Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybe I’ll have the chance to show you.

  They got my instructions over there to send everything to me.”

  Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape. They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel they had both read, and he was saying, “I suppose you think he was justly punished.”

  “Punished?” she repeated. “Why, they got married, after all!”

  “Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy.”

  “Then it seems to me that she was punished; too.”

  “Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn’t help that.”

  Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

  “I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was very exacting.”

  “Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn’t deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn’t that worse?”

  “Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her.”

  “Oh!”

  “He might have had to do that. She wouldn’t have minded his fibbing outright, so much, for then it wouldn’t have seemed to come from his nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn’t true, and didn’t say a word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak, something cowardly in him.”

  Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. “I suppose it did. But don’t you think it’s rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?”

  “Yes, it is,” she assented. “That is why I say she was too exacting. But a man oughn’t to defend him.”

  Burnamy’s laugh had more pleasure in it, now. “Another woman might?”

  “No. She might excuse him.”

  He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

  “I believe,” Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to the ruin alone, “that if you hadn’t required any quarterings of nobility from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He’s a robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn’t have any scruple in levying tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union crossbowmen.”

  If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, “I don’t see how you can have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him.”

  “Oh,” Burnamy replied in kind, “he buys my poverty and not my will. And perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more.”

  “Have you been doing something very wicked?”

  “What should you have to say to me, if I had?” he bantered.

  “Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you,” she mocked back.

  They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

  A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him. He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village’s claims upon the visitors’ interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.

  XXXVI.

  The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden, bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to find flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her. She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

  A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon them, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine in time of siege.

  From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General Triscoe’s leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of the present. It was more a difference in method than anything else that distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. What was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by steamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.

  “Then you believe in free trade,” said Stoller, severely.

  “No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff laws.”

  “I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night,” said Miss Triscoe, “that people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way their things are tumbled over by the inspectors.”

  “It’s shocking,” said Mrs. March, magisterially.

  “It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times,” her husband resumed. “But I’m glad the travellers make no resistance. I’m opposed to private war as much as I am to free trade.”

  “It all comes round to the same thing at last,” said General Triscoe.

  “Your precious humanity—”

  “Oh, I don’t claim it exclusively,” March protested.

  “Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his course, and coming back to where he started.”

  Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can’t stand the duties.”

  “Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,” March consented.

  If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields and in long
curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance. “I don’t suppose,” Burnamy said, “that life ever does much better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and saying ‘Unberufen.’ I might knock on your bouquet; that’s wood.”

  “It would spoil the flowers,” she said, looking down at them in her belt.

  She looked up and their eyes met.

  “I wonder,” he said, presently, “what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?”

  “Do you have that, too?” she asked.

  “Yes. Perhaps it’s because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse.”

  “That must be it. I never thought of it before, though.”

  “If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears beforehand — it may come to that.”

  “I hope it won’t. I’d rather not know when I was to be happy; it would spoil the pleasure; and wouldn’t be any compensation when it was the other way.”

  A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief. “Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?” he called gayly up to him.

  “I guess we’ve seen about all there is,” he answered. “Hadn’t we better be going?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

  “All right,” said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

  They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.

  They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where all the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place. March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

  “Oh, give him something!” Mrs. March entreated. “He’s such a dear.”

  “No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,” he refused; and then he was about to yield.

  “Hold on!” said Stoller, assuming the host. “I got the change.”

  He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

  The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it is broken and obliterated in places.

  The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

  “That is all?” he asked of the spectral sacristan.

  “That is all,” the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something handsome.

  “No, no,” said Stoller, detecting his gesture. “Your money a’n’t good.”

  He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered a sad “Danke.”

  Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

  “Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

  “Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamy entreated.

  “Well,” she consented, and she added, “If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

  As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He came back directly, saying, “No, he didn’t find it.”

  She laughed, and held both gloves up. “No wonder! I had it all the time.

  Thank you ever so much.”

  “How are we going to ride back?” asked Stoller.

  Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, “Oh, I think the way we came, is best.”

  “Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at Pupp’s, “think I was going to let him drive back with Agatha?”

  “I wonder,” said March, “if that’s what Burnamy calls her now?”

  “I shall despise him if it isn’t.”

  XXXVII.

  Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together. He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young man did not s
it down after putting his letters before him. He said, with an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, “I have looked through the papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see.”

  “What do you mean?” said Stoller.

  Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but their editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the Honorable Jacob to their ranks.