Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Hope laughed rather distractedly. “I guess you will have to. It’s about that tablet he wants to put up in the front of the library.”

  Mrs. Langbrith stiffened in her chair, and said, “Oh!”

  “Well, James has been writing to me about it since he went back to Cambridge, and I guess he thinks I have been making fun of him, when I was only making fun of the notion that he should take something I said so seriously. Don’t you understand?”

  “James is apt to take things seriously,” his mother said.

  “And I’m not,” Hope retorted, with a touch of resentment, as if she felt a touch of reproach in Mrs. Langbrith’s tone, though the words themselves were so neutral. “And that’s just the difference, and always will be.” The last clause of the sentence was a generality, which the girl seemed to address to herself rather than Mrs. Langbrith. “Now, I’ll tell you what it is. He asked me What I thought about his having the dedication on Decoration Day, and I told him I didn’t think it was quite fair to take that day from the old soldiers and their families; and he saw it in the same light, and he telegraphed to say that I was right and he wouldn’t. And I wrote back making fun of his telegraphing, as if it couldn’t wait for a letter.”

  “I don’t see any harm in that. James is very intense in his feelings, but he would see that you didn’t mean anything unfriendly — anything—”

  “No, of course not. But now comes what I am really ashamed of. My making fun seems to have made him very mad, so mad that he says he is going to give up the whole idea, and won’t have anything done about it. He says I have made it seem ridiculous to him.”

  Mrs. Langbrith cast down her eyes. “James is very sensitive in regard to — Mr. Langbrith.”

  “Yes, I know that, and that’s what makes me sorry. Of course, I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings for his father. And now, Mrs. Langbrith, and now — I’ve got something else to tell you. You know how girls are?”

  “Thoughtless, you mean?’’

  “No — bad! Downright wicked! I told Susie Johns about James’s telegraphing. I don’t see why I should do such a thing. But we were laughing about a lot of things, and that came out. It was as mean as it could be. And now I would do anything in the world to make it right, but I don’t suppose I ever can. I don’t care a bit about his being mad at me for it; he has a perfect right to be; but what I hate is people laughing at him. I’ve been to tell Susie not to tell, since I got his last letter, but I know she will. He mustn’t give up the idea, because they will say that I laughed at it, and that was the reason, and I am not going to have them. Don’t you see? I expect you to blame me, Mrs. Langbrith, and never speak to me again; but I shall not care for that if you can think of some way to stop him — to make him not give it up. Why, he must go on with it, now. Everybody knows that he was going to do it, and he must. Was there ever such a scrape?”

  Mrs. Langbrith sat silent, but this was quite what Hope seemed to expect, and the face that she turned upon the girl was by no means severe, but rather somewhat distressed and puzzled.

  Hope went on. “I don’t believe it will do any good for me to write to him and tell him he must.” Mrs. Langbrith made no comment on this suggestion, and Hope owned, “Well, I have written to him, and he’s written back, and said that he knows my real feeling now, and he cannot go on. I don’t see why he minds my feeling, anyway, and that’s the reason why I’ve come to you. I don’t know what made me come to you about it, but I wanted to ask you if you thought it would do for me to ask Dr. Anther to write to James?”

  “Dr. Anther?”

  “Yes, and tell him not to mind a person who is not worth minding, but to go on and put up the tablet. Tell him that everybody approves of it, and expects it.”

  Mrs. Langbrith emerged from her absence, but the stare which she bent upon the girl was as silent as her far-off look.

  “Will it do for me to ask the doctor? I don’t want to do it, because — But I will, rather than let it go as it is. I will do anything. What do you think, Mrs. Langbrith?”

  Mrs. Langbrith shook her head, and said, with something that she kept from being a shudder, “Oh no, it won’t do to speak to Dr. Anther.”

  “For me? Or for any one?”

  “For you. I — I will speak to him.”

  “You? Oh, thank you, Mrs. Langbrith! I thought — I hoped — I didn’t dare to hope—” The pent emotions, kept in so bravely, broke in tears, and Hope caught her handkerchief from her belt and sobbed into it. “Oh, dear, I don’t see why you do it! I don’t see how you can bear to look at me, or speak to me, much less do anything I ask you to, after the mischief I’ve made. But I do, do thank you—”

  She wavered towards the other, with what design she did not know; but, whatever it was, Mrs. Langbrith put her arms round her, and pulled her head down on her shoulder, and the girl had her cry out there. “Oh, I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed!” she kept saying. “I don’t know why you let me, Mrs. Langbrith!”

  Mrs. Langbrith did not say, and perhaps could not; but when Hope’s passion of weeping was spent and she drew away to wipe her eyes, and compose her face, the woman said, irrelevantly, “How is your father, Hope?”

  “Oh, much better. I believe the doctor thinks he can cure him.”

  “That’s good,” Mrs. Langbrith said as irrelevantly as before, and now she let the girl, with a fling of her arms round her neck, run out of the house unhindered.

  Half-way to the gate she met Mrs. Enderby coming up to make a call on Mrs. Langbrith; and, from behind the veil she had caught down over her face, she was able to chant a gay little “Good-afternoon, Mrs. Enderby!” without exciting any question in the lady, except as to how a girl whose life was so tragically conditioned could keep that blithe note in her voice.

  XIX

  ALMOST the first thing Mrs. Enderby said was, “That poor, pretty creature, how wonderfully she keeps up!” for this was what was still first in her mind when she took the place at the window which Hope had just left, and looked to see if she could still see her.

  Mrs. Langbrith said, “Won’t you have a fan?” and Mrs. Enderby thanked her and took from her the fan which Hope had dropped on the table. “It is unseasonably warm.”

  “We often have a hot day like this towards the beginning of May.”

  “Oh yes, that is true. But the leaves not being out makes it so melting in the sun. Is there the least hope for the child’s father?”

  “Dr. Anther has always believed his habit could be cured.”

  “Oh yes, Dr. Anther: how we all depend upon him! Saxmills would be another place without him. We turn to him in so many things. I was just thinking about him — just speaking about him with Dr. Enderby. But, Mrs. Langbrith, what is this I hear about your son’s giving up the notion of the tablet to his father? I hope it isn’t true — just town gossip.”

  “James hasn’t said anything to me about giving it up,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, and she quelled the outward signs of her wonder whether Hope had come to her with a half-confession, and had been twice as silly and light-tongued as she had owned. “He has given up having the dedication on Decoration Day.”

  “Oh, well, perhaps that’s it, and it has got twisted into the other thing. May I say that you have heard nothing from him in regard to it?”

  Mrs. Langbrith could truthfully assent to this, but she assented with so much coldness that Mrs. Enderby was struck by it, and a little hurt. In her kind heart, which was equal to most emergencies where excuses were needed for offences, she accounted for the coldness as the expression of rustic shyness. She had known village modesty to take the form of village pride, and, later, unmask itself in touching gratitude.

  “We all,” she went on, after thanking Mrs. Langbrith for her assent, “think it such an admirable idea, and Dr. Enderby particularly favors it. He feels it so important to recognize character, especially when it has influenced a whole community as Mr. Langbrith’s has influenced Saxmills, and stamped his traits on the place, as Dr. Ende
rby says, that I believe he would have been glad to have a tablet to Mr. Langbrith’s memory in the church.”

  At this point Mrs. Enderby certainly expected some sort of response; but Mrs. Langbrith preserved a silence of unbroken iciness. Perhaps she did not like the notion of a tablet in the church. Mrs. Enderby went on:

  “But, of course, he feels that there is a peculiar fitness in its being in the library building. We all do, and I am sure every one will be glad to hear that there is nothing in that report, or nothing but a perversion of the Decoration Day part of it.”

  Mrs. Langbrith made no sign of gratification in Mrs. Enderby’s conclusion, and Mrs. Enderby had to go away in an uncomfortable misgiving for the effect of the interest she had shown in the matter. She had no misgiving for the interest itself. That was simply a duty towards one of her husband’s parishioners, such as she had promised herself to fulfil towards all after she had so reluctantly consented to his taking the parish of St. Cuthbert’s at Saxmills. She felt that she was not only following him into the wilderness — anywhere over twenty miles from Boston was the wilderness for a Bostonian of her elect origin — but she had fears of the peculiar difficulties which a priest of Dr. Enderby’s socialistic — she called them “sociological” — tendencies would have in a cure of proletariat souls, housed in a temple built with money from their exploitation. Langbrith had given St. Cuthbert’s small but sufficient church to the parish, as well as the library to the town; and Mrs. Enderby’s question was whether her husband could keep that perfect conscience between a due sense of gratitude towards the giver’s memory and his duty towards the employés of his son’s milling property in the event of those differences which might any time arise between capital and labor. She had been wakened by this question one memorable night, and had not been able to wait till morning before submitting it to Dr. Enderby, in a conscience inherited from Calvinistic forefathers through a Unitarian father who had preserved nothing from his ancestral faith but the conscience transmitted to his family of daughters. Dr. Enderby’s own conscience was of the same lineage, and it cost them both a night’s sleep to decide the point. In fact, it was not until late into the next afternoon that they had reasoned to the conclusion that to do right was his sole duty, and that to shrink from conditions which might sometimes render the right embarrassing or difficult would be a confession of unworthiness for the office they both wished to magnify.

  Mrs. Enderby came away from Boston with all the reluctance that she had foreseen; but, though she was followed by the sympathies of her friends, she had as yet experienced nothing which turned her mind towards them in longing for their pity. Saxmills had not proved quite the social desert, beset with dangers, which she had sometimes foreboded. She had there, as everywhere, her husband, first and foremost; and, besides, there were several people she liked. Not counting those she loved because they were poor and sick and dependent, there were, among those she liked, Judge Garley and his wife, who were agreeable mid-Massachusetts town-folk, reasonably cultivated and passably acquainted with life, by reason of several winters’ official residence in Boston; and she liked Mrs. Langbrith, ordinarily, very much, though she was not quite what Mrs. Enderby would have quite called cultivated, and certainly not acquainted with life. But her shy charm was a great charm for Mrs. Enderby, and it was much in her favor that she always made Mrs. Enderby think of that old-fashioned, late-summer flower, mourning-bride. The abiding girlishness of the long-widowed, middle-aging woman responded to a girlishness of her own, from which she was fond of all the nice young girls of the village, like Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Jessamy Colebridge, and such others as did not dismay her by their fearlessness with the young men. Outside of the mills, the young men were, indeed, so few that there was, perhaps, not much reason to be afraid of them. But, above all, she liked and respected and honored Dr. Anther, whose life had such a daily beauty that she could better have expressed her sense of it if she were still a Unitarian than she could now she was a churchwoman. She was constantly finding him in the houses of affliction, which she visited in her own quality of good angel, and it was without surprise or any feeling of coincidence that she now met him coming to the gate of a common patient, which she opened next after closing Mrs. Langbrith’s.

  She merely said, “ Oh, how delightful, Dr. Anther! I was just thinking of you.” And then she added, “I hope you leave our poor sufferer better?”

  “You will, after you have seen her,” the doctor said, shifting his little bag of medicines from his right to his left hand, so as to take the hand of Mrs. Enderby put out to him. He had a fine perception of her lady-world in Mrs. Enderby, and liked to say as nice things as he could to her. “She needs cheering up, and you’ll be better for her than my medicine.”

  “If I could believe you were serious in your civilities, I should be conceited; but I know you only, say such things to cheer me up — not that I need it just now. I’ve been to see Mrs. Langbrith, and she has reassured me in regard to a strange report I had heard. I wonder if you had?”

  “Better try me,” Anther said, twitching his bag up and down with a latent impatience.

  “Why, merely that her son had given up the notion of the memorial tablet for the library front. Had you?”

  “No,” Anther replied, shortly, jerking his bag with open violence.

  “Well, if you do, there’s nothing in it, as far as his mother has heard. He has changed his mind about having the dedication on Decoration Day, and the report probably arose from that.” The doctor said nothing, and once more Mrs. Enderby was bruised and disappointed by the bluntness of village manners — this time from one who had always been so responsive. But she rose above it, as she would have said, so far as to excuse him in consoling herself. “But I see your mind is on your next patient, doctor. It’s cruel of me to keep you, and I won’t any longer. Good-bye!”

  She went in to cheer up the sick woman, but even after the exhilarating effort she came away with a little lingering impression of Dr. Anther’s indifference to her news. She submitted her impression to her husband, whom she found struggling with a sermon of an hour’s length rebellious to his ideal of twenty-five minutes. He detached himself to examine the impression, and to match it with one he had brought away from the supper at Mrs. Langbrith ‘s, when Dr. Anther had received young Langbrith’s proposal of the tablet with so little interest. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it is not that country uncouthness altogether; there may not have been all that friendliness between the doctor and the elder Langbrith which we have inferred from his present relations to the family.”

  “Why, have you heard anything of that kind?” Mrs. Enderby was of an eagerness in her inquiry which her husband thought it well to repress.

  “No, nothing at all. It’s pure conjecture with me.

  “It would be very interesting.” Mrs. Enderby sighed for the evident want of foundation in fact.

  “Yes, but, Alice, don’t let it take possession of your fancy. It would be very unjust and it might be injurious.”

  “Oh, I should not dream of mentioning it to any one. To whom could I? But it happens to tally — is that slang?”

  “I don’t know that it is.”

  “I oughtn’t to use it if it is, in a place like this. It happens to tally with something that has come into my mind. I have always wondered why Dr. Anther doesn’t marry Mrs. Langbrith.”

  “He may not wish it, or she may not.”

  “It would be such an appropriate thing. They are old friends, and they are not too old. Her son will soon be leaving her — I know he’s in love with that poor, pretty, joyous Hope Hawberk; and the doctor must have always been very uncomfortable at Mrs. Burwell’s, and now she’s going to break up, and where will he go?”

  “He certainly might do worse than go to Mrs. Langbrith’s,” the rector allowed; “but still there is no more proof that he wishes to marry Langbrith’s widow than that he bears a grudge to his memory.”

  “No, but don’t you see that, if
he did want to marry Mrs. Langbrith, it would make him willing to have Mr. Langbrith forgotten? Wouldn’t that be natural?”

  “I’m afraid it would, Alice,” the rector said, with a regretful recognition of a trait of fallen man.

  “And wouldn’t it account both for the way Dr. Anther behaved that night and for the way he behaved just now?”

  “It might; but don’t you see we are proceeding upon a pure hypothesis?”

  “That is true,” she consented; and now, having not before removed her hat, she pulled out the long pins that pierced its sides into the mass of her handsome graying hair, and lifted it off, carried it out of the study on her hand, thoughtfully considering it as she went.

  “Of course, Alice,” he called after her, “we must both be careful to keep our hypothesis to ourselves.”

  “Oh yes, indeed! I shall be very careful not to speak of it.”

  XX

  AFTER indulging his resentment of Hope’s ridicule to the violent extreme of renouncing all intention of the memorial tablet, Langbrith allowed a natural revulsion of feeling to carry him so far back as a renunciation of Hope instead. He wrote her an angry letter, in answer to hers asking him not to mind anything she had said for the reason that she was not worth minding herself. Then he felt so much stronger that he returned to his intention, and got Falk to go with him into Boston to the studio of the young sculptor who was modelling the bas-relief. It had to be done from few and rather poor photographs, for it had not been one of his father’s excesses to sit often for his picture. There were some ferrotypes and still older daguerreotypes from which the sculptor had imagined a head more or less ideal. Falk tacitly considered the ideal an improvement on the portrait in the library at Saxmills, and he had kept Langbrith from sending for the painting by sufficiently offensive censures of its woodenness. Besides, as that was from a photograph, too, he held that there would be no advantage in studying the tablet from it.