Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She disdained to help him pretend that he did not know. “It was I who told that horrible woman about your experience at St. Johnswort. I didn’t dream that she was an interviewer, but that doesn’t excuse me, and I am willing to take any punishment for my — I don’t know what to call it — mischief.”

  She was so intensely ready, so magnificently prepared for the stake, if that should be her sentence, that Hewson could not help laughing. “Why there isn’t any punishment severe enough for a crime like that,” he began, but she would not allow him to trifle with the matter.

  “Oh, I didn’t think you would be so uncandid! The instant I read that interview I made Mrs. Rock get ready to come. And we started the first steamer. It seemed to me that I could not eat or sleep, till I had seen you and told you what I had done and taken the consequences. And now do you think it right to turn it off as a joke?”

  “I don’t wish to make a joke of it,” said Hewson, gravely, in compliance with her mood. “But I don’t understand, quite, how you could have got the story over there in time for you—”

  “It was cabled to their London edition — that’s what it said in the paper; and by this time they must have it in Australia,” said Miss Hernshaw, with unrelieved severity.

  “Oh!” said Hewson, giving himself time to realize that he was the psychical hero of two hemispheres. “Well,” he resumed “what do you expect me to say?”

  “I don’t know what I expect. I expected you to say something without my prompting you. You know that it was outrageous for me to talk about your apparition without your leave, and to be the means of its getting into the newspapers.”

  “I’m not sure you were the means. I have told the story a hundred times, myself.”

  “But that doesn’t excuse me. You knew the kind of people to tell it to, and I didn’t.”

  “Oh, I am afraid I was willing to tell it to all kinds of people — to any kind that would listen.”

  “You are trying to evade me, Mr. Hewson,” she said, with a severity he found charming. “I didn’t expect that of you.”

  The appeal was not lost upon Hewson. “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you,” said Miss Hernshaw, with an effect of giving him another trial, “to say — to acknowledge that you were terribly annoyed by that interview.”

  “If you will excuse me from attaching the slightest blame to you for it, I will acknowledge that I was annoyed.”

  Miss Hernshaw drew a deep breath as of relief. “I will arrange about the blame,” she said loftily. “And now I wish to tell you how I never supposed that girl was an interviewer. We were all together at an artist’s house in Rome, and after dinner, we got to telling ghost-stories, the way people do, around the fire, and I told mine — yours I mean. And before we broke up, this girl came to me — it was while we were putting on our wraps — and introduced herself, and said how much she had been impressed by my story — of course, I mean your story — and she said she supposed it was made up. I said I should not dream of making up a thing of that kind, and that it was every word true, and I had heard the person it happened to tell it himself. I don’t know! I was vain of having heard it, so, at first hand.”

  “I can understand,” said Hewson, sadly.

  “And then I told her who the person was, and where it happened — and about the burglary. You can’t imagine how silly people get when they begin going in that direction.”

  “I am afraid I can,” said Hewson.

  “She seemed very grateful somehow; I couldn’t see why, but I didn’t ask; and then I didn’t think about it again till I saw it in that awful newspaper. She sent it to me herself; she was such a simpleton; she thought I would actually like to see it. She must have written it down, and sent it to the paper, and they printed it when they got ready to; she needed the money, I suppose. Then I began to wonder what you would say, when you remembered how I blamed you for telling the same story — only not half so bad — at that dinner.”

  “I always felt you were quite right,” said Hewson. “I have always thanked you in my own mind for being so frank with me.”

  “Well, and what do you think now, when you know that I was ten times as bad as you — ten times as foolish and vulgar!”

  “I haven’t had time to formulate my ideas yet,” Hewson urged.

  “You know perfectly well that you despise me. Can you say that I had any right to give your name?”

  “It must have got out sooner or later. I never asked any one not to mention my name when I told the story—”

  “I see that you think I took a liberty, and I did. But that’s nothing. That isn’t the point. How I do keep beating about the bush! Mrs. Rock says it was a great deal worse to tell where it happened, for that would give the place the reputation of being haunted and nobody could ever live there afterwards, for they couldn’t keep servants, even if they didn’t have the creeps themselves, and it would ruin the property.”

  Hewson had not been able, when she touched upon this point, to elude the keen eye with which she read his silent thought.

  “Is that true?” she demanded.

  “Oh, no; oh, no,” he began, but he could not frame in plausible terms the lies he would have uttered. He only succeeded in saying, “Those things soon blow over.”

  “Then how,” she said, sternly, “does it happen that in every town and village, almost, there are houses that you can hardly hire anybody to live in, because people say they are haunted? No, Mr. Hewson, it’s very kind of you, and I appreciate it, but you can’t make me believe that it will ever blow over, about St. Johnswort. Have you heard from Mr. St. John since?”

  “Yes,” Hewson was obliged to own.

  “And was he very much troubled about it? I should think he was a man that would be, from the way he behaved about the burglary. Was he?” she persisted, seeing that Hewson hesitated.

  “Yes, I must say he was.”

  There was a sound of walking to and fro in the adjoining room, a quick shutting as of trunk-lids, a noise as of a skirt shaken out, and steps advanced to the door. Miss Hernshaw ran to it and turned the key in the lock. “Not yet, Mrs. Rock,” she called to the unseen presence within, and she explained to Hewson, as she faced him again, “She promised that I should have it all out with you myself, and now I’m not going to have her in here, interrupting. Well, did he write to you?”

  “Yes, he wrote to me. He wanted me to deny the story.”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course not!” said Hewson, with a note of indignation. “It was true. Besides it wouldn’t have been of any use.”

  “No, it would have been wicked and it would have been useless. And then what did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? And you have never heard another word from him?”

  “Yes, he came to see me last night.”

  “Here in New York? Is he here yet?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Where?”

  “I believe at the Overpark.”

  Miss Hernshaw caught her breath, as if she were going to speak, but she did not say anything.

  “Why do you insist upon all this, Miss Hernshaw?” he entreated. “It can do you no good to follow the matter up!”

  “Do you think I want to do myself good?” she returned. “I want to do myself harm! What did he say when he came to see you?”

  “Well, you can imagine,” said Hewson, not able to keep out of his tone the lingering disgust he felt for St. John.

  “He complained?”

  “He all but shed tears,” said Hewson, recalled to a humorous sense of St. John’s behavior. “I felt sorry for him; though,” he added, darkly, “I can’t say that I do now.”

  Miss Hernshaw didn’t seek to fathom the mystery of his closing words. “Had he been actually inconvenienced by that thing in the paper?”

  “Yes — somewhat.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh,” Hewson groaned. “If you must know—”

/>   “I must! The worst!”

  “It had fairly turned him out of house and home. His servants had all left him, and he had been reduced to taking his meals at the inn. He showed me a handful of letters from people whom he had asked to visit him, withdrawing their acceptances, or making excuses for not accepting.”

  “Ah!” said Miss Hernshaw, with a deep, inward breath, as if this now were indeed something like the punishment she had expected. “And will it — did he think — did he say anything about the pecuniary effect — the — whether it would hurt the property?”

  “He seemed to think it would,” answered Hewson, reluctantly, and he added, unfortunately for his generous purpose, “I really can’t enter upon that part.”

  She arched her eyebrows in grieved surprise. “But that is the very part that I want you to enter upon Mr. Hewson. You must tell me, now! Did he say that it had injured the property very much?”

  “He did, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I think St. John is a man to put the worst face on that matter.”

  “You are saying that to keep me from feeling badly. But I ought to feel badly — I wish to feel badly. I suppose he said that it wasn’t worth anything now.”

  “Something of that sort,” Hewson helplessly admitted.

  “Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he chooses to ask!” With the precipitation which characterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose from the chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, pushed an electric button in the wall, swirled away to the other side of the room, unlocked the door behind which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it open, said, “You can come out, Mrs. Hock; I’ve rung for breakfast.”

  Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague eyes wandering over every other object in the room, till they rested upon Hewson, directly before her. Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, as if taking him into the joke. “Well, has Rosalie had it out with you?”

  “I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock,” Miss Hernshaw answered, “and I will tell you all about it later. Now I want my breakfast.”

  XII.

  Hewson ate the meal before him, and it was a very good one, as from time to time he noted, in a daze which was as strange a confusion of the two consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. Whatever the convention was between Miss Hernshaw and Mrs. Rock with regard to the matter in hand, or lately in hand, it dropped, after a few uninterested inquiries from Mrs. Rock, who was satisfied, or seemed so, to know that Miss Hernshaw had got at the worst. She led the talk to other things, like the comparative comforts and discomforts of the line to Genoa and the line to Liverpool; and Hewson met her upon these polite topics with an apparent fulness of interest that would have deceived a much more attentive listener.

  All the time he was arguing with Miss Hernshaw in his nether consciousness, pleading with her to keep her away from the fact that he had himself bought St. Johnswort, until he could frame some fitting form in which to tell her that he had bought it. With his outward eyes, he saw her drooping on the opposite side of the table, and in spite of her declaration that she wanted her breakfast, making nothing of it, after the preliminary melon, while to his inward vision she was passionately refusing, by every charming perversity, to be tempted away from the subject.

  As the Cunard boats always get in on Saturday, this morrow of their arrival was naturally Sunday; and after a while Hewson fancied symptoms of going to church in Mrs. Rock. She could not have become more vague than she ordinarily was, but her wanderings were of a kind of devotional character. She spoke of the American church in Rome, and asked Hewson if he knew the rector. Then, when he said he was afraid he was keeping her from going to church, she said she did not know whether Rosalie intended going. At the same time she rose from the table, and Hewson found that he should not be allowed to sit down again, unless by violence. He had to go away, and he went, as little at ease in his mind as he very well could be.

  He was no sooner out of the house than he felt the necessity of returning. He did not know how or when Miss Hernshaw would write to St. John, but that she would do so, he did not at all doubt, and then, when the truth came out, what would she think of him? He did not think her a very wise person; she seemed to him rather a wild and whirling person in her ideals of conduct, an unbridled and undisciplined person; and yet he was aware of profoundly and tenderly respecting her as a creature of the most inexpugnable innocence and final goodness. He could not bear to have her feel that he had trifled with her. There had not been many meetings between them, but each meeting had been of such event that it had advanced their acquaintance far beyond the point that it could have reached through weeks of ordinary association. From the first there had been that sort of intimacy which exists between spirits which encounter in the region of absolute sincerity. She had never used the least of those arts which women use in concealing the candor of their natures from men unworthy of it; she had not only practiced her rule of instant and constant veracity, but had avowed it, and as it were, invited his judgment of it. Hitherto, he had met her half-way at least, but now he was in the coil of a disingenuousness which must more and more trammel him from her, unless he found some way to declare the fact to her.

  This ought to have been an easy matter, but it was not easy; upon reflection it grew rather more difficult. Hewson did not see how he could avow the fact, which he wished to avow, without intolerable awkwardness; without the effect of boasting, without putting upon her a burden which he had no right to put. To be sure, she had got herself in for it all by her divine imprudence, but she had owned her error in that as promptly as if it had been the blame of some one else. Still Hewson doubted whether her magnanimity was large enough to go round in the case of a man who tried to let his magnanimity come upon her with any sort of dramatic surprise. This was what he must seem to be doing if he now left her to learn from another how he had kept St. John from loss by himself assuming the chance of depreciation in his property. But if he went and told her that he had done it, how much better for him would that be?

  He took a long, unhappy walk up into the Park, and then he walked back to the Walholland. By this time he thought Mrs. Rock and Miss Hernshaw must have been to church, but he had not the courage to send up his name to them. He waited about in the region of the dining-room, in the senseless hope that it would be better for him to surprise them on their way to luncheon, and trust to some chance for introducing his confession, than to seek a direct interview with Miss Hernshaw. But they did not come to luncheon, and then Hewson had the clerk send up his card. Word came back that the ladies would see him, and he followed the messenger to Mrs. Rock’s apartment, where if he was surprised, he was not disappointed to be received by Miss Hernshaw alone.

  “Mrs. Rock is lying down,” she explained, “but I thought that it might be something important, and you would not mind seeing me.”

  “Not at all,” said Hewson, with what seemed to him afterwards superfluous politeness, and then they both waited until he could formulate his business, Miss Hernshaw drooping forward, and looking down in a way that he had found was most characteristic of her. “It is something important — at least it is important to me. Miss Hernshaw, may I ask whether you have done anything — it seems a very unwarrantable question — about St. Johnswort?”

  “About buying it?”

  “Yes. It will be useless to make any offer for it.”

  “Why will it be useless to do that?”

  “Because — because I have bought it myself.”

  “You have bought it?”

  “Yes; when he came to me last night, and made those representations — Well, in short, I have bought the place.”

  “To save him from losing money by that — story?”

  “Well — yes. I ought to have told you the fact this morning, as soon as you said you would buy the place. I know that you like people to be perfectly truthful. But — I couldn’t — without seeming to — brag.”

  “I u
nderstand,” said Miss Hernshaw.

  “I took the risk of your writing to St. John; but then I realized that if he answered and told you what I ought to have told you myself, it would make it worse, and I came back.”

  “I don’t know whether it would have made it worse; but you have come too late,” said Miss Hernshaw. “I’ve just written to Mr. St. John.”

  They were both silent for what Hewson thought a long time. At the end of it, he asked, “Did you — you must excuse me — refer to me at all?”

  “No, certainly not. Why should I?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that it would have mattered.” He was silent again, with bowed head; when he looked up he saw tears in the girl’s eyes.

  “I suppose you know where this leaves me?” she said gently.

  “I can’t pretend that I don’t,” answered Hewson. “What can I do?”

  “You can sell me the place for what it cost you.”

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said Hewson.

  “Why do you say that? It isn’t as if I were poor; but even then you wouldn’t have the right to refuse me if I insisted. It was my fault that it ever came out about St. Johnswort. It might have come out about you, but the harm to Mr. St. John — I did that, and why should you take it upon yourself?”

  “Because I was really to blame from the beginning to the end. If it had not been for my pitiful wish to shine as the confidant of mystery, nothing would have been known of the affair. Even when you asked me that night if it had not happened at St. Johnswort, I know now that I had a wretched triumph in saying that it had, and I was so full of this that I did not think to caution you against repeating what I had owned.”

  “Yes,” said the girl, with her unsparing honesty, “if you had given me any hint, I would not have told for the world. Of course I did not think — a girl wouldn’t — of the effect it would have on the property.”

  “No, you wouldn’t think of that,” said Hewson. Though he agreed with her, he would have preferred that she should continue to blame herself; but he took himself severely in hand again. “So, you see, the fault was altogether mine, and if there is to be any penalty it ought to fall upon me.”