“No, no! I just mentioned it to Dr. Anther the other day. He thinks very well of it.”
“Did you say anything about James, to him?”
“No, no, no! Not a word.”
“Nor to anybody else?”
“Why, I haven’t been home long enough to see anybody else.”
Hope left that subject. “Well, now, I’ll tell you what, father. I think after you get through this pinch, as you call it, you had better talk with Dr. Anther about leaving off, gradually.”
“Why, that’s exactly what we did talk about the last time I saw him. We’ve fixed up a splendid plan. The doctor’s all right. I told him what I thought the weak points at the Retreat were, and he agreed with me right along. He’s going to study into my case. It’s peculiar. I’ve kept it up so long, and yet there hasn’t been a day when I couldn’t have left it off. My idea is to stop the thing short off. No dilly-dallying.”
Hawberk’s words expressed an energy which his weak tones and his stumbling gait in his restless movement to and fro as he talked altogether belied. Hope sat watching him, with a face which her mocking words in turn belied when she spoke.
“Do you think you can manage to catch a little waking spell every now and then till I’ve been to the doctor’s? I don’t want that green one round when I’m gone, even if he isn’t real.”
Hawberk laughed joylessly. “He’s got to stay away till night, now, anyway. I can manage him. Don’t you be afraid. I’ll get your grandmother to give me a good strong cup of coffee at dinner, and that will help to keep him down.”
“Well, shall I read now?”
“Yes, read away. I’ll keep moving; or if I get to dozing when I stop to rest, poke me with this stick.” He gave her a fallen bough which he stripped of its dead needles and broke to a stout club, and she took it in the drolling humor which formed the atmosphere of their companionship.
There was enough of this feeling in her face and voice to make Anther pause a moment when she asked him, a few hours later, “Doctor, can’t something be done about father?” She sat with the stout bottle of laudanum which Anther had given her in her hand, and tilted it back and forth on her knee.
“How do you mean?” he finally asked.
“Well, to make him stop it.”
The doctor rose and closed his door, and then sat down again and kept his eyes absently on her smiling face, as if his mind were at work beneath its surface, seeking the measure of her portion in the suffering to which her young life was helplessly related. He was not likely to exaggerate her sympathetic suffering. He had seen how the young life is always defended from the worst misery of the old; how from their common source it flows on in the same channel, and takes no tint or taint from the concurrent stream, but keeps itself pure and glad side by side with the darkest anguish.
“Do you know how much he’s taking now?”
“I guess he’s got back to nearly the old quantity.” Anther waited again before he spoke. “I didn’t expect it so soon after he had got home.”
“I don’t think the Retreat did him much good. But I believe you could, Dr. Anther.”
“I don’t know, my dear! Does he believe it?”
“Oh, he believes in you; and I know he would like to make an effort to stop it. I know he’d help you. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He has got to sleep, of course, but the minute he goes off he begins dreaming, and that green one comes, he says, and tries to wall him in. It’s pretty awful.” She laughed in a queer way, and then the tears burst from her eyes. “You must think I’m a strange person, to laugh at such things.”
“No, no,” the doctor said, tenderly. “I understand, Hope.”
“I suppose it’s my being used to it all my life that I don’t realize it as some others would. And then father is so funny when he tells about it, and acts it out, as he does. I suppose I’m like him. He knows it’s nothing, as well as you do. But it’s real while it lasts.”
“Yes,” Anther said. “But you’re right not to distress yourself about it, Hope. That wouldn’t do any good, and you can help your father best as you are.”
“Well, I am afraid I am of a light nature. Grandma says so. Now and then it all comes to me, what he goes through, and then” — she quivered on the verge of a sob, but controlled herself and said, “Well, I didn’t make myself; and I haven’t got myself to blame for ever forgetting him, anyway.”
“I know that, my dear.” Anther sat thinking, till Hope recalled herself to him.
“Don’t you believe it’s worth while to try again, doctor?”
“Yes, indeed! We must never give up trying.” Anther rose again, and opened the silk-lined glass doors which shut in the shelves where he kept his office-supply of drugs, and began mixing a bottle from various bottles before him. He shook the mixture vigorously, with his thumb over the mouth of the bottle, and then corked it, made a little pencil-mark on the top of the cork, and gave the bottle to Hope. It was quite like the bottle of laudanum, in size and shape. “There!” he said. “I’ve marked the cork so that you’ll know it, and I want you to keep it where you can substitute if for the laudanum every other time. Understand?”
“Yes, I understand, but—”
“It won’t hurt him if he gets the laudanum bottle, now and then, instead of this; it may even help to tide him over a bad place. But try to make the alternations regular. Gradually—”
“Yes, but hadn’t he better break it off altogether — at once?”
The doctor shook his head. “It might do in some cases, but it won’t do in his.” At something insistent in the girl’s face he said: “You want a reason? Well, because we’ve tried it once. It was a good while ago, when you were little, and before you were old enough to know anything about it. We agreed to stop it short off. We agreed with Wason, the apothecary, he was then — young Wason’s father — that he wasn’t to let your father have anything without my orders on any conditions whatever. I took his laudanum away, and the third night he came to me half-dressed, through the blinding snow, and woke me, and made me give him the laudanum. I have always been humbly thankful that I had the sense to do it, and I have never tried to stop him short off since. I tell you this, for I don’t want you to let him tempt you into any experiment like that. He is quite likely to smash his laudanum and try to go it on the other alone.”
“I know it!” Hope smiled in recognition of her father’s optimism. “He does feel so sure of himself when he makes his good resolutions!”
She rose, with a large bottle in either hand, and the doctor, seeing how she was cumbered, said: “I’m going up your way. Get into the buggy with me, and let me take you home. Nobody else seems coming to-day.”
When she was tucked in beside him, he let the old horse jog at will in the direction he had given, and resumed the talk broken off in the office. “Does he take to the same hopeful view of things generally as ever?”
“Well, whenever he can get away from the green dwarf, he does,” the girl said. “You know,” she smiled across her shoulder into the doctor’s face, “he has bought the hill back of our house?”
“I think he mentioned it,” the doctor returned, with the same quality of smile.
“Yes, he’s going to build for me there. Nothing can stop him. Doctor,” she went on with a note of tragical imploring which had not got into anything else she had said of her father, “did he speak to you about — about — James Langbrith?”
She gasped out the name, and nervously put her hand on the doctor’s, pinching the buckskin of his glove between her little thumb and forefinger. “Because there isn’t — there isn’t — Oh, it would kill me if I thought he was talking to people!”
“Oh, poor thing!” said the doctor. “Don’t worry! He did speak to me, but, of course, I understood.”
“Oh, I don’t mind his speaking to you,” she said. “You’re like one of the family; but — but—”
“Well, you needn’t be afraid. You know he sees almost nobody out of your own house but me; I cautione
d him against talking of that matter, and he usually regards what I say.”
“I suppose it’s just the dreadfulness of it that scares me. But it would be more than I could bear. Will you speak to him again, doctor?”
“Yes, yes, I will, my dear. Don’t you worry!” Anther turned his face away, and smiled to realize that the girl who could keep her courage in the face of misery like her father’s should lose all her strength at the thought of having her name coupled with the name of the young man who loved her, and made the talk of the village. But that was youth, and that was life. “Don’t you be troubled!” he said, looking at her again. “Nobody would mind what he said.”
“Is that much comfort?” she asked.
“It’s the most there is,” he answered. They drove along in silence broken by the rattling of the loosened nuts in the framework of the old buggy, and the dull clump-clump of the horse’s hoofs on the road. Suddenly, as if at the end of a sharp decision, he asked, “Hope, does your father ever speak of James’s father?”
“Why, yes, he always says what friends they used to be — cronies. He says he was the best friend he ever had. He was, wasn’t he?”
“Oh yes — yes,” Anther said in a lie that sickened him; but he had brought the necessity of it upon himself, and he could only hang his averted head in merited shame. “I didn’t know but sometimes he took the other turn. You know,” he went lying on, “how his mind works by contraries.”
“Oh yes, I know that,” Hope said, and she did not reason to the corollary, in her concern with the more personal fact. “But that wouldn’t help if he got people gossiping about me.”
It came to Anther again, as it had come before, that each generation exists to itself, and is so full of its own events that those of the past cannot be livingly transmitted to it; that it divinely refuses the burden which elder sins or sorrows would lay upon it, and that it must do this perhaps as a condition of bearing its own. He idly flicked the road with the lash of the whip which he so seldom laid upon the back of his lazy old horse.
XVII
A LETTER for Hope came from Langbrith the day after he went back to Cambridge, and letters had come from him at frequent, irregular intervals since. They were nearly all of the same tenor, growing more urgent and impatient in their protest of his love for her, and in his demand for some answer more definite than she had been willing to give. She had gone no further than to say, “I do not know whether I care for you or not, in the way you mean. I should not think our being children together had anything to do with it. If it had, I ought to hate you, because you always used to try to domineer over me. If it is any comfort to you, I will say that I do not hate you, but that is the most I can say now. As for promising anything, that is ridiculous as long as I am not certain. I am going to keep myself as free as the air, so that if any one comes along that I like better I shall not be bound to refuse him. But there are such droves of young men passing through Saxmills all the time, I may not be able to choose. If anything can make me choose somebody else, it will be asking so much to choose you. I don’t like to be followed up.” Langbrith tried to read the meaning into her letters which he could so little read out of them. But when it came to this last declaration of hers he thought it best to forbear, and in his answer he held his hand altogether. He did not recur to anything she had said, but made his letter, not without resentment, about Falk and their contributions to Caricature, and about some teas and dances which he had been going to in Boston. He wished to philosophize these social facts, and contrast the manners and customs of Saxmills with those of the town. It was his conclusion that, with some superficial advantages, the city was not politer than the village. “The society buds here have a rudeness which strikes me as worse than the freedom among our village girls, which would shock them. People talk of the decay of social life in the country; but I shall be very well satisfied to settle down at Saxmills, when I have got all my tools, and go to work there for life. By-the-way, I hope you will be interested to know that I have been talking with that young sculptor here whom I told you about, and he has taken my idea of a medallion of my father in a very intelligent way. He is a great worshipper of Saint-Gaudens, and he is quite with me in not wanting to do anything round or oval. He thinks of an oblong, with the greatest length horizontal, for a head of my father; in the upper left-hand comer, an inscription of three or four lines, with dates and the name, and in the right comer, a relief of the mills as they looked when my father first took hold of the business. He did want to have him holding a relief of them in his right hand, as people are shown holding cities and temples in some of the old sculptures, but I am afraid this would not be understood, and I do not want to have anything that could detract from the serious feeling which the tablet ought to inspire. I wish you would think it over and tell me how the notion strikes you. Don’t talk with any one else. I want your opinion alone. How would it do to have the dedication on Decoration Day?”
Hope wrote back a scoffing answer, so far as concerned the appeal for her judgment in such a matter, but she freely gave it against the archaic treatment. She said it would look funny. As to the best time for the ceremony of dedicating the tablet, she refused to say anything whatever. But she did say that it seemed to her Decoration Day belonged to the few old soldiers who were left and their families, and it ought to be left to them. It appeared that this notion struck Langbrith as of the most immediate importance. He did not wait to write an answer; he telegraphed: “Thanks about Decoration Day. Perfectly right. Would be ridiculous.”
The telegram was brought to Hope while she sat trying to talk her father out of a plan he had for taking Dr. Anther’s prescription only half as often as directed. His reason was that he had proved its efficacy so thoroughly that there was no hurry about his cure. He was satisfied now that he could drop the opium habit whenever he liked; but, at present, just while he was working at a new invention in his mind, he needed the tonic and strengthening effect of the laudanum. Hope argued the question with him half jocosely, as she treated all the phases of their common tragedy, and prevailed with him to continue the doctor’s treatment to the end of the week. “If you stop it now,” she urged, “you’ll have that green dwarf back the first time you drop asleep, and I can’t stand him. He’s made more trouble for this family — !”
The grandmother, a fierce little spectre of a woman, with burning blue eyes and a whorl of white hair crowning her wrinkled face, could not make the father and the daughter out. She kept the housekeeping fast in the strong, shrivelled hands into which Hope’s dying mother’s hands had let it fall, but she did not meddle with the girl and her father except in the way of censure and prophecy of doom. “If I had my say, I should fill that laudanum bottle up with good strong, black coffee, and not let him have anything but the coffee and the medicine.”
“Then you’d have him tearing the roof off. Father would know the difference between coffee and laudanum the first sip,” Hope said.
“And is it a daughter’s place to give her father poison?”
“It seems to be this daughter’s place, grandma. Besides, it isn’t poison for him, and it’s Dr. Anther’s orders.”
“Oh, a great doctor! I tell you, child,” and the old woman flared her fierce visage close in the girl’s face, “it won’t be the doctor that will have to answer for this.”
“Well, I hope nobody will. There must be a great deal of harm in the world that nobody in particular has to answer for.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” the old woman demanded, “that all the sin doesn’t come from sinners?”
“Now, grandmother, you know I don’t understand about those things, and I never did, even when I was little and expected to. You’d better ask the people at evening meeting some time. I can’t tell you. All that I know is that I’m going to follow the doctor’s directions in spite of father and you, both, and I’m not going to make it all medicine or all laudanum to please either of you. What is it, father?”
Hawberk had gone
down to the side gate at the first menace of dispute, and left Hope and her grandmother to contend over him, while he remained beyond the hearing of the censure which the old woman could always make him feel that he merited, though he had his theories that he was the helpless prey of his evils. Hanging over the gate in his nerveless fashion, he was approached by the boy from the telegraph office, who preferred climbing the hill on a bicycle to bringing a message less laboriously on foot. At sight of him the old woman quenched her flaring presence in the dark of in-doors. She was afraid the boy had heard her lifted voice, and Hope sauntered across the grass while the boy was taking the despatch out of the inside of his cap.
Hawberk looked at the address, and then handed it up over his shoulder to her. “Why, who in the world,” she wondered, “has been sending me a telegram? Dear, I wish they wouldn’t, whoever it is,” she said in a laughing panic. And then, having read it and frowned darkly at it and puzzled over it in a second reading, she started back to the house with the laugh, but none of the panic, and the proclamation, “Well, certainly, he is the greatest—”
“Any answer?” the boy demanded, as sternly as a boy could in supporting himself on his stationary wheel by holding to a picket of the gate.
“No, of course not,” Hope called back, and she added, in a lower voice, “Goose!” which, if it was meant for the boy, did not reach him in the swift scorch on which he had instantly started down the hill, in compensation for his difficult climb.
Her grandmother, lurking in the shadow of the cramped entry, tried to stop the girl in her flight up the sharply cornering stairs to her room in the halfstory. “What is it, Hope?”
The girl called down from above, “Just some nonsense from James Langbrith,” and, with the telegram flattened and reperused on her table before her, she began to write.
“I have just received your despatch. At first I thought it must be somebody dying, or telling me that I had been left a fortune; but I decided against that before I opened it. Of course, I am proud to think my opinion is so important that it has to be acknowledged by telegraph. But I guess you had better wait and write the next time. I was not very likely to run off and see the Selectmen and have a town-meeting called before I could hear from you by mail. I hope you will not be disappointed if I don’t telegraph back. But if everything you have anything to do with is so important, perhaps you will be. I don’t know what that new telegraph-girl at the depot will think. She must be trying to puzzle it out by a cipher code and racking her brains over it. Why did you send it? Did you think what you had suggested was so very silly that you could not bear to let it go another night before taking it back?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 801
