here, Althea, I’m going back into the sleeping-car here to get a place for you, so you can rest comfortable. I don’t want you should sit up here all night.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I can set up well enough—”

  “Then so can I, too! And I’m going to stay here with you.”

  “Now, Althea, you just let me have my own way about this. I took the place for you before the car reached Fitchburg, and it’s paid for, and you might as well use it.”