Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  I

  “WE’RE neither of us young people, I know, and I can very well believe that you had not thought of marrying again. I can account for your surprise at my offer, even your disgust—” Dr. Anther hesitated.

  “Oh no!” Mrs. Langbrith protested.

  “But I can’t see why it should be ‘terrible,’ as you call it. If you had asked me simply to take ‘no’ for an answer, I could have taken it. Or taken it better.”

  He looked at her with a wounded air, and she said, “I didn’t mean ‘terrible’ in that way. I was only thinking of it for myself, or not so much myself as — some one.” She glanced at him, where, tenderly indignant with her, he stood by the window, quite across the room, and she seemed to wish to say more, but let her eyes drop without saying more.

  He was silent, too, for a time which he allowed to prolong itself in the apparent expectation that she would break their silence. But he had to speak first. “I don’t like mysteries. I can forget — or ignore — any sense of ‘terrible’ you had in mind, if you will tell me one thing. Do you ask me now to take simply ‘no’ for an answer?”

  “Oh no!” The words were as if surprised from her, and she made with her catching breath as if she would have caught them back.

  He came quickly across the room to her. “What is it, Amelia?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she shuddered out, and she recoiled, pulling herself up, as if she wished to escape but felt an impenetrable hinderance at her back. In the action, she showed taller than she was, and more girlishly slender. At forty, after her wifehood of three years and her widowhood of nineteen years, the inextinguishable innocence of girlhood, which keeps itself through all the experiences of a good woman’s life, was pathetic in her appealing eyes; and the mourning, subdued to the paler shades of purple, which she permanently wore, would have made a stranger think of an orphan rather than a widow in her presence.

  Anther’s burly frame arrested itself at her recoil. His florid face, clean shaven at a time when nearly all men wore beards, was roughed to a sort of community of tint with his brown overcoat by the weather of many winters’ and summers’ driving in his country practice. His iron-gray hair, worn longer than the fashion was in towns, fell down his temples and neck from under his soft hat. He had on his driving-gloves, and he had his whip in one hand. He had followed Mrs. Langbrith indoors in that figure from the gate, where his unkempt old horse stood with his mud - spattered buggy, to pursue the question which she tried rather than wished to shun, and he did not know that he had not uncovered. At the pathos in her eyes and in her cheeks, which had the vertical hollows showing oftener in youth than in later life, the harshness of gathered will went out of his face. “I know what you mean,” he said; and at his words the tears began to drip down her face without the movement of any muscle in it, as if a habit of self-control which enabled her to command the inward effects of emotion had not been able to extend itself to its displays. “Poor thing!” he pitied her. “Must you always have a tyrant?”

  “He isn’t a tyrant,” she said.

  “Oh yes, he is! I know the type. I dare say v he doesn’t hit you, but he terrorizes you.”

  Mrs. Langbrith did not speak. In her reticence, even her tears stopped.

  “You tempt him to bully you. Lord bless me, you tempt me l But I won’t; no, I won’t. Amelia, why, in Heaven’s name, should he object? He has his own interests, quite apart from yours; his own world, which you couldn’t enter if he would let you.

  A fellow in his junior year at college is as remote from his mother in everything as if he were in another planet!”

  “We write to each other every Sunday,” she urged, diffidently.

  “I have no doubt you try to keep along with him; that’s your nature; but I know that he cowed you before he left home, and I know that he cows you still. I could read your correspondence — the spirit — without seeing it. He isn’t to blame. You’ve let him walk over you till he thinks there is no other path to manhood. Remember, I don’t say Jim is a bad fellow. He is a very good fellow — considering.” The doctor went to the window and stooped to look out at his horse, which remained as he had left it, only more patiently sunken in a permanence expressed by the collapsing of its hind quarters into a comfortable droop, and a dreamy dejection of its large head. In the mean time, Mrs. Langbrith had sat down in a chair which she seemed to think had offered itself to her, and when the doctor came back he asked, “May I sit down?”

  “Why, of course! I’m ashamed—”

  “No, no! Don’t say that! Don’t say anything like that!”

  In the act of sitting down, he realized that he had his hat on. He took it off and put it on the floor near his feet, where it toppled into a soft heap. His hair had partly lifted with it, and its disorder on his crown somewhat concealed its thinness. “I want to talk this matter over sensibly. We are not two young things that we need be scared at our own feelings, or each other’s. I suppose I may say we both knew it was coming to something like this?” She might not have let him say so for her, but in her silence he went on to say so for himself.

  “I knew it was coming, anyway, and I’ve known it for a good while. I have liked you ever since I came to Saxmills” — she trembled and colored a little— “but I wouldn’t be saying what I am saying to you, if I had cared for you before Langbrith died as I care for you now. That would be, to my thinking, rather loathsome. I should despise myself for it; I should despise you; I couldn’t help it. But we are both fairly outside of that. I didn’t begin to realize how it was with me till about a year ago, and I don’t suppose that you—”

  Mrs. Langbrith shifted her position slightly, but he did not notice, and he began again.

  “So I feel that I can offer you a clean hand. I’m six years older than you are, which makes it just about right; and I’m not so poor that I need seem to be after your — thirds. I’ve got a good practice, and I don’t intend to take life so hard hereafter. I could give you as pleasant a home—”

  “Oh, I couldn’t think of leaving this!” she broke out, helplessly.

  Anther allowed himself to smile. “Well, well, there’s no hurry. But if Jim marries—”

  “I should live with him.”

  “I’m imagining that you would live with me.”

  “You mustn’t.”

  “I’m merely imagining; I’m not trying to commit you to anything, or to overrule you at all. My idea is, that there’s been enough of that in your life. I want you to overrule me, and if you don’t fancy settling down immediately, and would like a year or two in Europe first, I could freshen my science up in Vienna or Paris, and come back all the better prepared to keep on in my practice here; or I could give up my practice altogether.”

  “You oughtn’t to do that.”

  “No, I oughtn’t. But all this is neither here nor there, till the great point is settled. Do you think any one could care for me as I care for you?”

  “Why, of course, Dr. Anther?”

  “Do you care for me — that way — now?” He seemed to expect evasion or hesitation, even such elusion as might have expressed itself in material escape from him, and, unconsciously, he hitched his chair forward as if to hem her in.

  It was a needless precaution. She answered instantly, “You know I do.”

  “Amelia,” Anther asked solemnly, without changing his posture or the slant of his face in its lift towards hers, “have I put any pressure on you to say this? Do you say it as freely as if I hadn’t asked you?”

  The absurdity of the question did not appear to either of them. She answered, “I say it as freely as if it had never been asked. I would have said it years ago. I have always liked you — that way. Or ever s
ince—”

  He leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands forward on the arms. “Then — then—” he began, bewilderedly, and she said:

  “But—”

  “Ah!” he broke out, “I know what that ‘but’ means. Why need there be any such ‘but’? Do you think he dislikes me?”

  “No, he likes you; he respects you. He says you are a physician who would be famous in a large place. He—”

  Anther put the rest aside with his hand. “Then he would object to any one? Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Langbrith, with a drop to specific despair from her general hopelessness.

  “I don’t recognize his right,” Anther said sharply, “unless he is ready to promise that he will never leave you to be pushed aside; turned from a mother into a mother-in-law. I don’t recognize his right. Why does he assume such a right?”

  “Out of reverence for his father’s memory.”

  II

  ONE cannot look on a widow who has long survived her husband without a curiosity not easily put into terms. The curiosity is intensified and the difficulty enhanced if there are children to testify of a relation which, in the absence of the dead, has no other witness. The man has passed out of the woman’s life as absolutely as if he had never been there; it is conceivable that she herself does not always think of her children as also his. Yet they are his children, and there must be times when he holds her in mortmain through them, when he is still her husband, still her lord and master. But how much, otherwise, does she keep of that intimate history of emotions, experiences, so manifold, so recondite? Is he as utterly gone, to her sense, as to all others? Or is he in some sort there still, in her ear, in her eye, in her touch? Was it for the nothing which it now seems that they were associated in the most tremendous of the human dramas, the drama that allies human nature with the creative, the divine and the immortal, on one side, the bestial and the perishable on the other? Does oblivion pass equally over the tremendous and the trivial and blur them alike?

  Anther looked at Mrs. Langbrith in a whirl of question: question of himself as well as of her. By virtue of his privity to her past, he was in a sort of authority over her; but it may have been because of his knowledge that he almost humbly forbore to use his authority.

  “Amelia,” he entreated her, “have you brought him up in a superstition of his father?”

  “Oh no!” She had the effect of hurrying to answer him. “Oh, never!”

  “I am glad of that, anyway. But if you have let him grow up in ignorance—”

  “How could I help that?”

  “You couldn’t! He made himself solid, there. But the boy’s reverence for his father’s memory is sacrilege—”

  “I know,” she tremulously consented; and in her admission there was no feint of sparing the dead, of defending the name she bore, or the man whose son she had borne. She must have gone all over that ground long ago, and abandoned it. “It ought to have come out,” she even added.

  “Yes, but it never can come out now, while any of his victims live,” Anther helplessly raged. “I’m willing to help keep it covered up in his grave myself, because you’re one of them. If poor Hawberk had only taken to drink instead of opium!”

  “Yes,” she again consented, with no more apparent feeling for the memory imperilled by the conjecture than if she had been nowise concerned in it.

  “But you must, Amelia — I hate to blame you; I know how true you are — you must have let the boy think—”

  “As a child, he used to ask me, but not much; and what would you have had I should answer him?”

  “Of course, of course! You couldn’t.”

  “I used to wonder if I could. Once, when he was little, he put his finger on this” — she put her own finger on a scar over her left eye—” and asked me what made it. I almost told him.”

  Anther groaned and twisted in his chair. “The child always spoke of him,” she went on passionlessly, “as being in heaven. I found out, one night, when I was saying his prayers with him, that — you know how children get things mixed up in their thoughts — he supposed Mr. Langbrith was the father in heaven he was praying to.”

  “Gracious powers!” Anther broke out.

  “I suppose,” she concluded, with a faint sigh, “though it’s no comfort, that there are dark corners in other houses.”

  “Plenty,” Anther grimly answered, from the physician’s knowledge. “But not many as dark as in yours, Amelia.”

  “No,” she passively consented once more. “As he grew up,” she resumed the thread of their talk, without prompting, “he seemed less and less curious about it; and I let it go. I suppose I wanted to escape from it, to forget it.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “But, doctor,” she pleaded with him for the extenuation which she could not, perhaps, find in herself, “I never did teach him by any word or act — unless not saying anything was doing it — that his father was the sort of man he thinks he was. I should have been afraid that Mr. Langbrith himself would not have liked that. It would have been a fraud upon the child.”

  “I don’t think Langbrith would have objected to it on that ground,” Anther bitterly suggested.

  “No, perhaps not. But between Mr. Langbrith and me there were no concealments, and I felt that he would not have wished me to impose upon the child expressly.”

  “Oh, he preferred the tacit deceit, if it would serve his purpose. I’ll allow that. And in this case it seems to have done it.”

  “Do you mean,” she meekly asked, “that I have deceived James?”

  “No,” said Anther, with a blurt of joyless laughter. “But if such a thing were possible, if it were not too sickeningly near some wretched superstition that doesn’t believe in itself, I should say that his father deceived him through you, that he diabolically acted through your love, and did the evil which we have got to face now. Amelia!” he startled her with the resolution expressed in his utterance of her name, “you say the boy will object to my marrying you. Do you object to my telling him?”

  “Telling him?”

  “Just what his father was!”

  “Oh, you mustn’t! It would make him hate you.”

  “What difference?”

  “I couldn’t let him hate you. I couldn’t bear “that.” The involuntary tears, kept back in the abstracter passages of their talk, filled her eyes again, and trembled above her cheeks.

  “If necessary, he has got to know,” Anther went on, obdurately. “I won’t give you up on a mere apprehension of his opposition.”

  “Oh, do give me up!” she implored. “It would be the best way.”

  “It would be the worst. I have a right to you, and if you care for me, as you say—”

  “I do!”

  “Then, Heaven help us, you have right to me. You have a right to freedom, to peace, to rest, to security; and you are going to have it. Now, will you let it come to the question without his having the grounds of a fair judgment, or shall we tell him what he ought to know, and then do what we ought to do: marry, and let me look after you as long as I live?”

  She hesitated, and then said, with a sort of furtive evasion of the point: “There is something that I ought to tell you. You said that you would despise yourself if you had cared for me in Mr. Langbrith’s lifetime.” She always spoke of her husband, dead, as she had always addressed him, living, in the tradition of her great juniority, and in a convention of what was once polite form from wives to husbands, not to be dropped in the most solemn, the most intimate, moments.

  Anther found nothing grotesque in it, and, therefore, nothing peculiarly pathetic. “Well?” he asked, impatiently trying for patience. “Well, I know that I cared for you then. I couldn’t help it. Now you despise me, and that ends it.”

  Anther rubbed his hand over his face; then he said, “I don’t believe you, Amelia.”

  “I did,” she persisted.

  “Well, then, it was all right. You couldn’t have had a wrong th
ought or feeling, and the theory may go. After all, I was applying the principle in my own case, and trying to equal myself with you. If you choose to equal yourself with me by saying this, I must let you; but it makes no difference. You cared for me because I stood your helper when there was no other possible, and that was right. Now, shall we tell Jim, or not?”

  She looked desperately round, as if she might escape the question by escaping from the room. As all the doors were shut, she seemed to abandon the notion of flight, and said, with a deep sigh, “I must see him first.”

  Anther caught up his hat and put it on, and went out without any form of leave-taking. When the outer door had closed upon him, she stole to the window, and, standing back far enough not to be seen, watched him heavily tramping down the brick walk, with its borders of box, to the white gateposts, each under its elm, budded against a sky threatening rain, and trailing its pendulous spray in the wind. He jounced into his buggy, and drew the reins over his horse, which had been standing unhitched, and drove away. She turned from the window.

  III

  EASTER came late that year, and the jonquils were there before it, even in the Mid-New England latitude of Saxmills, when James Langbrith brought his friend Falk home with him for the brief vacation. The two fellows had a great time, as they said to each other, among the village girls; and perhaps Langbrith evinced his local superiority more appreciably by his patronage of them than by the colonial nobleness of the family mansion, squarely fronting the main village street, with gardened grounds behind dropping to the river. He did not dispense his patronage in all cases without having his hand somewhat clawed by the recipients, but still he dispensed it; and, though Falk laughed when Langbrith was scratched, still Langbrith felt that he was more than holding his own, and he made up for any defeat he met outside by the unquestioned supremacy he bore within his mother’s house. Her shyness, out of keeping with her age and stature, invited the sovereign command which Langbrith found it impossible to refuse, though he tempered his tyranny with words and shows of affection well calculated to convince his friend of the perfect intelligence which existed between his mother and himself. When he thought of it, he gave her his arm in going out to dinner; and, when he forgot, he tried to make up by pushing her chair under her before she sat down. He was careful at table to have the conversation first pay its respects to some supposed interest of hers, and to return to that if it strayed afterwards, and include her. He conspicuously kissed her every morning when he came down to breakfast, and he kissed her at night when she would have escaped to bed without the rite.