Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The doctor looked compassionately away from the girl, and said, “Well, we must arrange about getting you off, then.”

  “But I want you should go with me, doctor, and see me settled all right. You can, can’t you? I sha’n’t ca’e how much it costs?”

  The doctor said gravely he thought he could manage it and he ignored the long unconscious sigh of relief that Clementina drew.

  In all her confusing anxieties for Mrs. Lander, Gregory remained at the bottom of her heart a dumb ache. When the pressure of her fears was taken from her she began to suffer for him consciously; then a letter came from him:

  “I cannot make it right. It is where it was, and I feel that I must

  not see you again. I am trying to do right, but with the fear that

  I am wrong. Send some word to help me before I go away to-morrow.

  F. G.”

  It was what she had expected, she knew now, but it was none the less to be borne because of her expectation. She wrote back:

  “I believe you are doing the best you can, and I shall always

  believe that.”

  Her note brought back a long letter from him. He said that whatever he did, or wherever he went, he should try to be true to her ideal of him. If they renounced their love now for the sake of what seemed higher than their love, they might suffer, but they could not choose but do as they were doing.

  Clementina was trying to make what she could of this when Miss Milray’s name came up, and Miss Milray followed it.

  “I wanted to ask after Mrs. Lander, and I want you to tell her I did. Will you? Dr. Welwright says he’s going to take her to Venice. Well, I’m sorry — sorry for your going, Clementina, and I’m truly sorry for the cause of it. I shall miss you, my dear, I shall indeed. You know I always wanted to steal you, but you’ll do me the justice to say I never did, and I won’t try, now.”

  “Perhaps I wasn’t worth stealing,” Clementina suggested, with a ruefulness in her smile that went to Miss Milray’s heart.

  She put her arms round her and kissed her. “I wasn’t very kind to you, the other day, Clementina, was I?”

  “I don’t know,” Clementina faltered, with half-averted face.

  “Yes, you do! I was trying to make-believe that I didn’t want to meddle with your affairs; but I was really vexed that you hadn’t told me your story before. It hasn’t taken me all this time to reflect that you couldn’t, but it has to make myself come and confess that I had been dry and cold with you.” She hesitated. “It’s come out all right, hasn’t it, Clementina?” she asked, tenderly. “You see I want to meddle, now.”

  “We ah’ trying to think so,” sighed the girl.

  “Tell me about it!” Miss Milray pulled her down on the sofa with her, and modified her embrace to a clasp of Clementina’s bands.

  “Why, there isn’t much to tell,” she began, but she told what there was, and Miss Milray kept her countenance concerning the scruple that had parted Clementina and her lover. “Perhaps he wouldn’t have thought of it,” she said, in a final self-reproach, “if I hadn’t put it into his head.”

  “Well, then, I’m not sorry you put it into his head,” cried Miss Milray. “Clementina, may I say what I think of Mr. Gregory’s performance?”

  “Why, certainly, Miss Milray!”

  “I think he’s not merely a gloomy little bigot, but a very hard-hearted little wretch, and I’m glad you’re rid of him. No, stop! Let me go on! You said I might!” she persisted, at a protest which imparted itself from Clementina’s restive hands. “It was selfish and cruel of him to let you believe that he had forgotten you. It doesn’t make it right now, when an accident has forced him to tell you that he cared for you all along.”

  “Why, do you look at it that way, Miss Milray? If he was doing it on my account?”

  “He may think he was doing it on your account, but I think he was doing it on his own. In such a thing as that, a man is bound by his mistakes, if he has made any. He can’t go back of them by simply ignoring them. It didn’t make it the same for you when he decided for your sake that he would act as if he had never spoken to you.”

  “I presume he thought that it would come right, sometime,” Clementina urged. “I did.”

  “Yes, that was very well for you, but it wasn’t at all well for him. He behaved cruelly; there’s no other word for it.”

  “I don’t believe he meant to be cruel, Miss Milray,” said Clementina.

  “You’re not sorry you’ve broken with him?” demanded Miss Milray, severely, and she let go of Clementina’s hands.

  “I shouldn’t want him to think I hadn’t been fai’a.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by not being fair,” said Miss Milray, after a study of the girl’s eyes.

  “I mean,” Clementina explained, “that if I let him think the religion was all the’e was, it wouldn’t have been fai’a.”

  “Why, weren’t you sincere about that?”

  “Of cou’se I was!” returned the girl, almost indignantly. “But if the’e was anything else, I ought to have told him that, too; and I couldn’t.”

  “Then you can’t tell me, of course?” Miss Milray rose in a little pique.

  “Perhaps some day I will,” the girl entreated. “And perhaps that was all.”

  Miss Milray laughed. “Well, if that was enough to end it, I’m satisfied, and I’ll let you keep your mystery — if it is one — till we meet in Venice; I shall be there early in June. Good bye, dear, and say good bye to Mrs. Lander for me.”

  XXVIII.

  Dr. Welwright got his patient a lodging on the Grand Canal in Venice, and decided to stay long enough to note the first effect of the air and the baths, and to look up a doctor to leave her with.

  This took something more than a week, which could not all be spent in Mrs. Lander’s company, much as she wished it. There were hours which he gave to going about in a gondola with Clementina, whom he forbade to be always at the invalid’s side. He tried to reassure her as to Mrs. Lander’s health, when he found her rather mute and absent, while they drifted in the silvery sun of the late April weather, just beginning to be warm, but not warm enough yet for the tent of the open gondola. He asked her about Mrs. Lander’s family, and Clementina could only tell him that she had always said she had none. She told him the story of her own relation to her, and he said, “Yes, I heard something of that from Miss Milray.” After a moment of silence, during which he looked curiously into the girl’s eyes, “Do you think you can bear a little more care, Miss Claxon?”

  “I think I can,” said Clementina, not very courageously, but patiently.

  “It’s only this, and I wouldn’t tell you if I hadn’t thought you equal to it. Mrs. Lander’s case puzzles me. But I shall leave Dr. Tradonico watching it, and if it takes the turn that there’s a chance it may take, he will tell you, and you’d better find out about her friends, and — let them know. That’s all.”

  “Yes,” said Clementina, as if it were not quite enough. Perhaps she did not fully realize all that the doctor had intended; life alone is credible to the young; life and the expectation of it.

  The night before he was to return to Florence there was a full moon; and when he had got Mrs. Lander to sleep he asked Clementina if she would not go out on the lagoon with him. He assigned no peculiar virtue to the moonlight, and he had no new charge to give her concerning his patient when they were embarked. He seemed to wish her to talk about herself, and when she strayed from the topic, he prompted her return. Then he wished to know how she liked Florence, as compared with Venice, and all the other cities she had seen, and when she said she had not seen any but Boston and New York, and London for one night, he wished to know whether she liked Florence as well. She said she liked it best of all, and he told her he was very glad, for he liked it himself better than any place he had ever seen. He spoke of his family in America, which was formed of grownup brothers and sisters, so that he had none of the closest and tenderest ties obliging
him to return; there was no reason why he should not spend all his days in Florence, except for some brief visits home. It would be another thing with such a place as Venice; he could never have the same settled feeling there: it was beautiful, but it was unreal; it would be like spending one’s life at the opera. Did not she think so?

  She thought so, oh, yes; she never could have the home-feeling at Venice that she had at Florence.

  “Exactly; that’s what I meant — a home-feeling; I’m glad you had it.” He let the gondola dip and slide forward almost a minute before he added, with an effect of pulling a voice up out of his throat somewhere, “How would you like to live there — with me — as my wife?”

  “Why, what do you mean, Dr. Welwright?” asked Clementina, with a vague laugh.

  Dr. Welwright laughed, too; but not vaguely; there was a mounting cheerfulness in his laugh. “What I say. I hope it isn’t very surprising.”

  “No; but I never thought of such a thing.”

  “Perhaps you will think of it now.”

  “But you’re not in ea’nest!”

  “I’m thoroughly in earnest,” said the doctor, and he seemed very much amused at her incredulity.

  “Then; I’m sorry,” she answered. “I couldn’t.”

  “No?” he said, still with amusement, or with a courage that took that form. “Why not?”

  “Because I am — not free.”

  For an interval they were so silent that they could hear each other breathe: Then, after he had quietly bidden the gondolier go back to their hotel, he asked, “If you had been free you might have answered me differently?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clementina, candidly. “I never thought of it.”

  “It isn’t because you disliked me?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Then I must get what comfort I can out of that. I hope, with all my heart, that you may be happy.”

  “Why, Dr. Welwright!” said Clementina. “Don’t you suppose that I should be glad to do it, if I could? Any one would!”

  “It doesn’t seem very probable, just now,” he answered, humbly. “But I’ll believe it if you say so.”

  “I do say so, and I always shall.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dr. Welwright professed himself ready for his departure, at breakfast next morning and he must have made his preparations very late or very early. He was explicit in his charges to Clementina concerning Mrs. Lander, and at the end of them, he said, “She will not know when she is asking too much of you, but you will, and you must act upon your knowledge. And remember, if you are in need of help, of any kind, you’re to let me know. Will you?”

  “Yes, I will, Dr. Welwright.”

  “People will be going away soon, and I shall not be so busy. I can come back if Dr. Tradonico thinks it necessary.”

  He left Mrs. Lander full of resolutions to look after her own welfare in every way, and she went out in her gondola the same morning. She was not only to take the air as much as possible, but she was to amuse herself, and she decided that she would have her second breakfast at the Caffe Florian. Venice was beginning to fill up with arrivals from the south, and it need not have been so surprising to find Mr. Hinkle there over a cup of coffee. He said he had just that moment been thinking of her, and meaning to look her up at the hotel. He said that he had stopped at Venice because it was such a splendid place to introduce his gleaner; he invited Mrs. Lander to become a partner in the enterprise; he promised her a return of fifty per cent. on her investment. If he could once introduce his gleaner in Venice, he should be a made man. He asked Mrs. Lander, with real feeling, how she was; as for Miss Clementina, he need not ask.

  “Oh, indeed, the docta thinks she wants a little lookin’ after, too,” said Mrs. Lander.

  “Well, about as much as you do, Mrs. Lander,” Hinkle allowed, tolerantly. “I don’t know how it affects you, ma’am, such a meeting of friends in these strange waters, but it’s building me right up. It’s made another man of me, already, and I’ve got the other man’s appetite, too. Mind my letting him have his breakfast here with me at your table?” He bade the waiter just fetch his plate. He attached himself to them; he spent the day with them. Mrs. Lander asked him to dinner at her lodgings, and left him to Clementina over the coffee.

  “She’s looking fine, doesn’t the doctor think? This air will do everything for her.”

  “Oh, yes; she’s a great deal betta than she was befo’e we came.”

  “That’s right. Well, now, you’ve got me here, you must let me make myself useful any way I can. I’ve got a spare month that I can put in here in Venice, just as well as not; I sha’n’t want to push north till the frost’s out of the ground. They wouldn’t have a chance to try my gleaner, on the other side of the Alps much before September, anyway. Now, in Ohio, the part I come from, we cut our wheat in June. When is your wheat harvest at Middlemount?”

  Clementina laughed. “I don’t believe we’ve got any. I guess it’s all grass.”

  “I wish you could see our country out there, once.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “Nice? We’re right in the centre of the state, measuring from north to south, on the old National Road.” Clementina had never heard of this road, but she did not say so. “About five miles back from the Ohio River, where the coal comes up out of the ground, because there’s so much of it there’s no room for it below. Our farm’s in a valley, along a creek bottom, what you Yankees call an intervals; we’ve got three hundred acres. My grandfather took up the land, and then he went back to Pennsylvania to get the girl he’d left there — we were Pennsylvania Dutch; that’s where I got my romantic name — they drove all the way out to Ohio again in his buggy, and when he came in sight of our valley with his bride, he stood up in his buggy and pointed with his whip. ‘There! As far as the sky is blue, it’s all ours!’”

  Clementina owned the charm of his story as he seemed to expect, but when he said, “Yes, I want you to see that country, some day,” she answered cautiously.

  “It must be lovely. But I don’t expect to go West, eva.”

  “I like your Eastern way of saying everr,” said Hinkle, and he said it in his Western way. “I like New England folks.”

  Clementina smiled discreetly. “They have their faults like everybody else, I presume.”

  “Ah, that’s a regular Yankee word: presume,” said Hinkle. “Our teacher, my first one, always said presume. She was from your State, too.”

  XXIX.

  In the time of provisional quiet that followed for Clementina, she was held from the remorses and misgivings that had troubled her before Hinkle came. She still thought that she had let Dr. Welwright go away believing that she had not cared enough for the offer which had surprised her so much, and she blamed herself for not telling him how doubly bound she was to Gregory; though when she tried to put her sense of this in words to herself she could not make out that she was any more bound to him than she had been before they met in Florence, unless she wished to be so. Yet somehow in this time of respite, neither the regret for Dr. Welwright nor the question of Gregory persisted very strongly, and there were whole days when she realized before she slept that she had not thought of either.

  She was in full favor again with Mrs. Lander, whom there was no one to embitter in her jealous affection. Hinkle formed their whole social world, and Mrs. Lander made the most of him. She was always having him to the dinners which her landlord served her from a restaurant in her apartment, and taking him out with Clementina in her gondola. He came into a kind of authority with them both which was as involuntary with him as with them, and was like an effect of his constant wish to be doing something for them.

  One morning when they were all going out in Mrs. Lander’s gondola, she sent Clementina back three times to their rooms for outer garments of differing density. When she brought the last Mrs. Lander frowned.

  “This won’t do. I’ve got to have something else — something lighter and warma.”
/>   “I can’t go back any moa, Mrs. Landa,” cried the girl, from the exasperation of her own nerves.

  “Then I will go back myself,” said Mrs. Lander with dignity, “and we sha’n’t need the gondoler any more this mo’ning,” she added, “unless you and Mr. Hinkle wants to ride.”

  She got ponderously out of the boat with the help of the gondolier’s elbow, and marched into the house again, while Clementina followed her. She did not offer to help her up the stairs; Hinkle had to do it, and he met the girl slowly coming up as he returned from delivering Mrs. Lander over to Maddalena.

  “She’s all right, now,” he ventured to say, tentatively.

  “Is she?” Clementina coldly answered.

  In spite of her repellent air, he persisted, “She’s a pretty sick woman, isn’t she?”

  “The docta doesn’t say.”

  “Well, I think it would be safe to act on that supposition. Miss Clementina — I think she wants to see you.”

  “I’m going to her directly.”

  Hinkle paused, rather daunted. “She wants me to go for the doctor.”

  “She’s always wanting the docta.” Clementina lifted her eyes and looked very coldly at him.

  “If I were you I’d go up right away,” he said, boldly.

  She felt that she ought to resent his interference, but the mild entreaty of his pale blue eyes, or the elder-brotherly injunction of his smile, forbade her. “Did she ask for me?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go to her,” she said, and she kept herself from smiling at the long sigh of relief he gave as she passed him on the stairs.

  Mrs. Lander began as soon as she entered her room, “Well, I was just wonderin’ if you was goin’ to leave me here all day alone, while you staid down the’e, carryin’ on with that simpleton. I don’t know what’s got into the men.”

  “Mr. Hinkle has gone for the docta,” said Clementina, trying to get into her voice the kindness she was trying to feel.