Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of this encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Another point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that obscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, and perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to the fact that they were now each other’s forever.

  They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. “He has always appreciated you,” she said courageously, “and I know he will see it in the right light.”

  She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

  “No, I will see him,” she said, “I wish to see him first; he will expect it of me. We had better go in, now,” she added, but neither made any motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

  Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways and Burnamy’s parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened the door into her father’s and listened.

  “Well?” he said in a sort of challenging voice.

  “Have you been asleep?” she asked.

  “I’ve just blown out my light. What has kept you?”

  She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark, she said, “Papa, I wasn’t very candid with you, this afternoon. I am engaged to Mr. Burnamy.”

  “Light the candle,” said her father. “Or no,” he added before she could do so. “Is it quite settled?”

  “Quite,” she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. “That is, as far as it can be, without you.”

  “Don’t be a hypocrite, Agatha,” said the general. “And let me try to get to sleep. You know I don’t like it, and you know I can’t help it.”

  “Yes,” the girl assented.

  “Then go to bed,” said the general concisely.

  Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, but she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him a tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into her own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight, with a smile that never left her lips.

  When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much greater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valves open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from above. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great central truth of the universe:

  “I love you. L. J. B.”

  She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

  “So do I. Don’t be silly. A. T.”

  She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch. She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

  It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involved in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young people. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was unpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everything that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not hopelessly discouraging.

  They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general’s tray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more at his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted upon the weather between them.

  “I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy,” said General Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, “and I suppose you know why you have come.” The words certainly opened the way for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had abundant time to add, “I don’t pretend that this event is unexpected, but I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you to marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are attached to each other, and we won’t waste time on that point. Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her are. How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

  “Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?”

  “I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a publisher.” The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy’s mind.

  “Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March’s book?”

  “That’s a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars.”

  “And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?”

  “Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn’t take that,

  General Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

  General Triscoe, from his ‘lit de justice’, passed this point in silence.

  “Have you any one dependent on you?”

  “My mother; I take care of my mother,” answered Burnamy, proudly.

  “Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?”

  “I have none.”

  “Then you don’t expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon her means.”

  “I expect to do nothing of the kind!” cried Burnamy. “I should be ashamed — I should feel disgraced — I should — I don’t ask you — I don’t ask her till I have the means to support her—”

  “If you were very fortunate,” continued the general, unmoved by the young fellow’s pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon his wife’s means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter’s, “if you went back to Stoller—”

  “I wouldn’t go back to him. I don’t say he’s knowingly a rascal, but he’s ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I behaved badly to him, and I’d give anything to undo the wrong I let him do himself; but I’ll never go back to him.”

  “If you went back, on your old salary,” the general persisted pitilessly, “you woul
d be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to twenty-five hundred a year.”

  “Yes—”

  “And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the scale she is used to? I don’t speak of your mother, who has the first claim upon you.”

  Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the question was of Stoller, began to sink.

  The general went on. “You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven’t money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a stranger—”

  “Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe,” Burnamy protested. “You have known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago will tell you—”

  “A stranger, and worse than a stranger,” the general continued, so pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. “It isn’t a question of liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself. You’ve done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little of you, in spite of our three months’ acquaintance; and that little is — But you shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential employ of a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself.”

  “I did. I don’t excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But it wasn’t done maliciously; it wasn’t done falsely; it was done inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it wasn’t; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I didn’t! I can never outlive that.”

  “I know,” said the general relentlessly, “that you have never attempted any defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me to overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you told her you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think, after that, of your coming back to see her? Or didn’t you expect me to know it?”

  “I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don’t excuse that, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is that I had to see her again for one last time.”

  “And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself to her.”

  “I couldn’t help doing that.”

  “I don’t say you could. I don’t judge the facts at all. I leave them altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to say to such a man as you have shown yourself.”

  “No, I will say.” The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and

  Agatha flashed in from it.

  Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. “Have you been listening?” he asked.

  “I have been hearing—”

  “Oh!” As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

  “I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn’t help hearing; and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on, after all you’ve said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he deserved.”

  “That doesn’t justify me,” Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost as severely as she — had dealt with her father.

  “Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to falsify the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you.”

  Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the other.

  “And besides, if it didn’t justify you, what you have done yourself would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the same as if you hadn’t done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is all I care for.” Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she flushed a little as she added tremulously, “And I should never, never blame you for it, after that; it’s only trying to wriggle out of things which I despise, and you’ve never done that. And he simply had to come back,” she turned to her father, “and tell me himself just how it was. And you said yourself, papa — or the same as said — that he had no right to suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he — unless — And I should never have forgiven him, if he hadn’t told me then that he that he had come back because he — felt the way he did. I consider that that exonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn’t broken his word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and — and strangely. And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, so delicately, that I don’t believe he would ever have said anything again — if I hadn’t fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!” she cried at a movement of remonstrance from Burnamy. “And I shall always be proud of you for it.” Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted his eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamy stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity. “And as for the rest,” she declared, “everything I have is his; just as everything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to take me without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha’n’t be afraid but we can get along somehow.” She added, “I have managed without a maid, ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!”

  LXVIII.

  General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers learn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character, and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable that they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in her father’s face as little as they could, but he may have found their serene satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear as a more boisterous happiness would have been.

  It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America, and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment in New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done with perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was not to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no talk of their being married.

  The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. It included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes, ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account of their several friends.

  In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of what they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at every instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistent anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leaving Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a month before sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved, of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if he got it they might not go home at once. His gains from that paper had eked out his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses in getting the material which he had contributed to it. They were not so great, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than a hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to him in crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was at times dimly conscious of his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatible with his status as Agatha’s betrothed, if not unworthy of his character as a lover in the abstract.

  The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy’s umbrella, and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father’s packing. Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in undistu
rbed possession of his room as long as possible.

  What chiefly remained to be put into the general’s trunk were his coats and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and carefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

  There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved to be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satin ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, was of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

  Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined it near to, and then at arm’s length. August stood by with a pair of the general’s trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in his eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered bouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers, which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in the closet. At August’s smile it became something else. Still she asked lightly enough, “Was ist loss, August?”

  His smile deepened and broadened. “Fur die Andere,” he explained.

  Agatha demanded in English, “What do you mean by feardy ondery?”

  “Oddaw lehdy.”

  “Other lady?” August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. “Now, August,” she said very calmly, “I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir sagen — what other lady — wass andere Dame — these flowers belonged to — diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?”