Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She broke in upon him with a sudden harshness: “Lorenzo, what was it made you feel foolish about me in the first place?”

  Lorenzo kept the smile that was left from his muse, though Althea had spoken so strangely. “I don’t know as I can remember the beginning exactly.”

  “Yee, you can, Lorenzo! There must have been a time when you began to feel foolish. Think!”

  “Why, I told you, Althea. It was one day when I saw you in the march at meetin’, and the way you stepped off, and the way you turned at the corners, and the way you carried your head. I always used to watch you; but that day I seemed to be following you round, as if I was drawed by a rope, and I couldn’t get away if I tried.”

  “Was that what made you foolish about me?”

  “It wasn’t all. I don’t know as I ought to tell you, Althea, but I thought you had beautiful eyes, and there was something about your mouth when you spoke or smiled, and your voice — there was something about that, when I picked it out in the singing; that seemed to go through me. I can’t express it exactly.”

  “Was that all?”

  “Well, I don’t know as you want me to speak of it—”

  “Yee, yee!” she besought him, passionately. “Tell me everything, speak of everything!”

  “I thought — I thought you had a nice figure, Althea; I told you that last night. Your dress was the same as the rest, but it didn’t look the same on you. It was sightlier, and graceful. There, I don’t feel anyways sure it’s right to speak of such things, but you wanted I should.”

  “Yee, I wanted you should. And now I am going to tell you what made me feel foolish about you. It was because you were so tall and strong-looking, and you had pretty eyelashes, and your hair had such a wave in it when it was long; and your mouth curved so at the corners, and you had such a deep voice. And you were so handsome; and once when we all went berrying, and I hurt my foot, and you lifted me over the wall—”

  “I remember,” said Lorenzo, joyfully, shyly.

  “I didn’t want you to put me down. Do you despise me for it?”

  “Althea!”

  “You were afraid I despised you for thinking I had a pretty figure.” Lorenzo was silent, as if he did not know what to say.

  “We’ve been over this before, Althea,” he spoke, at last.

  She did not heed what he said, apparently. “That young woman, that Mrs. Cargate, has been telling me all about her love affairs, as she calls them. She was engaged three times before she got married. She says she has been in love with lots of men.”

  “Well; well!” said Lorenzo.

  “And she has got their pictures, and they have got hers. She asked me if I had been engaged before. She says it’s nothing to be engaged. She says that her husband says he first felt foolish about her when he saw her through the car-window eating candy and carrying on, as she calls it, with some other girls; and it was her regular teeth, and red lips when she was eating, that made him feel so.”

  “It’s kind of — sickish,” said Lorenzo.

  “He came into the car, and he made an excuse to sit down by her when the other girls left, and she let him have a chance to squeeze her hand — he didn’t know that she let him—”

  “Don’t, Althea!”

  “And before she got out they were as good as engaged; she was dead in love with him, she says, from the first look, and he sent her his picture as soon as he got to New York.”

  “Well, well!”

  “Her mother was opposed to her getting engaged again because she thought it was just another flirtation, and she had got sick of having her engaged so much. She told me just why she fell in love with each one, and what each one said he fell in love with her for.”

  “It don’t seem exactly right,” said Lorenzo. “She must have made you about sick with her talk.”

  “Her mother didn’t like him when he first called — they promised to correspond before she got off the cars, and she told him where she lived — but she took to her bed, and her mother had to consent. Now her mother likes him as much is she does. They’re the greatest friends, and when he found that he would have to go back to New York from here he kept it a secret from her and telegraphed for her mother to come up and stay with her, and she never knew anything about it till her mother came into the room.”

  “Well, it seems to have come all right, then,” said Lorenzo, with a vague optimism but he moved uneasily under Althea’s eye, and his smile faded.

  “From all that I can make out,” she said, “they fell in love with each other for the same things, or just about the same, as we got foolish about each other for. He thought she was handsome, and she thought he was handsome. Lorenzo, they fell in love with each other’s looks!”

  Lorenzo waited a moment before he said, with a certain reproach, “I thought you was smart too, Althea — smarter than I was.”

  “And I knew you were good, Lorenzo. But it didn’t begin with that.”

  “Nay, it didn’t begin with that,” he owned.

  “If it had begun with that,” she went on, “I shouldn’t ever have doubted about it for a second. It’s the way it began that makes me afraid of it.”

  “I never saw it in that light before,” said Lorenzo.

  She drew a little away from him, and looked at him askance. “How do I know but I was trying to make you feel, all the time in the march, that I was graceful? How do I know but what I just thought my foot hurt, so that you would have to carry me—”

  “Now, look here, Althea, that young woman has made you blame yourself for nothin’. You’re perfectly notionate about it—”

  She caught his hand where it lay next her on the seat, and pressed it nervously, piteously. “Try to think back — far back, Lorenzo — and see if there was not something different in your mind that made you foolish about me before you noticed that I was — sightly. See if you didn’t think I was bright first. I shouldn’t want them to say in the Family that we were taken with each other’s looks.”

  Lorenzo thought, as he was bid. “Nay, I guess it was the looks first, as far as I went,” he said, faithfully. “It was afterwards that I thought you was smart.”

  “Oh!” she said, and a little gush of tears came into her eyes.

  They were both silent for a time, and then Lorenzo said, “I know it seems kind of demeanin’, but I don’t know as you can say it’s wrong exactly. I presume it’s the way that folks have begun to feel foolish ever since — there was any folks. And I presume the looks must have been given to us for some good purpose?” He suggested rather than asserted this, with his eyes fastened tenderly upon Althea’s face, which, blurred with tears as it was, was still so pretty. She wiped her eyes with the handkerchief he had bought her that morning, and then tucked it, with a little vivid, graceful motion, into the waist of her dress.

  When he began again it was with more confidence, more authority of tone. “The way I think we had ought to look at it is this: It’s the body that contains the soul, and the body is outside of the soul, and it comes first, and it has a right to, as long as it’s outside the soul. It can’t help it, and the soul can’t help it. But I believe we shall find each other in the soul more and more.”

  “Do you really think that, Lorenzo?”

  “Yee, I do, and I wouldn’t say it just to comfort you.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, Lorenzo. You are true — truer than I am.”

  She rose, and they walked silently out of the park together. Beyond the gate he asked her, “Where would you like to go now, Althea?”

  “To the minister’s,” she said.

  Lorenzo arrested her in a panic. “Not unless you want to go there of your own accord, Althea.”

  “I do.”

  “Do you feel as if I had coaxed you to do it — hurried you any ?”

  “Nay, you always do what you say you will do. If I only felt as sure of myself as I do of you!”

  “Oh, I do!” said Lorenzo. “I presume,” he continued, as if from the ne
cessity of finding a reason for her conclusion, “you’ll feel full better about lettin’ that driver and the young woman think we’re married if we really are married.”

  “Nay, what difference does that make now?” she demanded, scornfully.

  “I don’t know as it does a great deal,” he assented.

  “If we’re like the world-outside in one thing, we must be like it in all,” she said.

  Lorenzo did not answer.

  XIII

  IT was the minister himself again who opened the lattice door to them. “Oh, here you are back. I am glad to see you. Well, have you made up your minds?” He spoke while they were getting through the entry into his dim parlor, with a tone of pleasantry.

  Althea took the word. “Yee, we have made up our minds.”

  “And you really intend to get married this time?” He looked at Lorenzo.

  “Yee, we do.”

  “I suppose you’ve thought it over thoroughly. I wish all the young people who come to me would do so. It would save a great deal of hopeless and useless thinking afterwards. If you’ll sit down I will call my wife, and—”

  He left them alone a moment, and Lorenzo whispered, “Althea, if you want to ask him again how he looks at that point in Luke—”

  “Nay, we can see it as clearly as he can. We have got all the light there is.”

  “Yee, I presume that is so.”

  They had each other by the hand, and she pressed his hand convulsively, “Don’t say anything more, Lorenzo.”

  “Just as you say, Althea.”

  After a little delay the minister returned, bringing his wife with him — a short, stout little bruuette, who had the effect of having hurriedly encased herself for the occasion in a black silk dress she wore. She glanced at Althea with a certain dislike or defiance in her look, as one does at a stranger whom one has heard prejudicial things of; and if the minister had told her of Althea’s misgivings it might well have incensed a wife and mother.

  He introduced them to her as Miss Brown and Mr. Weaver, and he said, “Well, now, if you will take your places,” and when they stood before him he began the ceremony. Lorenzo, when he was asked if he would take Althea to be his wedded wife, helplessly answered, “Yee,” and Althea did the same in her turn.

  The light of a smile came over the minister’s face at their answers, and when he had pronounced them man and wife and blessed them, he said, laughing, “I suppose that this comes as near being a Shaker wedding as any could. Did you make the responses purposely in Shaker parlauce?”

  “Did we say yee?” Lorenzo asked of Althea.

  “Yee, we did,” she said, and he smiled, but she did not. “I heard you say it, and I guess I did.”

  They both sat down again, and the minister’s wife was about to sit down too, seeing that they were not going away, when there came loud cries of grief and rage from the back of the house, and she ran out to still them. The minister went to a writing-desk and filled up a certificate of marriage, which he handed to Althea, and then he sat down too.

  “I don’t know why we always make the ladies the custodians of these things, but we do. I think myself it’s often quite as important to the husband to know that he is married.

  “And are we married now?” she faltered. “Is that all?”

  “Quite. It wasn’t so very formidable, was it?”

  “But — but—” She stopped, as if in a fright. “But it isn’t over? I thought — I thought there was something more; and that — that — Do you mean that now we couldn’t change?”

  “Why, surely,” said the minister, “you understood what you were doing? Didn’t you suppose that when I asked you if you would take this man for your husband, I was asking you if you would marry him?”

  “Yee, I knew that. But I didn’t think that was all there was to it.”

  “I presume,” Lorenzo began, “that it’s because you ain’t used to it, Althea.”

  The minister broke in with a laugh. “It’s to be hoped that you won’t get into the habit of it, Mrs. Weaver; some people do. But you’re quite right about it, in one sense. This isn’t all there is of marriage, aud it isn’t all over by any means. It’s just begun.” He sat rocking and smiling at them, and they remained rigidly upright in their chairs.

  “I presume,” said Lorenzo, “that there’s some charge. How much will it be?”

  The minister seemed amused at the bluntness of the demand. “There’s no fee.” He had apparently a little difficulty in adding, “It is something we always leave to the bridegroom.”

  Lorenzo took out his roll of bank-notes. He peeled one off the roll, and handed it to the minister. “That be enough?”

  The minister took the ten-dollar note and looked at it. “I think it would be altogether too much unless you are richer than I imagine.”

  “Well,” said Lorenzo, proudly, “I started with a hundred dollars last night.”

  “And is that all your worldly wealth?”

  “I’ve got a lot in Fitchburg that’s worth four hundred more.”

  “Is that so?” asked the minister. “You are a capitalist. Still, I think that if you happen to have a one-dollar bill in that roll I should prefer it.”

  “I guess I got one,” said Lorenzo, with the same phlegm; and he looked among the notes till he found a dollar bill, which he gave to the minister.

  “Ah, thank you,” said the minister; and he added, “I don’t suppose you had quite the training of a financier — a moneyed man — in the Family?”

  Lorenzo laughed. “I never had a cent in my hands till a week ago, when I left the Family. The Trustees do all the buyin’.”

  “Is it possible, is it possible?” cried the minister. “You are of the resurrection, indeed! You begin to convert me! Do you think they would admit me to the Family ?”

  “Oh, yee,” said Lorenzo, gravely. “You would have to separate, and give up your children.”

  “Ah, that isn’t so simple. At any rate, it requires reflection. But to be in a condition where the curse of money is taken away! What is the name of your family: Eden? Paradise? Golden Age?”

  “Nay,” returned Lorenzo, with seriousness; “we came from Harshire.”

  There seemed to he nothing more to say or do, but Lorenzo would probably not have got away of his own motion. It was Althea who had to say to the minister, “Well, good-afternoon;” and when he offered his hand in response, it was she who had first to take it. She did it very stiffly, hut Lorenzo gave it a large, loose grasp, and held it a moment, as if trying to think of something grateful, or at least fitting, before he said, “Well, good-afternoon,” in his turn.

  XIV

  ON their way back to the hotel they were silent till Lorenzo took out the money he had put loosely into his pocket, and folded it more neatly. He turned the notes over, and then felt in his other pockets, as if he thought he might have misplaced some of them. Althea did not seem to notice what he was doing. She walked rapidly a little ahead of him.

  “Althea,” he said, gently, and a little timidly, “I don’t know as we better stay in Saratoga — well, not a great deal longer.” She looked round. “I — I — the money seems to be nearly all gone. I guess we ha’n’t got much more than enough to pay for our tickets back to Fitchburg.”

  She appeared not to understand at first. Then she said, passionately, “Let us go at once then! I shall be glad to go. Don’t let’s stay a minute longer. It’s dreadful to me here!”

  “Just as you say, Althea,” he returned, submissively. “I presume we might full as well stay till after supper. We’ve paid for it, and the cars don’t—”

  “Go and see if there isn’t an earlier train — if there isn’t one that starts right off. I want to start now.”

  “Why, Althea—”

  “Don’t try to speak to me, Lorenzo!”

  “Nay, I won’t, then. But I got to take you to the hotel, and get them to show you where the room is.”

  “Well!”

  “And then I�
��ll go round to the depot and find out about the cars.”

  As they mounted the steps of the hotel porch a girlish figure in light blue came flying towards them from the end of the long veranda. It was young Mrs. Cargate; she waved a telegram in the air. “Oh, he’s coming!” she called to them. “He’s coming to-night! He’ll be here on the seven o’clock train! Oh, it seems as if I could fly, I’m so glad! I could just hug everybody! I must hug somebody; I must kiss—” She ran upon Althea, and flung her arms round her, and put up her pouted lips.

  Althea pulled away, and, with her head thrown back, “Nay,” she said, icily, “we don’t kiss.”

  The young woman released her. “You don’t kiss? Well, if that isn’t the best joke yet! When I tell George about this! Why, what do you and Mr. Wea—”

  “It’s against our religion,” said Lorenzo, sternly, and his face was the face of an ascetic as he spoke.