Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “There is everything hushed up,” Anther nodded, frowningly.

  “And you mean that you can tell me — ?” The judge checked himself, with a laugh for his weakness.

  “Not everything, because I don’t know everything; but I know enough.”

  “Squalid things — the kind we don’t like to handle, or pretend we don’t?”

  “Squalid, and lurid, too. He was the devil.”

  “There you are, with your actionable language again! It’s well for you that our ex-fellow-citizen is out of the way.”

  “Do you believe,” Anther asked, “that one of us can do another a wrong so atrocious as to confound the sufferer’s conscience?”

  “Cause his brother to offend? Isn’t that rather a question for our friend Enderby?”

  “Perhaps. But what do you think?”

  “I should say that it was a theory which a great many people would like to urge for a justification, or at least an explanation of their misdemeanors.” The doctor’s tragic humor broke in a joyless laugh. “Oh, of course, you are right. It is astonishing how these old theological cobwebs hang on in corners of the brain. What a comfort you legal minds are! Advocatus diaboli!”

  “Ah, aren’t you playing that part now? I should be quite willing to leave our ex-townsman in the enjoyment of his canonization, but you seem to want to reopen the case.”

  “No.” Anther relapsed into his gloom. “It can never be reopened. That is the worst of the evil that lives after men. It intertwines itself with so much of the good in the survivors that you can’t strike at it without wounding the best and gentlest of them. But I want to tell you, Garley, about that man — Or, no! Why should I bore you — burden you?”

  “Oh, we always like scandal, even concerning the dead. I’ve allowed that, and I can enjoy yours all the more because I know it isn’t idle scandal. Go on, doctor!”

  Anther had risen, and he did not sit down at the courteous gesture towards his chair which the judge made.

  “Hawberk has got back,” he said.

  “Ah!” Judge Garley brightened up. “It’s he whom you have been allowing the opium? I supposed he always came back permanently cured.”

  “This time seems to be an exception. He has come back cured of seven-eighths of his ordinary dose, if you can believe him; which you can’t. I used to think I could follow his lies, or their probable direction. But I give it up. Beyond having mostly an optimistic character, and being the absolute reverse of the known fact, his mendacity is an ever-new surprise. I give it a harder name than it ought to have. He doesn’t mean to deceive, poor soul. It’s pure romancing, absolute fiction, but it’s no worse. What interested me to-day was the turn which he has taken towards the memory of the man who ruined him. He wanted to persuade me that Royal Langbrith was a fine fellow, with whom he had always been on the best of terms. The fact is — do you want to hear it? Well, I’ll tell you anyway — Langbrith did him one of the deadliest and crudest injuries that ever a man had to bear. You know they were partners in the mills here?”

  “I have heard the poetic legend that Hawberk was an ingenious mechanic to whom Langbrith gave a share in the business, and then had to get rid of because he was an opium fiend. Is the legend a little too florid?”

  Anther seemed to restrain a burst of fury. When he spoke it was quite pacifically. “You can decide. Hawberk was an ingenious mechanic, whose invention put the business on a prosperous basis. He discovered how to make from straw-pulp the light quality of printing-paper which is the specialty of the mills to-day, and which they still have the secret of. Langbrith wanted the whole business. Hawberk had been his partner from the beginning, and he forced Hawberk out under threat of exposing him to his wife, almost maniacally neurotic, in a foolish boy affair with a woman. Hawberk told me, while he could still tell the truth, that there was nothing guilty in the business; but his wife was frantically jealous, and the fact wouldn’t have mattered. She would have believed anything against him, because she must.” Prom his own science the judge acknowledged with a nod the point which the doctor made from his. “He brooded upon his injury night and day, till the night and day were one, and there was no sleep in them. Then he took to opium. I prescribed it, as I should have to do again in a case like his, if we were back where we were then with soporifics. He could not have taken chloral. But the opium mastered him, while he was still hoping for justice from a man who did not know what justice meant. His opium-eating could not be kept a secret in a place like this, and Langbrith had it all his own way. The things that can be kept secret are the kind of things he did. He had two wives: one, the woman he threatened Hawberk with, in Boston, and never married, and one, the Mrs. Langbrith you know here. He went to town for his debauches of all kinds, and sometimes when he came home so much of his drink-fury remained that he taunted his wife with the other woman. He used to strike her — she has told me, because she had to, and that is how I came to know the other thing. She told me that, too, but not until it could not be kept from me any longer. What graves women are for the wickedness of men! I suppose you know it, in your profession; but in mine — !”

  Anther had apparently come to an end, but he sank into the chair he had left.

  “That does put another complexion on it,” the judge said, sobered in his irony, but ironical still. “ I don’t know that I can dispute your professional superiority as a repository of family mysteries. Your case rather goes beyond any I could boast of, in some features.”

  “And this,” Anther broke out, taking away the handkerchief with which he had been wiping his face, “is the man whom, that poor young fool wants to put up a tablet to in the front of the Public Library!”

  “I noticed,” the judge said, “that you seemed to receive the suggestion rather conservatively the other night. I laid it to envy of the deceased.”

  “Oh, pooh! I know what you mean. I was going to tell you. I do wish to marry her. I don’t think she is perfect, and I’m long past the time of marrying for ‘love,’ as it is called. But to me she is the most sacred of human beings. I have known her from the first days of her hideous marriage, almost from the time when that man took her from her hard work in his mills and made her his slave; for she was that from the beginning.”

  “Excuse me,” the judge interrupted. “I oughtn’t to let you go on, if you think I meant to imply what you have inferred. I didn’t intend to insinuate that you had the envy of a successor.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind your knowing what I’ve told you.” Anther stopped there, as if he had lost the thread of his thinking, and the judge made his attempt to restore it to him.

  “I had understood that Mrs. Langbrith was the daughter of a minister in the country near here, and was employed in the business in a clerical capacity.”

  “She wasn’t,” the doctor said, bluntly. “Her father was a starving saint in the hill parish where she was born; but when Langbrith married her she was a hand in the mills, like forty other girls. It was her inherent dignity that may have given him the notion of something else. Or it may have been his dignity. At any rate, he married her and martyred her, even to the blows that fell upon her body as well as her soul. I don’t say he never fancied her; and she fancied him, poor soul, as long as he would let her; and when she lost all faith in him she was still his faithful victim. She was so gentle that, though she suffered, she could not resist evil. She was born to keep that commandment. He could outrage her nature, and abuse her to his heart’s content, and he could count absolutely upon her silence. He was as safe from her as from the God he found so complaisant to his wickedness.”

  “Oh, come,” the judge remonstrated, ironically still, though he felt the indignant passion that throbbed in Anther’s words and respected it; “you mustn’t allow yourself to arraign the Deity for His way of doing business. How do you know but our friend is paying his shot now in what is not perhaps ‘the easiest room in hell’?”

  “Why I have come to you” — Anther made anoth
er of his abrupt breaks from the direct line—” is because I want you to advise me what to do. It is all open between her and me, but she has to live in subjection to some one, and she lives in subjection to her son. She has never positively deceived him in regard to his father, but she has never found the time to tell him what sort of man his father was.”

  “It would have been difficult,” the judge owned, somewhat more gravely.

  “I have thought the matter over a thousand times, and tried to imagine some moment when she could have spoken to undeceive him, but I never could make it out. All that I could make out was that every moment’s delay rendered the truth more impossible.” The judge nodded his large head in unconscious assent. “As time went on, the man became a sort of town myth. He grew into the tradition of a conscript father, the founder of our prosperity, the benefactor of the community; and it would have been an insult to the public faith, as well as a terrible ordeal for the boy, if his real character had been proclaimed.”

  “I see,” the judge assented, with a certain pleasure in the perfection of the situation.

  “It became a sort of moral necessity,” Anther continued, “ to leave the past undisturbed, to let the lie remain. The only man who might have unmasked Langbrith living was held from it by the grip Langbrith had of his throat, and Langbrith dead has been safe from him through the optimistic turn his opium craze has taken in the direction of a legend of close friendship between them. Besides, Hawberk’s repute as a liar had become so firmly established that his word wouldn’t have counted in a place where Langbrith’s fair fame is the richest jewel of the local history. There couldn’t be a more acceptable, a more entirely popular, thing proposed in Saxmills than his commemoration in the way his son has suggested. It wouldn’t cost the town anything, and it would be such a credit to it!”

  The doctor laughed for helplessness, and the judge joined in the bitter merriment. “Yes,” he assented, with the ponderous movement of his mind which found expression in his formal and weighty diction, whether he joked or whether he adjudicated. “There appears, as you say, doctor, to be a sort of moral necessity to let lying dogs sleep, if we may reverse the axiom, especially when they have slept long. What is the advantage, the better element might ask, of rending the veil of oblivion from errors which Providence has seen fit to leave in the shadow, doubtless for some wise purpose? The morals of the community, they would contend, would be more contaminated by the effluvium from our late fellow-townsman’s tomb, if we were to open its ponderous and marble jaws for the purpose of drawing his frailties from their dread abode, than if we were to leave the past undisturbed. They could argue that his success, which is now an example and an incentive to light our young men on the upward way, as long as they suppose it to be founded upon virtue, would be a means of endless corruption if it were known to be the putrescent splendor of his moral rottenness, and would prove an ignis fatuus to lure them into the abyss. As far as our community is concerned, doctor, I think you will do better to leave the late Royal Langbrith’s memory alone.”

  “As far as the community is concerned, Garley,” the doctor returned, hotly, “I think you are perfectly right. But that isn’t the point, except for the psychological publicist, if there is such a thing. I am interested solely in the personal view.”

  “And what is that?”

  Anther replied, after a moment of silent chagrin: “I hoped you might have inferred. But it is simply this: Mrs. Langbrith and I both have the belief that our marriage would be abhorrent to her son, not because he has any dislike for me — he is rather fond of me, and I like the boy, when he is off his high horse and isn’t patronizing me—”

  “He patronizes me, too,” the judge observed; the doctor ignored his reflection in proceeding.

  “ — but because he has this extraordinary infatuation for his father’s memory, and would consider his mother’s second marriage with any one a desecration not to be voluntarily endured. Simply, she is afraid to bring our wish to his knowledge, and she is afraid to let me do so. I have been almost a father to the boy from his first years; and, under ordinary circumstances, there would be no reason to suppose that our marriage would be distasteful to him. But as it is—”

  Anther stopped, and the judge said, with the air of summing-up, “Your conclusion is that the defamation of his father is the only means of—”

  “Why do you speak,” Anther cried out, “as if his father were an innocent man, and not the wickedest and filthiest scoundrel that ever lived?”

  “My dear old friend,” said the judge, leaning forward in his rocking-chair and laying his hand on the doctor’s arm, “let us be careful not to employ actionable language, even in regard to those who can only cite us to appear before the higher tribunal, which has no jurisdiction in this county, or, so far as I know, in this State. I quite enter into your feelings, and I should be the first to wish you joy of the fulfilment of your hopes, the fruition of your wishes. But you will certainly not further them by adopting anything like a violent line of expression. Now, go on. The boy has returned to Harvard. Have you seen Mrs. Langbrith since?”

  “I parted with her in anger Sunday night. But she had tried my patience beyond endurance. She proposed to me, as a way of propitiating James, that—” Anther choked, and the judge had to prompt him:

  “She proposed to you — ?”

  “Well, that I should humor his notion of putting up this memorial to his father; that I should stultify myself, and help to perpetuate the — the—”

  “Careful, careful!” his friend suggested.

  “Oh, you know what I mean! I don’t believe she felt the enormity of it as I did. She couldn’t, in that meek forgivingness of hers. But I left her in anger — yes, for the first time; and I don’t see my way to making her understand the shame, the iniquity—”

  “Really, you ought to have been a doctor of divinity! I think we can leave your reconciliation with her to nature,” and the judge finely smiled at the doctor. “But now, in regard to the son’s undeception — or shall we say enlightenment? — is it your notion that some third party might undertake the task of accomplishing the end desired?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what my notion is,” Anther replied, rising with a finality which he expressed in superfluously buttoning his coat about him. The day was a warmish day in April, and he might well have found his winter great-coat uncomfortable, even in driving. With the afternoon sun pouring into the thinly shaded windows of the judge’s bare office, it was almost a summer heat in which he had been sitting. He added, with a quick sigh, “I didn’t know but you would be able to advise me—”

  “I will think it over,” the judge promised, with bland placidity, and he turned from taking leave of his friend and rearranged some papers on his open desk. “By-the-way,” he called after Anther, “I meant to ask you: the brother, who has charge of the business, does he know anything of this double life and character?”

  “John Langbrith?”

  “Yes. How long has he been in charge?”

  “Oh, ever since Langbrith’s death. Somebody had to take hold of the business. He was here before that.”

  “But nothing has ever passed between you and him as to the facts?”

  “Not a word. They were not things I could speak of first, and John Langbrith speaks of nothing. I suppose he talks business, but I have no business to talk with him.”

  “Does Mrs. Langbrith know whether he knows?”

  “We have never mentioned the matter, but I don’t believe she does. You know how close he is. He never goes to her except on business, and she has never seen the inside of his house. The mill is his home.”

  “In his way, he is as successful a secret as his brother?”

  “Quite,” the doctor said, gloomily.

  XV

  ON his way home to the early tea which Mrs. Burwell’s primitive tradition obliged him to accept, in place of anything like a late dinner or later supper, Dr. Anther drove by the Langbrith mansion, and looked hard
at it. He turned, when he got by, drove back, stopped his buggy at the gate, and hurried up the brick walk to the door. It was opened, before he could ring, by Mrs. Langbrith. “Both the girls are out,” she partially explained, and she could have said further that the middle-aged serving-women, who were still girls to her, had not outlived their youthful passion for mingling with the crowds which thronged the long main street of Saxmills on pay-day, and that she had yielded to it for the sake of the pleasure which the fine weather would add to their outing. But he paid no heed to her opening words, and she did not go on.

  “Amelia,” he said, with the fervid rashness that was natural to him, “I want to beg your pardon for the way I left you last night.”

  “Oh!” she murmured, so deeply that the murmur was almost a sob.

  Then these two elderly people did by one impulse what they had never done before. In the dim hall, beyond which Anther had not tried to penetrate, they cast themselves into each other’s arms, and he kissed one cheek of hers, while she buried the other in his neck, and smoothed her silvered brown hair, and kept saying softly, “Poor girl, poor girl, poor girl!”

  He kissed her cheek again, and then he walked slowly and thoughtfully down to the gate, and got into his buggy and let his horse take its own gait and course. Not only a tender patience with her swelled Anther’s heart, but an unwonted tolerance for young Langbrith also found room for itself there. What wonder that the boy was reverent of his father’s memory, since he knew no evil of him? Was it for this he must be called fool and despised for an ass? Anther saw that there were yet many steps to be taken with regard both to him and his mother, and that they could not be separated in relation to himself. He softened more and more towards the whole situation, and momently the thought of the weakness he had surprised in her consecrated and endeared her to him.

  He drove along the village street with his figure stooped well towards the dash-board, when his ears were saluted with a succession of girlish trebles. “How do, doctor!”