After venting the agitation of her fluttered nerves in these railleries, she went on to make Langbrith what amends for them she could by writing a longer and friendlier letter than usual; and, when she had finished it, she told her grandmother she was going to the post-office, and perhaps she would stop to see Susie Johns on the way, but she would be back again soon. She tilted down the long hill-side street, and her face was as gay with the fun reverberating in her mind from her letter as if she had left nothing but a sunny serenity in the house behind her, where her father was fighting away from the horrors of his dream, and her grandmother was gloomily exulting in the doom that must follow his ill-doing, as if for the reward of her well-doing. While Hope was with them, she felt the oppression of their unhappiness; but out of their presence, it existed for her only as something inevitable, which she must not take any more seriously than James Langbrith’s self-importance. The unhappiness made her laugh sometimes, as Langbrith’s pomposity did, or the thought of his clumsy truth and the humble pride with which he owned himself wrong in his absurdities.
“What long steps you take!” a voice called after her at a corner she was passing, and she whirled her face over her shoulder to see Mrs. Enderby hurrying to join her. “Hope,” the rector’s wife said, breathlessly, “you’re the brightest and blithest thing in this town.”
“Am I, Mrs. Enderby?” the girl laughed, slowing her pace for the friendly lady.
“Don’t you know it? Or perhaps you don’t, and that’s the reason why you can keep it up. Don’t try to realize it, child. How are you all at home this lovely morning?”
“Oh, we’re always well, Mrs. Enderby. That is—”
She stopped, and Mrs. Enderby went on for her. “I’m not going to make you conscious, and you mustn’t let me, but just to see that face of yours is inspiration. Were you always so?”
“Why, I don’t know what kind of ‘so’ you mean. I suppose I’m pretty well all the time, and that makes a difference.”
“And I’m not going to tell you that you’re pretty without the well, for that never makes any part of the difference. But, Hope, you are pretty, whether you know it or not.”
“Well,” the girl drolled, “I don’t know as I could do anything about it if I did.”
“No, and that’s what makes me feel so safe in praising you. I know it won’t spoil you. When you came rushing along past the comer, you made me think of some tall flower sloping in the wind. I wish you would tell me just what flower you made me think of! If there was some kind of black iris! Well, I must try to find out.”
They laughed together, and Hope said, “If I knew, I might think you wanted to flatter me, Mrs. Enderby.”
“No, I’m not flattering you. If I told you what I thought of you that night at Mrs. Langbrith’s, you might suppose I was. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. And other people couldn’t. I dare say you didn’t know it?”
“If I did, I must have forgotten it by this time; it was such a long while ago.”
“Hope, you are not only the gayest and prettiest girl here, but you are the wittiest.”
“Well, now, I know you’re not flattering me. It’s no more than my just dues to have you say that.”
“Oh, I’m only repeating what I hear other people say. I wonder,” Mrs. Enderby went on, as if to the very next thing, “whether Mr. Langbrith spoke to you about a great scheme that he has in mind?” Mrs. Enderby was launched, and nothing in her own nature or the situation could keep her from sailing to her destination. As a Boston woman valiantly and loyally following her husband, not only from the Unitarian cult in which they were both born into the church on whose ritualistic heights the rector had planted his banner, but also from the many lively interests of her native city into the social desolation of Saxmills, she realized from time to time that she owed herself all the amends within her reach, and she was not one to be guilty of the injustice of withholding them. She had been charmed with Hope from the first, and when she perceived, as she did very early in the history of her establishment in Saxmills, what this poor, pretty, happy, tragical creature obviously was to the young owner of the local industry and prosperity, the mother-heart of her childlessness bowed itself upon them both, and held her in the hope of at least so revealing them to each other that they need not err as to their mutual meaning. The affair satisfied the most recondite demands of her soul by its romantic properties; and that disparity in the worldly fortunes of the pair did not affect her with a sense of unfitness, as it might have done if they had been Bostonians. They were both natives of a place that, without any sort of social traditions, had grown from a small village under the magic of the elder Langbrith’s enterprise into the busy little town she knew; and the picturesque legend of Langbrith’s forbearance with the infirmity of Hope’s father until he could forbear no longer, touched the fancy of Mrs. Enderby as the material of a peculiar tie between the young people. Something better than her fancy was pleased with the notion of the father’s reconciliation in their children.
“About what scheme?” Hope asked, with the inevitable hypocrisy.
“He was speaking of it to the gentlemen after the ladies left the table that night, and Dr. Enderby mentioned it to me. Why! I don’t know but it’s a tremendous secret, and I oughtn’t to talk of it!” Hope wished to talk of it, and now she had to unmask. “Was it the tablet he wants to put into the library to his father?”
“You do know about it, then!” Mrs. Enderby rejoiced. “What do you think about it?”
“Why, nobody could have any objections, could they? If his father gave the library building to the town?”
“No, certainly. I fancy they’ll be only too glad to have him do it. At any rate, he’s going on with it. He’s got a sculptor to design it, and as soon as it is finished he is going to have it dedicated here. He hasn’t fixed on just the time. Dr. Enderby had a letter from him this morning, saying he had thought of Decoration Day, but that he had consulted with some one in whose taste he had special confidence, and this mystical unknown had suggested to him that it would be taking the day from those whom it belonged to for something else; and he wanted Dr. Enderby to suggest another date not much later. Dr. Enderby proposed his father’s birthday, and very likely he will decide on that unless his unknown adviser counsels differently. Do you suppose it is that Mr. Falk who was here with him?”
“I think he would be likely to ask Mr. Falk,” Hope demurely conceded, with eyes that could not help falling under Mrs. Enderby’s.
“Well, whoever it is, Dr. Enderby admires his sense and his feeling.” And, at this, the question in Hope’s mind whether she should tell Susie Johns about the affair went out of it. She could not do so now without seeming to brag. She was not going to brag, but she felt proud of having the sense and the feeling that Dr. Enderby had praised. “Dr. Enderby liked Mr. Langbrith’s frankness, too, in confessing his own want of thoughtfulness.”
“Yes, that was nice,” Hope said, with some tacit misgiving for the sarcastic tenor of the letter in her pocket. She said to herself that it was the only way to get along with James Langbrith. If you did not laugh at him a little, he would be unbearable. But she thought that, if she found a letter from him in the post-office, she might not mail hers, at least till she read his.
“Dr. Enderby,” the rector’s wife pursued, “thinks very highly of Mr. Langbrith. Of course, every one has their faults, but he thinks Mr. Langbrith really tries to overcome his when he sees them, and he bears being shown his weaknesses very well. Dr. Enderby says that is the most uncommon kind of virtue. I didn’t quite like Mr. Falk’s sarcastic tone with him, but I suppose Mr. Langbrith knows how to take care of himself. Sometimes young men seem to enjoy that. It’s like their ‘scrapping,’ as they call it. But Dr. Enderby says that Mr. Langbrith was just as nice with the cold way Dr. Anther took his plan for the tablet.”
“Didn’t Dr. Anther like it?” Hope asked.
“Apparently not. He didn’t say why, and that made it all the more a
wkward for Mr. Langbrith. Dr. Anther didn’t seem to take any interest in the project, and yet Mr. Langbrith’s father was his old friend.”
Hope mused darkly for a moment, then she brightened to a laugh. “Well, it doesn’t seem to have discouraged Mr. Langbrith very much.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Mrs. Enderby recognized with a laugh of her own, “and I’m glad of it. I think it’s a very good plan, and it will be an attractive addition to the front of the library — so very plain. I believe in commemorating such things. It helps to make a place historical, and we have so little history. But Mr. Langbrith is so very sensitive, and I don’t like to have him hurt. I know he suffers very much when he has found himself in the wrong.”
“Nobody enjoys that,” Hope suggested.
“No, of course not; but his ideal is so very high. He does always want to do what is fine and noble. I can see that. I think he is rare. I almost trembled when you got into that little dispute with him that night: he’s not as quick as you, Hope.” Mrs. Enderby questioned with eager eyes the young face which masked itself against her pursuit in a smile.
“Oh, it wasn’t very serious.”
“Not for you, of course, but it was for him. He was making a brave show, but I could see how very — very — He isn’t as satirical as you are. You must be careful of that keen little tongue of yours. Oh, dear, what am I saying? You do forgive me? But girls don’t know how the things they say rankle in young men’s minds, and how eager young men are to have the approval of girls they respect. There! There comes Dr. Anther now. I wish I had the courage to ask him why he doesn’t approve of the tablet. Good-bye, dear; I’m going into this store. Are you going to the post-office? I believe I’ll go with you — or no! If I waited to meet Dr. Anther, I should be sure to ask him, and I’ve no right to. Well!”
Mrs. Enderby slipped into the door-way where she had scarcely halted the girl, and Hope tilted on towards the post-office with not so light nor so swift a gait as before. It was silly, of course, to mind what Mrs. Enderby said; but she had now fully agreed with herself that she would not mail her sarcastic note to Langbrith till she had seen whether there was a letter. She flushed when the girl clerk gave her a letter from him, and she turned the corner at the post-office to be able to read it unmolested in the by-street leading to Susie Johns’. It was so full of what seemed to her a swelling self-satisfaction that she did not look up the date to see whether it had been written before her last reached him, but pushed it into her pocket, and, hurrying round the square, without stopping to see Susie Johns, she reached the post-office again, and shot the note she had with her into the slot in the door, and walked vigorously homeward, with the full approval of her judgment and a just indignation for her momentary betrayal into a mistaken mercy for an offender so hardened as James Langbrith. She had to pass his mother’s house on the way, and she saw Mrs. Langbrith out in the sun before it, stooping to look at the perennials in their bed beside the door. But Mrs. Langbrith did not see her, and Hope got home in a defiance of Mrs. Enderby that kept itself from being articulate with difficulty.
XVIII
MRS. LANGBRITH came out every fine day to look over her flowers at first, and then to work over them. She made the man clean up round the tall syringas planted at intervals along the brick walk to the gate, and about the lilacs that overhung the fence. She followed him as he combed down the limp last year’s grass and raked the dead leaves and stems into heaps at the points she chose and then set fire to them. At tea, she liked to have the dining-room windows a little open, that the homely smell of their burning heaps might come in with the fresh evening air and possess her with the dreams of that girlhood which now no longer seemed so far past. She thought Dr. Anther might stop some evening in going by; but if she caught sight of him in the distance, she went in-doors. She realized that their embrace at their last meeting was more like a final parting than a pledge of union, unless she were ready to do what she wished but was afraid to do. Yet this thought of it had the greater sweetness for that reason; and the love that had come into her life so late was the more precious because it seemed to have come too late.
Towards her son, grown a man, she felt its indecorum in a kind which she could not quite formulate, but which was distinct enough. If her love had come when she was younger, and he still a child, it would have been different; and yet she could not blame her friend for not knowing himself sooner. That blame would have been as indecorous towards Anther as now the thought of him was towards her son. Before her marriage her fancy had scarcely been stirred. She had gone the round of the simple children’s amusements in her country neighborhood — the parties and picnics and school festivals; but no little boy had been her beau. She had not even been teased by her mates about any one. She was younger in experience than any girl she knew in the mill when Langbrith cast his eye her way, and suddenly, somehow, through her necessity and helplessness, made her his wife. She certainly was not aware of anything like love for him, so far as she imagined love; but she was flattered and dazzled and overcome, and she supposed that she was marrying as other people married, and for the reasons that they had. Her awakening from her illusion was like the terror of a child which has not enough knowledge of the world to match its experiences with those of others. In a fashion not definite or articulate, she accepted her lot as a common lot in wifehood; and, as she had supposed herself to have married from the usual motives, so she now supposed that what she underwent was not unusual. From her sufferings, she formed a notion of marriage grotesquely false, which was like a child’s misconception of life, and the spell of this kept her submissive. She did not talk of what she underwent; no one talked to her of such things, and apparently it was not the custom.
Her childlikeness so prolonged itself, not ignorantly, but innocently, through her wifehood and motherhood and widowhood, that, when at last she was aware of liking the man who later loved her, and of trusting him and longing for his affection, it was with a sense of shame as from unprecedented guilt. Before the thought of her son she was so ashamed that she knew she should never be able to tell him of Dr. Anther, nor even allow Anther to speak for himself. She did not feel that her tenderness for her friend could be wrong when she was with him. She was now glad of that sole embrace which they had ever suffered their love, and proud of it; but the knowledge of it sunk her at her son’s feet when she imagined his knowing it. Her face burned, and it did not avail her to remember the examples of mothers that had married again, and had lived on with their husbands, and their children by their dead husbands, in unimpaired harmony and mutual respect. She was moved late in her inextinguishable girlhood to her first passion, but only to find herself inexorably consecrated to her widowhood through her reverence for her son’s ideal of his father.
At sight of Hope Hawberk tilting lightly down the sidewalk, she was seized with the same impulse to flight as at the approach of the doctor in his vagarious buggy; and she had to conquer far more shyness when, one warm afternoon, Hope caught her so preoccupied with the hired man that it was too late for her to think of eluding her. She shrank together beyond a well-budded lilac, where Hope’s gay voice, as if it had a bright, entangling noose of sound, reached her in the chanted salutation, “How do you do, Mrs. Langbrith?” and held her fast. She came reluctantly from her shelter, and advanced slowly towards the gate, on the top of which the girl had laid her arms, and her red cheek for a moment in the hollow of one of them. “Isn’t it awfully warm?”
“Yes, it is. Though I haven’t noticed it so much, working about. Won’t you come in, Hope?”
“Why, I will, Mrs. Langbrith, if you’ll let me. I was just coming in, when I saw you.” She pushed the gate open and joined Mrs. Langbrith, who turned with her and walked towards the house. “How fast your things are coming on! It seems as if they were twice as forward as ours, and there are twice as many of them. I don’t suppose they help each other, do they?”
“I don’t believe they do,” Mrs. Langbrith answered so literally that
it might have passed as a piece of the same whimsicality. “How is your grandmother?”
“She’s as energetic as ever. I don’t see how she can be. This weather takes all the good resolutions out of me, Mrs. Langbrith, and I don’t know how I’ve got together enough to come and see you. I want to tell you something that I don’t want to tell you.”
The girl’s humor was catching, and the woman caught it. “Well, what is it?” she asked, but she apparently did not expect Hope to answer till she had got her seated at an open window of the parlor, with a palm-leaf fan in her hand.
“Why, it’s just this, Mrs. Langbrith. I’ve got into a scrape with James, and if you can’t tell me how to get out of it, I don’t know who can.”
Mrs. Langbrith’s heart fluttered with a varied anticipation, but she united her emotions in the single inexpressive phrase, “I don’t believe it’s anything serious.”
“Yes, it is, Mrs. Langbrith. It’s very serious, and it has gone so far now that something has got to be done about it, and I can’t have the responsibility left to me.”
Mrs. Langbrith listened with the wish for one thing and the will for another, but her will prevailed over her wish, and she kept herself from saying anything leading. She believed that there was some sort of love-quarrel which Hope had come to own, but she was not going to tempt her to the confession. She said, non-committally, “I will try not to hold you responsible.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 802
